Bible Challenge Days 34-36

Exodus 37-40, Psalms 29-30, Mark 2-3

I love all the beautiful imagery of Psalm 29!  It's a Psalm I remember reading in church, but I never understood it until now.  It uses a storm as a manifestation of God.  How fun that the psalmist takes a scary thing like a storm and makes it into the beauty and power of God.  His voice is the thunder and lightning.  There's peace in the storm, too.

"May the Lord give strength to his people!
May the Lord bless his people with peace!

I mentioned in my last post that Mark seems to establish Jesus' authority from the very beginning of the gospel. This certainly comes out in the first miracle Jesus performs:  healing the paralytic man.  Here we see two forms of Jesus' power.  First of all, the friends of the man were willing to bypass the crowds surrounding Jesus by removing the roof of Jesus' house and lowering their friend inside.  Think about that.  If you were a doctor and someone removed the roof of your house to get their friend inside, would you want to operate?  That's crazy!  But Jesus does.  These people recognized Jesus' power, and they stopped at nothing to get to him.  Secondly, Jesus heals the man by forgiving his sins.  The scribes don't like this.  Only God can forgive sins, but here Jesus does.  In this very first miracle we see that Jesus can do what only God can do.  We've already had the Holy Spirit descend when Jesus was baptized.  I smell a trinity!

Not to waste more time, Mark has the scribes plotting against Jesus in Chapter 2.  We're only a page and a half in when we start hearing rumblings of the crucifixion and resurrection.