The Lord Knows How to Save

Psalm 17; Zechariah 3:1-10; 2 Peter 2:4-21

Peter sure is grumpy and judgy today. The high point to me in Peter was "the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trial." This sure sounds like hope--if we think of ourselves as godly. The rest of Peter begs schadenfreude from the godly and trepidation from the ungodly.

What I really liked most about the lectionary today, though, was from Zechariah. Zechariah opens proving me wrong again about the nature of disembodied evil. There's the divine council. I see this as much more like Job, though, than like Chronicles. This is Satan as a character in literature more than Satan acting in history.

The thing I like, though--the thing that really makes me want to praise the scripture in the lectionary today--is the image of the clothes. Luther's image was that we are sinners, and we put on clean clothes to cover up our dirty selves. The character Joshua in this Zechariah passage is the opposite. Take off the dirty clothes so that the guilt is removed! The high priest Joshua gains access to the divine council because he is made guiltless by removing his sins, not by covering them up. Now, I'm a good reformed theologian and believe in innate depravity and all. I hear people trying to redeem us by logic who say that God made humans good, but in between, there's the fall, and that's where we are. The thing is that God will save us. God removes the guilt. God will remove the guilt of the land in a single day. God made us good, we fell and were sinners, God justifies us by fiat without our earning it. AND God removes our guilt so that we are actually good again. The Lord knows how to save, indeed.