The LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek (Luke 4)

Here's where I'm really going to feel like I'm repeating myself, as this scene in Luke 4 doesn't change much between the Gospels.

Jesus goes off into the wilderness and fasts for forty days. Note that it doesn't say that he drank nothing, only that he ate nothing. As it happens, I have known people who have gone on a forty day fast from solid food, but really, that's beside the point, as Jesus is meant to be understood as being rather exceptional. If a guy can walk on water and bring people back from the dead, going for forty days with maybe only water should be a cinch.

When the devil takes Jesus up on a mountain and shows him all the kingdoms of the world, I never took it as being a literal thing, but more a sort of a vision. Even if the world were flat, you can only see so far, so I don't think this passage is suggesting such a thing.

Who is the Lord of all the earth? As is implied by this passage, the devil is, but then why all the verses saying that God is? Rather than a contradiction, this is a sort of complicated feudal matter; God is Lord in the end, but for some reason that's never fully explored in the Bible, when Adam ate from the tree in the garden of Eden, a certain amount of control over the earth was given to Satan. Anyway, if I remember from the first time I addressed Jesus' misquote, yes the word "only" doesn't appear in the verse Jesus is quoting, but it's strongly implied. So yeah, technically a misquote, but Jesus hasn't changed the meaning of the verse.

Can God be tempted? I answered this at length once before; let me try to give a short answer this time: You certainly can try to tempt God, but that doesn't mean it would be effective. Is it OK to test (or tempt) God? Generally no, but clearly there have been exceptions. Not only is it not a hard-and-fast rule, but the page on the SAB is missing an important verse, Malachi 3:10, in which God commands Israel to test him! (Perhaps the SAB will add the verse once this goes up? I think it's a big one for this issue.)

The SAB has a few issues with the comparison of Luke 4:18-19 to Isaiah 61:1-2. First of all, the SAB claims that the verse in Isaiah refers to Isaiah, and not to a future prophet. While yes, the verse does refer to Isaiah, that does not mean that it's impossible that it might have another layer of meaning. It actually comes up a lot in the New Testament that a verse that people thought referred to a past event is reinterpreted to have a secondary fulfillment; that's what's going on here. Secondly, the SAB points out that this appears to be yet another case of Jesus misquoting Scripture, and asks idly if Jesus made the mistake or if Luke added it in later. I don't know how to answer that question, but I do have some insight into what's going on here. In Jesus' time, Greek was a very commonly-spoken language, and a lot of people read their Old Testament from a Greek version known as the Septuagint. As is happens, the Septuagint does mention "typhlois anablepsin" or "recovering sight to the blind" in this verse. Jesus could have been reading from the Septuagint, or Luke could have gotten his verses from the same, but we don't really have any way of knowing for sure. Admittedly, this does still leave the verse open for questioning in a number of different ways. Is the Septuagint a bad translation? Was it wrong for whoever quoted from the Septuagint to do so? If Jesus actually read correctly from the Hebrew text, and Luke substituted the Septuagint, what does that imply? These are all potentially big issues that I admittedly don't have answers for; although its not a contradiction, it is an inconsistency, which some people may consider just as bad. Please feel free to share your thoughts one way or the other in the comments.

How long was Elijah's drought? The SAB claims a contradiction here, but I seem to be failing to see it. The Old Testament doesn't seem to be at all specific as to the length of the drought. I'd be curious as to where James and Jesus got three and a half years.

In verse 38, there is mention of "Simon's wife" which implies, as the SAB says, that the "first Pope" was married. I don't know what Catholics believe about this, or even if it would be an issue, as I'm pretty sure that celibacy among clergy was not a thing practiced in the early church. The SAB also implies that Simon Peter abandoned his wife to follow Jesus, but I don't know that one could say that with certainty. Sure, it's possible, but just because verse 5:11 says "they forsook all" doesn't mean that it should be taken quite so literally; at the very least one might assume that they didn't leave behind their clothes, and if they took something at all, who knows what they may have taken overall?

In the rest of the chapter, there's a lot of healing and casting out "devils", and while the SAB marks all of this as absurd and/or scientifically wrong, we're talking about miracles once again. Just because Jesus cleared a fever by rebuking it doesn't mean that the Bible is saying that's standard medical practice. As for the casting out of devils, the SAB brings up a question that I don't have a good answer for.

Then shall they fast in those days (Matthew 4)

The first issue that the SAB has with Matthew 4 is an interesting one, as it brings up bigger theological issues. If James 1:13 says that God cannot be tempted, then how is it that Jesus, supposedly being God, can be tempted? Is this a contradiction? Once again, I think this can be chalked up to the ambiguity of language, but it raises other questions for me. The ambiguity is this: Let me use the example of one of my kids. Suppose you were to try to get my older daughter to do something and you were to bribe her with a chocolate bar. Believe it or not,  she actually doesn't like chocolate, so in a sense, while you could bribe her with chocolate, in another sense, you can't...because it wouldn't be successful. I think that's the point of what James is saying. (This goes for the issue on verse seven as well.)

The bigger theological issue this raises, at least for me, is the question of why the devil would even bother. As I've heard many people point out--in regards to this passage, no less--the devil seems to be well-versed in scripture, so one might wonder why he bothers to oppose God since he must know how futile such action must be. I don't have an answer for that, it's just something I've always wondered.

Anyway, the SAB seems to be asking how it can be possible for Jesus to have fasted for 40 days and nights. There are a few things to say about this. One thing is that there are no details given about the fast; I would assume that Jesus didn't go without water for forty days, but rather only went without food. As it happens, there was this thing a few years back (it may still be as popular now, I don't know) where a lot of people I knew were doing 40-day fasts. They didn't go completely without consuming anything, but I know they went without solid food for 40 days; it doesn't take superhuman endurance for that sort of thing. Which brings me to a more important point: Jesus was superhuman. I don't think it's so hard to imagine that someone who had the ability to walk on water and raise people from the dead could manage to go a long time without food.

Well, after fasting, the devil shows up and tries to tempt Jesus, even suggesting scripture to support the things that he's tempting Jesus to do. As the SAB says, Jesus misquotes Deuteronomy 6:13, and this is not a translation error for the KJV. Not only is the word "only" present in the Greek, but it's there in the parallel passage of Luke 4:8. I would say in defense of this misquote that the verse that immediately follows ("Ye shall not go after other gods...") implies "only", so it's not an unreasonable stretch for Jesus to put it there.

I find it interesting the way that the SAB envisions the sorts of things that the Bible talks about, and how it's clearly different than I do. I would have never considered the physical impossibility of the scene in verse eight, but I suppose it's an issue worth considering. The thing I'd always wondered about this scene is how and why it ended up in the Gospels at all, since there's no recording of a time that Jesus sat down with his disciples and said, "Let me tell you about this wild thing that happened this one time I was fasting!" As for the issue of whether we've got some sort of flat-earth situation, I think that I'd have to say that this is figurative language in some way. I mean, even if you supposed that the devil and Jesus were standing on the moon, they'd still only see half the earth (there were kingdoms in the western hemisphere, and maybe even Australia), and I don't think there is an angle at which you could see everything. But even if the world were flat and there was a huge mountain, you'd be looking at everything from miles and miles away, so you wouldn't really see all those kingdoms, would you? I'm sure detractors will call it a cop-out, but yeah, I'm going to go with figurative speech here.

Verse nine is an interesting one, because I think a lot of people miss the implications of the offer the devil is giving, but the SAB gets it. If the devil is offering Jesus the earth, doesn't that imply that the devil owns it? You can't tempt someone by offering them something that's not yours, so the devil must own "all the kingdoms of the world". So the SAB is right to ask the questions it asks about the earth. As important as this issue is, since this post is getting long, I'm going to answer it simply. There's a sense in which both God and the devil own the earth. In the end, God owns the earth; He created it, and at the end of time, He's going to take it back. In another very real sense, the devil owns the earth, but it's sort of like a guy with a long-term lease. I actually talked about this when I covered the book of Ruth and cross-referenced Revelation 5 and referred back to this chapter.

But back to verse 10 and Jesus' quote of Deut. 6:13. The SAB asks whether the Bible tells us to serve only God or whether we are to serve others. I think the answer to this is similar to the one I just gave. Ultimately, God is the one we are made to serve, but in the course of living our lives, we serve God by serving others. Children should serve parents, spouses should serve one another, employees should serve bosses, and citizens should serve their governments in some manner. While it may seem like a contradiction on the face of it if you take the language a certain way, I think the idea is that we serve God by serving the people that God wants us to serve.

So the last issue in this chapter is that of timing. Matthew (and Mark, apparently) seem to be implying that Jesus chose his apostles (or particularly Peter and Andrew) after John got put in prison, while the Gospel of John suggests the opposite. Well, as it happens, this sort of thing happens a lot in the Gospels. The ordering of events seems to get scrambled around a lot between one telling and another. My general answer is once again, something that's going to be considered a cop-out by many, but I really don't think it is: the Gospel writers just didn't care about getting their narratives in proper temporal order. I'm using that as a blanket dismissal of contradictions of this type, but there still will be times where getting the order is important (the Sunday morning after Jesus is crucified has some issues that need sorting out) and a fair number of times, there will be things that can be said to sort things out anyway.

In this particular case, I'd say a couple things. One is that one event coming after the other in the narrative doesn't necessarily mean that they come after each other in time, and I think here verse 17 ends one story and 18 starts another. But that's about what I said in the previous paragraph. Another possibility is that John ended up in prison more than once; he was pretty unpopular among the religious and political leaders, maybe even moreso than Jesus. Here's a more important distinction: I don't think that the story of the calling of Peter in John is the same story told here. Doesn't it seem odd that Jesus would just be walking along and call these two guys almost at random, and they immediately drop everything and follow him? No, I think this is the official calling moment, while other stories like the one in John 1 are stories of how Jesus had interacted with these men previous to calling them.

I will make the wilderness a pool of water (Exod 17)

Chapter 17 is a pretty easy one, so as I often do in such cases, I'm going to complicate things with my own comments on what I suggest the SAB might want to say.

First of all, it seems like verse 2 ought to be added to this page, although only if Wells is trying to be comprehensive in his citations. I think a lot of the time, he's just looking for a few good examples, but I'm not sure. It should be noted that he has mistakenly put Genesis 22:1 and 2Sam. 24:1 on this page, which I don't think he meant to. This verse would fit just fine, though. I suppose that since I therefore have not addressed this issue, I ought to here. I think the issue is not whether God can be tempted per se, but whether people will try to tempt God. One of the hard things about this concept is that "tempt" and "test" are largely used interchangeably, with some confusing results. God's certainly not going to be tempted into sin, which is the way we usually think of "tempting". However, God is certainly able to be tested; the only question is whether or not it's appropriate to do so at any given time or in any given manner. For some reason, throughout most of the wilderness wanderings of Israel, the kind of testing/tempting they were doing was inappropriate, while there are examples both of people testing God with positive results, and God actually ordering the people of Israel to test Him! Although the word "test" is not in that verse, the concept is pretty clear there, and I think Wells ought to consider adding it to the test page.

Really, I don't understand this well. I once heard a pastor who said that all testing of God is forbidden in the Bible except for what we find in Malachi 3:10. The guy was a great speaker, but I think he had forgotten Gideon, who doesn't really fit under this heading. (This is also akin to the story in Luke 1 which I really should have included in my "Christmas edition", in which one person gets in trouble for asking a question to an angel, and another person does not.) My only thought is that it has a lot to do with attitude. The Israelites were essentially saying, "Oh my gosh! Moses has led us out into the desert to die, and God doesn't care about us!" While people like Elijah tested God with an attitude more like, "I'm so certain that God is with me, that I'm willing to give him a test to show you!" This is only speculation on my part, but it makes some sense in that God seems to value faith very highly.

Now, Moses goes with the leaders of the tribes to this place where there is this rock that God says, "I will stand before thee there..." which I assume to be somewhat figurative; perhaps the pillar of smoke mentioned previously stopped at the rock. Moses hits the rock with the staff, and water comes out of it. "God is such a clever guy!" the SAB says. Yes, I suppose He is. Apparently, this is absurd to Steve Wells, but he doesn't explain why. I guess it's another case of anything miraculous is absurd. This is definitely meant to be a miracle, and aside from the obvious fact that it's supernatural for rocks to spew out water when hit, the fact that this staff is used is often an indication in the Torah that miracles are involved.

Shortly after this (although it's not clear, since the Bible isn't much on sequential storytelling) the Amalekites come to attack the Israelites. Apparently, the SAB deems fighting back against this attack to be cruel, unjust, and intolerant. Am I to take it then that they should have just let themselves be attacked?

Something miraculous seems to happen in this story. Moses goes up on a hillside, and holds up his staff. So long as the staff is over his head, the Israelites keep winning, when he puts it down, the battle turns on them. This may indeed be a miracle (remember what I said about the staff?) in which case it needs no further explanation. I do notice however that most of the miracles that Moses performs during his ministry are following an order from God to do them. No such order is mentioned here, and I wonder if it might have been a psychological morale-booster for the troops to see Moses holding up the staff? It's a possibility.

God tells Moses to write the story down "in a book," presumably this one we're reading now. I find this verse in itself to be an odd one, and it may be a Hebrew idiom that we don't fully understand, but God says essentially, "Make sure everyone remembers the Amalekites, because I'm going to make sure everyone forgets them." Huh? Sort of the reverse of Jesus' statement in Matthew 26, where He says the woman with the ointment will be remembered forever, but Matthew fails to tell us who the heck she was. (It may have been Mary, as a very similar story is told in John, and Mary is named there.) In any case, as I mentioned way back, Israel indeed had to keep fighting generation after generation of Amalekites, and yes, most of the time they had to do it without Moses' help.