Genesis 26:17-27:46
Matthew 9:1-17
Psalm 10:16-18
Proverbs 3:9-10
"It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick…I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners."
I have never been able to follow any of these "reality" tv shows (how much about them is actually reality is fodder for another blog entirely). I have little interest in the dysfunction, the backstabbing, the tantrums, the deception, the yelling, the arrogance and dismissiveness - all traits I would rather neither see nor be. So I don't watch.
And then I read today's OT reading, and what do I see? Parents favoring one child over the other, a mother conspiring with her favored child to deceive her husband, a son lying to his father to steal what he believes is his brother's, a brother who earlier had so dismissively forfeited his birthright bursts out in anger, and appears to be capable of fratricide. The drama! Why are these people in the Bible, why are they worthy examples?
They are worthy because they, like Matthew in the NT reading, are precisely the kind of people who depend on God's help. And they give evidence of the fact that God does not call the qualified (else there would be no one to call), He qualifies those He calls.
Two things I take away from this:
- There is no disaster that God has not ALREADY brought good from it. Consider that long before the drama of the stew, God had already ordained that Esau would serve Jacob, and Jacob would be Israel.
- There is no sinfulness that God will not forgive, no magnitude of sinner that God will not love. The Bible is rife with examples - from Isaac's family to Matthew, to the arrogant Peter and the murderous Paul.
Father, when I am discouraged by my sinfulness, by its gravity and persistence, by my inability to overcome it by my own strength, remind me that You call me not because I am perfect, but because I am flawed. And keep me from the thinking that caused Adam and Eve to hide from You; rather, give me a heart that seeks You in surrender.
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