🦁 Lent 1-👑

Readings: Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-10; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15. 

Reflection

Hello and welcome to first forward Advanced Scriptural Insight for Christian Soldiers. This is Brother Logan Isaac Broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. The readings for Lent one the first Sunday in Lent include Genesis nine, Psalm 25, first Peter three and Mark one. And the readings are difficult because in Genesis nine we have the flood, or rather the end of the flood with the rainbow, which in the Hebrew is Keshet, which is just an archer's bow. The the bow in its arc is pointing up at God and it may or may not be need to be included in the armor of God as the Divine warrior, because he calls it his bow, God's bow Keshet archers bow. But more importantly, and this is where it gets difficult, you all know the flood story. Thus the world had been so overcome by sin and particular violence that God said, Well, you know, I'm just going to reset. Noah is a righteous person. I'm going to take him and his children and their spouses and they're going to repopulate the Earth for me, this is also the Hebraic kind of interpretation of some cataclysmic event that occurred in the ancient Near East. And this is why this is how the Hebrews understood that event and made sense out of it, that a righteous person was saved and everybody else died. And of course, that person who was saved becomes this reset, just like Seth was the reset for Cain. And it doesn't always take, of course, and it's Cain's descendants who are taking over the earth. And Noah, of course, is descended from Seth. And so there's these polarities, the good and the the not so good or the fools or the the corrupted ones and then the uncorrupted ones. I won't call people evil because that's not what God made. But the flood is this horrible event of huge human suffering. Right? If we imagine that anything like it occurred, there's a lot of death, Right? Have you seen the Russell Crowe movie on Noah? I think it is Russell Crowe. It does a pretty good job of like people trying to climb onto the boat and hearing all these people trying to save themselves from drowning as they're in their boat, their ark being preserved from this flood. And in this passage, Genesis nine versus eight through 17, the repeating word is covenant, covenant, covenant. It says it's something like four times in Hebrew. I can't remember this specific word, but it draws the etymology. The the lineage of this word is about cutting. And if you remember later and in Genesis, Abraham splits bulls and calves and sheep in two and the spirit of God moves between all of these animals. And that is a sign of a covenant, because in the ancient world, the letting of blood was profoundly significant to escape death. If to like, make you know, it's like a blood debt, right? If you escape debt death, you owe somebody something. Somebody saved your life. And in the Bible, this splitting of animals is super ancient ritual. To signify an agreement between two parties occurs between the God of the universe and a man named Abraham who will be renamed Abraham. And this is the same word that is used Covenant, covenant, covenant, cutting, death, opening of your own body and life force. Right? And so God is saying, My new covenant, my new, you know, sacrificial thing that is a sign for you that I am on your side or that I am with you, that I'm here with you, I'm watching you is going to be this archers bow in the sky. It's got all these different colors. And remember that because in first Peter, the authors talks about the flood and it does so in a very difficult and alarming way. And so the reading for reading is first Peter 318 through 22 and in verse 20 the author says talks about when God waited patiently in the days of Noah during the building of the Ark in which a few that is eight persons listen were saved through water. 

Eight persons were saved through water. Now the water killed, you know, untold numbers of human beings and other animals right? The water killed people. They drowned. Noah was going to be reset and Noah and his children and their spouses were saved through the waters of death that annihilated the earth. They were saved through death. 

This reading is coupled with Mark one, the first chapter of Mark, the earliest gospel, the narrative telling of Jesus's life. Saul had a bunch of writings, and then Mark comes along probably very early in the Jewish war in which the temple will eventually be destroyed. Mark's sets out to tell the story of Jesus, and he includes this story where Jesus is baptized and it is He goes out to the Jordan to be baptized by this guy who's saying, Repent for the Kingdom of God is near and Jesus takes up this message after John is arrested. But the emphasis here is in this baptism, Jesus doesn't die. But anybody who knows the Hebrew scriptures know that the waters of death, the saving waters, are this conundrum, this paradox of saving through death. Noah was saved by the waters that killed hundreds of thousands. Maybe not millions. I don't. How many people were in the earth, either in the story or in real life, right. And so entering the waters was a significant was a significant act that signified that you knew you were going to die. Right. Noah was saved and his family was saved from that through their death. And this is really important because one of the first things you learn in the military is that you're going to die, right? Especially in the last 20 years. If you're going to go into the military, you have to be prepared to give your life. And hey, if you're lucky, maybe that never comes to that. But in 20, over the course of 20 years, millions of soldiers were. Now veterans looked at that possibility and nodded their heads. Yep, I get it. 

If you're a soldier, you know that death is not the worst thing that can happen to you because everybody's going to die. What matters is how you die. Why you die. Maybe when and with who Everybody is going to die. If you think that the good news means that you're not going to die, I'm sorry. That's not the good news. You're not Enoch. You're not Elijah, right? You're going to die if you accept that. And when you accept that, then you begin asking, What kind of person do I want to be? What kind of death do I want to have? What do I want my death to mean? What do I want my life to mean? You're not getting out of this life alive. Survival is not the point. If and when you can accept that the things that occurred in the most difficult parts of the Bible, including the flood, including the military campaign and. CONAN the metaphorical campaign, because it's very clear it wasn't successful, it was not total. It's very clear that this is a a creative writing piece. And Joshua and even in judges, when you accept that, that's when you are prepared to enter the life that Christ has for us, that God has for us. 

The earliest Christians like Stephen knew that water that by being baptized you were saying, Yes, I am ready to die. And it also means that, yes, you're ready to live because you know what you're ready to live for because you know that your death can be meaningful, that it doesn't just happen, that it's there for a reason. Right. We screwed up humanity kind of messed up. And now we have this thing called death. Everybody is going to experience it. You can either pretend it's not going to happen or you can accept that it is going to happen and make the most of the time that, you know, you have, you know, the question of an afterlife. We'll just put that on the shelf for now. And this is what Jesus does. He enters the water and he knows he's going to die. He may not know right at that moment, but he knows he's going to die before it happens. So it's in testimony. Ask for the cup to be taken, but if not, God's will be done, not his own. Which is just like what his mom said when she was told that she would have a baby without having known a man, which was a risk not just to her own body, but also like socially. So and I say this, I also think of like the flood was horrific. The things that are described in Joshua and judges are horrific. But the most the most reasonable, the most coherent explanation I've heard theological exploration of Joshua and judges I've heard is that and it has these words in and out in Joshua judges the ban that the opposing people were put under as Joshua and the the Israelite clans and tribes go through at times massacring everything, including animals. They're put under this ban Haran and Jon Yoder, who is a theologian and sexual predator, who posited that the people under the ban were God's sacrificial animals. Right? Like, if you think of the the sacrificial system that arose in exile and then in the temple system, you take a goat or bull or pigeon or whatever, and you'd kill it. And that would be the saving life force that atoned or made right what we'd made wrong. And so we have it right here. And first, Peter, he says all those people who died were to save that ate. And now that doesn't mean they're in hell, right? And yeah, it sucks to die. I, I'm not looking forward to when it happens to me, but that's not the worst that can happen to you. The worst that can happen is something like becoming a douchebag and then dying right? 

So these passages are difficult. It's not the Bible is not summer reading, right? Certainly not. Joshua judges a lot of stories in Genesis, including the flood. It's not summer reading. You're not going to get what it's trying to put out if you're just skimming the surface, you have to dig into it and you have to accept that certain things you're not going to like to hear, but that if you want to find God, you've got to get outside yourself, your own interest, your own whatever, and accept A Yeah, we're all going to die. And that that isn't the worst thing that can happen, that that being sacrificed on the altar of, you know, otherwise horrible things. Right. Is not, is not fun but that there's a reason that Christians call the Friday in which Jesus dies Good Friday. If you can't live in that paradox, the Christian life of faith is going to be very difficult for you. Soldiers and veterans who have post-9-11, veterans who have looked death in the face and who realize there's things worse that can happen Cowardice, arrogance, avarice, greed like those are worse than death. When those things seep into your heart and your soul, that's what's worse than death. And death just seals what's already been happening, right? So these passages are difficult. If you've looked face death in the face and you have not, you know, cowered away, whether by choice or not, like if you get in a harrowing car crash, a near-death experience, maybe something similar happens where you know that the value and the weight of life and you're not going to waste it and you're not going to live under some pretense that all the things that you want to do to be good cannot be put off. That's when you become fully alive. And I think that's the promise of the good news that, yes, death is death is this weird thing that that is going to happen. But looking the other way or putting off the inevitable is not going to help you. In fact, I think it's going to make it more difficult to be the kind of person that God has made you. And I think that's one of the gifts of military service services, being able many soldiers and vets, at least being able to look at what's really at the end of the line and start living your life so that when that moment comes, you can look back on yourself and know that you were the creature that God made.