A lot of my reading lately has been in the book of Job, and one thing I've been thinking about is how we characterize Job's friends. Make no mistake, they were wrong about Job, and this made them terrible friends and worse comforters in his time of need. They were mistaken to think that they knew exactly what the wrath of God would look like, largely by assuming it would always happen in this life. They were especially wrong to think they could discern the will and plan of God without any help from God, just based on their own wisdom. They were wrong in a great many ways and, in the end, require Job's intercession on their behalf to avoid judgement themselves.

But they weren't entirely wrong about the content of their words. That is, they keep circling back to ideas that no man is truly blameless, that we all have sin and that this basic, common degree of sin is itself enough to justify the full wrath of God, which is a terrible thing to receive. They have a right understanding of fallen man, they have a right understanding of God as just and the judge of the living. They were wrong not because they knew wrong things, in fact much of what they say will come on evildoers is repeated elsewhere in scripture, but because they knew so little about the story that was actually playing out.

But David understands in the psalm above that God sometimes allows the unrepentant to have their best life now. To enjoy wealth and prosperity, to pass down their good things to children who will hoard them just as they have. And James warns us against showing favor to those for whom life seems to be going well, giving preference to the rich, and calls out those who gain their wealth through the unjust treatment of others to expect wrath to come. It is very tempting to look at our own situation and then look at the goodness that others experience and get angry or jealous. It is easy to lose hope that we are on the right path when the path is so hard to walk. It is easy to be like Job's friends and think that the outward experience of this life is an accurate measure of how well one is pleasing God. But like Job, we must look beyond the situation and cry out to the God who is behind it, and see that He is good, even if we don't understand what is happening right now. If we will be like David, seeking after God's face and taking our joy in knowing Him, we will not have the time or the energy to be weighed down with jealousy for the lives of others. We can trust that He who did not withhold His only Son will surely not hold back the good that He intends for us.

If I had a dollar for every time I've heard someone talk about the idea of an Acts 2 church, or at least a church that looks like that described in the first few chapters of Acts, I could probably afford to go out and just plant a church.

There is a lot of debate I've encountered about how to read the idea that the church in the beginning of Acts had all things in common. The more politically conservative groups I tend to know like to talk about this pointing to the need to live in community, even radical community sometimes, but there's little application to this notion beyond seeing each other outside of church on purpose. In far more leftist circles, the idea seems to be to take the communalism and directly place it in today's context, whether in a state-wide communist society or a more local, counter-cultural body that rejects personal property and shares all that they have with one another.

I submit that there is something we don't tend to talk about that shows up in this idea, and it comes to mind today because much of my reading was about it. Living the lifestyle described of the church in Jerusalem requires an awful lot of willful vulnerability. You cannot sell all you have and place it at the feet of your leaders without accepting that you will now be reliant on those leaders for your every need. However we would apply it today, we must have in our minds that one of the most basic experiences of this church would have been the knowledge that they were not only pouring their resources into supporting one another, but that they were submitting themselves to needing support and trusting that the support would come.

This also points us back to God. Who is our provider? From where does our help come?

I have for some time held that one of the great dangers of our modern idea of Christianity in America, the Religious Right and the marriage so many churches have with specific political powers, is that it is an attempt to seize control of that which we were never meant to control. We try so hard now to control the seats of power, to direct the forces that we fear will persecute us. And for what end? Do we expect that we can overcome Christ's promise that we will have trouble if we can just become the ones who give out trouble? Do we believe that we can reach the nations by dropping bombs on their homes and building walls to keep them out of our own?

Where is the humility in our expression of faith today? Where are we esteeming others above ourselves? In what way are we allowing ourselves to be at the mercy of God if we strive constantly to control our own fate and our own environment to make it something we consider safe? How are we telling the world that we are saved through God's great provision and that we trust in His generous giving while we dig our claws into more power, more authority, more wealth and comfort?

How can we expect anyone to believe that we are laid bare and vulnerable before our God if they cannot see us allow even an ounce of vulnerability to each other?