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Weekly Devotional

November 2, 2009

God’s Peace be with you all.

Wisdom 3:1-9  But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them.  ² In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster,  ³ and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace.  ⁴ For though in the sight of others they were punished, their hope is full of immortality.  ⁵ Having been disciplined a little, they will receive great good, because God tested them and found them worthy of himself;  ⁶ like gold in the furnace he tried them, and like a sacrificial burnt offering he accepted them.  ⁷ In the time of their visitation they will shine forth, and will run like sparks through the stubble.  ⁸ They will govern nations and rule over peoples, and the Lord will reign over them forever.  ⁹ Those who trust in him will understand truth, and the faithful will abide with him in love, because grace and mercy are upon his holy ones, and he watches over his elect.

                The above text was the alternate first reading for yesterday.  Those of you that were at church (or have been recently) may have noticed that often times our bulletins give an alternate reading.  Most of the time, we do not read these alternates as they come from the Apocrypha.  However, even if we don’t read them on Sunday mornings, they are still worthy of being read.  The books in the Apocrypha are included in some Bibles, but not in others, based on the denominations.  Lutherans tend to stick with the NRSV as put together by the World Council of Churches.  That means for us that Wisdom is one of the books that is not included in either the Old or the New Testament.  This also means that they are books that we don’t normally study that often.

                While I was looking for study material for Wisdom, I found a website that offers a brief commentary on this particular passage and its relation to the whole book.  This material, published by the Anglican Diocese of Montreal, offers what I believe to be good insight and information about this text.  I hope you find it useful as well.

“Wisdom has been a book of the church since the earliest times. For some Christians, it is part of the Apocrypha ("hidden books"); for others, it is in the Old Testament. Until this book was written (about 50 BC), the best that could be hoped for when one died was to exist in some inderterminate state. Wisdom tells us that being made in the image of God includes sharing with him in immortality. Only the godly, the ethical, will be granted eternal life; those who choose to deviate from God's ways will be punished and will disappear into nothingness.

                Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9          

In the Hebrew Bible, life simply ended with death (or at best, the dead merely existed in an indeterminate state, separated from God), but during the first century BC, some Jewish thinkers developed the notion of after-life. Wisdom is in the Apocrypha or in the Old Testament: the Church has used it since the earliest times, but the Jewish authorities rejected it. It is quoted in the New Testament. The thinking is that, at the Last Judgement, the just (or righteous) will join God and the angels in heaven, but the unjust (or wicked) will be punished. 2:23-24 says: “... God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it”.

But the “righteous” (v. 1) are protected by God, and after death, they will not suffer. To the wicked (“foolish”, v. 2), they seem to have simply ceased to exist, to have been annihilated, but they are actually “at peace” (v. 3), with God and the angelic court. It may appear that they have been punished, but their certain hope in life and in death is to live for ever. Then v. 5: the hardship they have suffered in life is really discipline, a process of testing by God and being found acceptable to him, and a preparation for receiving “great good” from him. God’s testing (v. 6) is like refining gold: when the ore is heated, the metal coalesces and the slag separates: a process of purification. Isaiah 53, a Servant Song (which we believe tells of Christ) speaks of a “lamb that is led to the slaughter ... there was no deceit in his mouth” and his life is “an offering for sin”. This is the sense in which those who have died are a “sacrificial burnt offering” (v. 6). At the Last Judgement (“In the time of their visitation”, v. 7) those who have died will triumph (shining and “sparks” are images of triumph.) V. 8a summarizes Daniel 7:18-27; in the context of Wisdom, it simply means that the just will rule over the wicked (although many Jews took Daniel as saying that, in the Messianic age, Israel, the just, would rule all other nations.) In the age to come, “the faithful” (v. 9), “those who trust” in God, will understand ultimate “truth”, i.e. God, and will dwell in a loving relationship with him, because of his freely-given gift of love (“grace”) to, and forgiveness of (“mercy”) those he chooses.”

From http://montreal.anglican.org/comments/archive/grmbrm.shtml

In our prayers this week: 

Doris, Mary Netta, Ann, Joseph, Lisa, Kim, Robert, Evelyn, Gail H., Michael, and St. John’s Lutheran Church.  Also for November, the upstate conference is praying for our congregation.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Judson