Monday, May 15, 2006

Good Morning   

 

In honor of Brad and Ron's trip to China this coming Friday, I thought we would keep up with the weather in Beijing each day.

 

Current  Temp:  (at 7P local time) 84 degrees and fair.

Today: Plentiful sunshine. Warm. High 86F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph.

Tonight: Generally clear. Low 64F. Winds SSE at 5 to 10 mph. 

The 10-day forecast at: http://www.weather.com/outlook/travel/businesstraveler/tenday/CHXX0008?from=_topnav_business

Today's Reading:    Revelation 12 -- Barclay 83-87

 

-- As we start chapter 12, Barclay has us read the entire chapter before beginning his commentary.

 

-- Let me just say -- we just thought that the earlier chapters were full of confusing symbolism -- chapter 12 takes this to a whole other level.

 

-- Let's start with the woman and the child, working backwards from the child that is born.  According to Barclay and my bible commentaries, the child that is born is Christ.  The description ties back to the some Old Testament verses about the Messiah (rod of iron, for instance).  Then the question becomes who is the woman?

 

-- Barclay discounts the obvious choice --- Mary - because this image is in his mind too much of a superhuman, too symbolic.  The Church doesn't work, since the church began after Christ's birth and death, so it doesn't follow that the thing that Christ created should be shown symbolically as his mother.  Barclay settles on the idea that the woman represents the community of God's believers, specifically the Old Testament idea of the nation of Israel, or the Jews.  Christ came from Jewish people, and there is enough symbolism in the Old Testament to support the symbolism of the woman as representing God's chosen people.  You can expand that idea somewhat, by saying that the woman doesn't symbolize the Jews specifically as much as she symbolizes the community of God on earth, which would include the Jews, his chosen people, plus the church of believers that has grown since the birth of Christ.

 

-- Now, if we do that, we can understand or imply some other things -- the persecution of the woman by the dragon can be understood as the persecution of the Jews over the ages, or if you expand it to include Christians, the persecution of both Christians and Jews over the years.  The interesting and important thing to note is that the woman is always taken care of by God -- provision is always made for her, to protect her from the dragon.

 

-- On the other hand, while the symbolic view of the woman in this passage can be developed, there are some specific dates and times and actions connected with the woman that makes it seem more specific than that.  For instance, in chapter 11, we read about the witnesses and their time of 1,260 days, and we accepted and discussed that as a literal period of time.  In chapter 12, John gives us exactly the same time frame connected to the woman, and we are to take that (according to Barclay) as a symbolic measure of time.  I have a bit of problem with that, because it seems to me that John, in the space of a single chapter, would use the same language to represent the same concepts.  I also have a bit of problem with the time line -- for the explanation for the vision that John's sees to be true, what John is seeing is not a vision of the future, or just of the future, but a vision of a bigger slice of history, going back to the birth of Christ.  Some things we need to figure out as we go forward.

 

Today's Scripture   

 

Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.  But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.

John 3:20-21

Today's prayer requests:      John Fillebaum's friend

 

John has a friend who has had to be admitted to the psyche ward at the hospital.  She needs our prayers as she gets treatment and works at gettng better.  

Today's class member prayer:

Susanne Russell   

Jay