When Jesus calls James and John they are mending their nets with their father. They leave the boat and their father, and follow him. This is no trivial detail – a product of the fact that (unlike Simon and Andrew, in the previous verses) the sons of Zebedee happened to be on a job with their dad on the day when Jesus called them. It’s a pattern that Matthew keeps returning to through the rest of his gospel. For the disciples, the call to follow Jesus means literally leaving the family and the family business to travel around Galilee and Judea to go on the road with the itinerant rabbi Jesus.
Posted in Bible Bits | Also tagged Matthew |
Jesus came ‘[not] to abolish the Law or the Prophets… but to fulfill them’. This side of his death and resurrection, as people of the New Covenant, we are no longer under the law of Moses. But we are still called on by Jesus to live out the fulfillment of Moses’ commandments, written on our hearts by God’s Spirit. The God who gave the commandments to Moses for Israel is the same God who created the world; the commandments are an application of the wisdom of the creator to the nation Israel (cf. Matt 19:1-12), and although we are not that nation, he is still the same God. So when Jesus talks to Jewish people in his own day about the commandments of Moses and the way they were to keep them, we need to listen and learn.
Posted in Bible Bits | Also tagged Matthew |
God promised as far back as Genesis 12 to bless all the families of the earth through Abraham and his descendants. The promises that God gave to Abraham went with a serious responsibility to ‘command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice’ (Gen. 18:19).
Posted in Bible Bits | Also tagged Matthew |
God can do without human fatherhood – he managed to bring the Messiah into the world without even needing to use one of us as a sperm donor. But just as Joseph’s story in Matthew 1-2 provides us with a deliberately humiliating reminder of how dispensable we human fathers are, it also gives us an extraordinary example of how God uses us and our fatherhood in his plans.
Posted in Bible Bits | Also tagged Matthew |
This is the first in a series of five short(ish) posts on human fatherhood in Matthew’s gospel. (There’s also a lot in Matthew about God’s fatherhood, but that would be another whole series…).
The first thing to get straight about human fatherhood, according to the gospel of Matthew, is that God doesn’t need it.
Posted in Bible Bits | Also tagged Matthew |
