READING FOR AUGUST 1, 2024: EXODUS 37, TITUS 2, PSALM 74:12-23                                           EXODUS 37 The action of Exodus 37 represents Israel following in great detail the commands that God them gave them in great detail in Exodus 35.  Although the principle that obeying God is important has been mentioned earlier, perhaps this chapter would be an appropriate place to spend more time on that topic. 

Have any of you been in a Bible study when someone states her/his disagreement with what the text tells us to do? It might be a disagreement that the text actually represents God’s command or a belief that God would no longer command that action or even that God is wrong. For purposes of this discussion, let assume they all come down to the same thing because otherwise the person objecting would need to have her/his own personal pipeline to objective truth that overrides biblical revelation. 

One philosophical view of determining morality is called “Divine Command Theory.” It states that a command given by God is right regardless of our opinion of it because it is given by God who alone is all wise, all knowing, all holy, all loving and all just.  There is really no point in our trying to discern among ourselves if obeying such a command is a good idea. The command of God is the right thing to obey because God commands it. John Hare, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy from Yale, wrote a helpful book on the subject entitled God’s Commands. Below are some brief excerpts. 

“To love God requires us to repeat in our wills God’s will for our willing, and such a repetition is obedience. In the same way, entering the covenant is entering into a relation that is expressed, on our side, by obedience. God becomes our God and we become God’s people...  ‘Command’ (in the narrow sense) has internal reference to authority as part of the meaning of the speech act, with some kind of condemnation envisaged for failure...”

“God’s commands make obligatory the good things that God prescribes, all of which take us to our proper end by the path God has selected for us, and our obedience is an expression of our love for God that is good in itself. There is circularity here. God has rightful authority because God’s commands give us the reasons for action that we ought to have, and we ought to have them because God’s commands have authority. But the circularity is not vicious, because the chain of justification terminates in the principle known from its terms that God is to be loved and hence God is to be obeyed.” (From John Hare’s book God’s Commands)

READING FOR AUGUST 1, 2024 CONTINUED: TITUS 2, PSALM 74:12-23                                  TITUS 2 Paul directs Titus to tell specific groups the behavior fitting with sound doctrine: 

• To Older Men:  Be moderate, dignified, self-controlled in behavior. Be sound in faith, in love, in perseverance. 
• To Older Women: Be reverent, not a gossiper, not a substance abuser; teach young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, and subject to their own husbands. 
• To Younger Men:  Be sensible, do good deeds, be pure in doctrine, be dignified with speech.
• To Slaves/Employees: Be subject to their own masters, be pleasing and not argumentative; don’t steal, but show good faith.
• To Everyone: Deny ungodliness and worldly desires; live sensibly, righteously, and in a godly manner; look forward to seeing our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.

While there is certainly overlap in these various guidelines, the instructions are definitely targeted to each group. Group-specific differences seem to go in and out fashion much like clothing styles. Perhaps there’s wisdom in aligning our views of the differences to those given in the Bible. Paul, however, doesn’t give Titus any specific instruction to provide to young women. Guidelines to them are enfolded in guidelines given to older women, who are told to pass them along to younger women.  Perhaps it would have been immodest for Titus to do this directly or perhaps the younger women would receive it better coming from older women.    

Are all these guidelines weird to the general public? They should be. Paul said they are meant to differentiate Christians from nonbelievers, “to purify for Himself a people for His own possession, eager for good deeds.”  Paul doesn’t want Titus to be apologetic in his directions: “These things speak and exhort, and rebuke with all authority. No one is to disregard you.”

PSALM 74:12-23 In the first part of this chapter, great emotion is spent describing the current crises Asaph is experiencing. Now Asaph starts to focus upon what he knows to be true about God from his study of the scriptures. He begins to relive all the works of God going back to creation, works he could have only known about through reading God’s word or hearing about from his elders. His problems seem to shrink when this larger reality is considered. God doesn’t want us to escape from difficult realities but to factor in the larger reality of His kingdom 

Then when he returns in verse 18 to the current tormentors, he reframes them as totally mistaken and misguided for thinking they could possibly taunt such a great God. Do the forces of evil seem to be taunting God at the moment? Do we as God’s people feel ridiculed and afflicted? Maybe we are forgetting the larger reality of God’s kingdom. The worst part of such a crisis is not Asaph’s pain or ours but how God is being treated.  Asaph says our best strategy is to praise God and ask Him to arise to plead His cause.