Tag: Selfish

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Wore out worthiness.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Now the sons of Eli were scoundrels who had no respect for the Lord or for their duties as priests. Whenever anyone offered a sacrifice, Eli’s sons would send over a servant with a three-pronged fork. While the meat of the sacrificed animal was still boiling, the servant would stick the fork into the pot and demand that whatever it brought up be given to Eli’s sons. All the Israelites who came to worship at Shiloh were treated this way. Sometimes the servant would come even before the animal’s fat had been burned on the altar. He would demand raw meat before it had been boiled so that it could be used for roasting.1 Samuel‬ ‭2‬:‭12‬-‭15‬ ‭NLT‬‬

Some of the most egregious, heartbreaking stories are the ones where your own children go off track and become a curse to the family instead of a blessing. This is the story of Eli’s sons who took over portions of the tabernacle responsibilities and did whatever they pleased. And, it wasn’t good. They had contempt of God.

The story screams for resolve and answers. What in the world happened to turn Hophni and Phinehas into brats and scoundrels (The Hebrew word, beliyyaal: two words that literally mean they wore out their worthiness!), and eventually perpetrators of young women who served at the entrance of the tent of God. Exasperated, Samuel realizes that they were not going to change and writes. “Eli’s sons wouldn’t listen to their father, for the Lord was already planning to put them to death.” Death was merciful for everyone, the boys, their father and certainly the community!

And right in the middle of one of the worst family stories, the most abusive, out of control boys with an aging, failing Father, we find Eli, the priest raising young Samuel as a foster son and future judge of Israel. Samuel had great parents and a promise is a promise. Hannah entrusted her precious child to a wicked foster family! The question begs to be asked… even with a horrendous origin story of being raised with an ineffective leader with a couple of entitled, good for nothing boys, how does one become one of Israel’s most revered and beloved Judges and Prophets of his day? One, both Samuel’s parents loved him dearly. Two, his mother spoke to little Samuel of his future purpose by giving him a new “official” outfit every year – positively projecting Samuel’s worth and value to the people he loved and trusted the most. Three, seeing and living with Eli’s failures did not in anyway lessen Samuel’s respect for his mentor nor his mentor’s office. Samuel learned to hear God’s voice and obey God’s voice at a very early age. We should never dismiss the ability of a child to hear and obey God.

Proverbs speaks of the heartache and misery of parents whose children have gone awry in the things of God. Most children bring their parents joy throughout their entire life. But, there are also those who bring great shame and sorrow into the family because of their poor, selfish decisions.

Prayer

​Dad,
I think without Jesus changing my life, I could have become one of those sons who wore out my worthiness. I was just at the beginning of living life as a bad boy, bad son when you changed all that. I know of dozens of stories where the children have lived a destructive life and have wreaked havoc in every area they touch. I know parents are perfect, but none of these deserved the shame and financial cost of their wayward adult son or daughter. My heart goes out to each of them. Please let us see the days when our sons and daughters become amazing people of faith. Let us experience a generation that knows you and obeys you. Amen.

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Cancelling God.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

“Some Pharisees and teachers of religious law now arrived from Jerusalem to see Jesus. They asked him, “Why do your disciples disobey our age-old tradition? For they ignore our tradition of ceremonial hand washing before they eat.” ‭‭Matthew‬ ‭15‬:‭1‬-‭2‬ ‭NLT‬‬

Calling a spade a spade or the pot calling the kettle metal! Jesus calls out the misplaced attention to traditional detail, while the more weighty moral issues are dismissed as unnecessary.

First of all, EWE! Were the disciples not washing their hands before meals? 😂😂😂. No, that’s not what the religious leaders were calling out.

The disciples were not going through the rigorous rituals of purification that were mostly performative, instead of a duty to simple cleanliness. Jesus, using one of his own parable illustrations, doesn’t focus on the splinter in the disciple’s eyes, he wants to point out the log in the Pharisee’s eyes. It’s not the first time that religion is criticized for being overly critical of nonessential behaviors!

Jesus does not waste one second on answering the question. Jesus cross examines one of the most egregious offenses to the law itself. Number five on the big ten list, and the first in priority of our horizontal relationships. The religious ask about clean hands, Jesus asks about unclean hearts. Jesus quickly describes the Pharisees workaround to “legally” avoid honoring their own fathers and mothers. It was such a common, but nasty practice that no one would dare talk about it out in the open, especially in some public conversation. I’ll bet the teachers of the law wished they had never ask Jesus about hand washing.

Their sidestepping of God’s law, intent on honoring their parents, was super complicated but effective. As parents age, their ability to continue to work for money becomes increasingly more difficult. This is still true today. As such, the parents become more dependent on their children to care for them as they enter this elderly stage of their life. Sometimes, things did not go well for them in their senior years and they would become destitute and possibly lose their home and even their means to eat. The part of “honoring” parents meant that the children would step up and make sure their own parents wouldn’t be thrown out on the streets, begging for food and money.

Leave it the religious lawyers to scheme their way out of that responsibility. The Pharisees had it all worked out to skirt this God-honoring system. Just before their parents would become destitute, they would make a formal vow to donate much of their excess money to the temple. That vow was legally binding, but the money was placed in a discretionary fund that was only accessible to those working in the temple system. It was similar to using a “tax-sheltered” method to avoid giving it to the IRS. Except, in this case, they were avoiding the financial care of their own parents! The money was technically “unavailable,” so they could claim deep apologies to their parents for the lack of support. Pretty evil, right?

It was Jesus words in addressing this “attention to wrong priorities” that gets me. Jesus said, “In this way, you say they don’t need to honor their parents. And so you cancel the word of God for the sake of your own tradition” (vs. 6). Religion and religious practices can often get so entangled in the wrong priorities and give attention to the wrong details that we lose perspective! And when that happens, we are all in danger of nullifying or CANCELLING God!

And in my selfish ignorance, I may choose to judge someone else’s petty sin in complete ignorance of my own major sin. I would end up cancelling God AND judging others in the process! This is another reason it is dangerous to step into the arena of judging others, we lose perspective on our own wrongdoing.

Prayer

Dad,
The nerve of religiosity attempting to cancel you! It’s clearly our own whacky desires that would lead us to not just prefer our own agendas and priorities, but then to formalize them into rules that we would hold over others and judge them as well. Who in the world do we think we are…God ourselves? Oh, that’s the real point, isn’t it? We want to BE our own gods, behaving in some skewed image of ourselves rather than reflecting who you are. We were created in YOUR image, not the other way around. Help us, forgive us Oh Lord.