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SHREWD

‘I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore, be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.’  (Matthew 10:16 NIV)

This is Jesus’ advice to the twelve disciples as he dispatches them on their solo mission across Galilee, it may be obvious they go as sheep before wolves, in that people will vilify them; and in bringing the gospel of love and, in that vulnerability, they must necessarily be as ‘innocents’, unjudgmental, prepared to trust and risk rejection or worse, but what does Jesus mean when he says the must be as shrewd as snakes?

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ETERNITY

God has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.  (Ecclesiastes 3:11b)

The Bible affirms that human beings are eternal creatures.  Mortality was simply a mechanism of grace, for without mortal life the first infraction would doom to hell.  Solomon, granted all earthly wisdom, says self-knowledge of eternity is hard-wired into our very nature.

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RELIGION

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.  (James 1:27)

The word translated ‘religion’, is θρησκεία (thréskeia) and while the underlying sense is reverence, its usage conveys worship as expressed in ritual acts.  And it is in the context of action that James exhorts his brethren to be ‘doers of the word’, adding, ‘a doer who acts…will be blessed in his doing’.

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Day

And God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.  (Genesis 1:3-5)

Day is יוֹם yom in Hebrew and the word has a range of meanings including a sidereal day to an age; it means a defined period of time.

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