Daily Bread Pastor Mike Anderson

Reflection: Today, in Psalm 79, the psalmist cries out for God to help the people of Israel for the glory of His name. He then starts to reason with God, “Why should the nations say, Where is there God?”   Then, in the Isaiah passage, we see Isaiah reflecting on how even after the Babylonians had invaded and plundered the Southern Kingdom (Judah), that one day God would gather back all the exiles.   God would rise up another super power, the Persians, led by King Cyrus, to re-establish the people of God and overthrow the Babylonians.     At this point this was a prophetic utterance of Isaiah that would come true later.   And then bringing it full circle Paul finishes his letter to the Galatians by calling them the “Israel of God” .   Some dispensationalist theologians want to make a strict separation between “Israel” and the “Church”, yet it is hard to argue that case when just verses earlier Paul says, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, slave nor free, but al

Reflection:   When I was in high school and college, to earn a little money over the summer I would work at a landscaping job.   One of the bigger jobs we had to do was cutting down dead trees, or trees the owners no longer wanted.   It started with sawing off branches with chain saws, and then gradually cutting down the tree down to the base.   The hardest job was at the end pulling out the tree stump by its roots.   Depending how old it was, this was an arduous project of taking an axe and hacking out the old roots.   Sometimes if this didn’t work, we would have to hook up a chain to the back of the truck and around the stump, and literally yank it out!   But if you didn’t pull a tree out by its roots, sooner or later branches would start coming out of the stump of the tree if the tree was not dead.   In Isaiah 11, the prophet uses a similar metaphor when he says in verse 1, “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.” Then we see

Reflection: Having run in several races and preparing for one on the 4 th of July, I know how important it is to keep focused on the finish line.   In longer races like the Marathon this is especially true!   Today, Paul uses the metaphor of the “race”, as he has done before, to warn the Galatians not to let anyone cut in and distract them from the goal, the finish line.   Specifically, Paul is referring to those who were creeping into the church and trying to cause distraction either through “legalism”, which we talked about yesterday as trying to require new adult male converts to be circumcised. And today, he refers to using one’s freedom to indulge the sinful nature.   These dual threats were prevalent back then and they continue to be so today.   Each heresy is a distortion of God’s grace.   One cheapens God’s grace in Jesus, and the other one nullifies it.   So Paul then, knowing they will need a goal to focus on, teaches them to use their freedom for another use, s