Hello, nice people.
The day started out young—now it’s getting old. We filled it pretty full. At this late hour (8:30pm), I guess I need to be thinking on how to take on tomorrow. I just sent a text message to the person I started sawmilling for on Saturday to say I’d plan to be back at the mill to carry on slicing up some of his logs tomorrow morning about 10am. We had to deal with some rain on Saturday. It looks like we’ll likely be facing some of the same tomorrow.
Blessings. Good night. Ray.
That is quite a description! Here is how the following verse reads: “Stunned and bewildered, his disciples (being good Jews)asked, ‘Then who in the world can possibly be saved?’” (v. 25, TPT) As we process the FOCUS VERSE statement by Jesus, we who are NOT wealthy may be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief—reasoning that we, by not being wealthy, can easily “enter God’s kingdom realm.” Man!—for me, it should be “a piece of cake!” But wait!—Jesus goes on to pop that balloon by declaring that it’s not just wealthy people who face the impossibility of entering “God’s kingdom realm.” Responding to the disciple’s question, “…Jesus replied, ‘Humanly speaking, no one, because no one can save himself. But what seems impossible to you is never impossible to God!’” (v. 26, TPT).
I can’t imagine a better time than right here to recite familiar Ephesians 2:8-9: “For it was only through this wonderful grace that we believed in him. Nothing we did could ever earn this salvation, for it was the gracious gift from God that brought us to Christ! So no one will ever be able to boast, for salvation is never a reward for good works or human striving” (TPT).
On the other hand, while it is absolutely true that no amount of “human striving” is adequate to earn salvation, let us not presume that there no place for human effort in the management and maintenance of that gift. That, in fact, is what following Christ requires. “As for us, we have all of these great witnesses who encircle us like clouds. So we must let go of every wound that has pierced us and the sin we so easily fall into. Then we will be able to run life’s marathon race with passion and determination, for the path has been already marked out before us. We look away from the natural realm and we fasten our gaze onto Jesus who birthed faith within us and who leads us forward into faith’s perfection. His example is this: Because his heart was focused on the joy of knowing that you would be his, he endured the agony of the cross and conquered its humiliation, and now sits exalted at the right hand of the throne of God!” (Hebrews 12:1-2. TPT)
PS: We have typically heard the metaphor Jesus uses in verse 24 in terms of a camel passing through the eye of a needle, not stuffing “a heavy rope through the eye of a needle.” The Passion Translation that I’ve been quoting from includes an interesting footnote—which I will cite here: “As translated from the Aramaic. The Greek is “to stuff a camel through the eye of a needle.” The Aramaic word for both “rope” and “camel” is the homonym gamla. This could be an instance of the Aramaic text being misread by the Greek translators as “camel” instead of “rope.” Regardless, this becomes a metaphor for something impossible. It would be like saying. “It’s as hard as making pigs fly!” See also Luke 18:25