2 Samuel 11:26 - 12:13a

So, first, the story has to say something about the woman. She gets to mourn for some unnamed but apparently very brief time then she's taken in by David. Women had few choices. Her alternatives were very difficult and very dangerous. She would have had to give up everything she had known her life to be and find a community that would accept her. She might not have found that at all. But anyway, what's important apparently is that we hear what the men have to say. The Prophet explains to him what he did wrong and the punishment goes to the kid.

It's been tough going with David, hard to extract anything meaningful from this terribly flawed character. We get a "story sermon", the first in the Bible actually, from Nathan. David gets the story, but has to be told it's an analogy to him. To get anything else from this passage, you would have to read on. This passage ends as if David's confession is the point. As it turns out, the "sword" does remain in David's house. Several of his sons die. This is not a story of a man following God, but one who ignores the God who chose him. It's a man who doesn't learn the simple lesson that actions have consequences.

Exodus 16:2-4, 9-15

This story gets repeated to provide background for the John passage.

Ephesians 4:1-16

This is some standard theology, I have commented on similar entries many times. It's also a graphic example of the influence of Hellenism. These ideas of levels of heaven that are ascended and descended come from Plato and Aristotle and continued to be debated and discussed into the time of the gospels. Philo of Alexandria was a Jewish Hellenistic philosopher who wrote of them for instance. He died in 50 AD. In this cosmology, the firmament, that's where we are, is corruptible. Above us are the 7 heavens that are changeless. Angels and demons descend to bring us messages because that is beneath the work of gods. Sermons speak of this descending all the time but never about where the ideas came from. It's just assumed they are how the universe works and the Bible is there to describe it to us.

John 6:24-35

If you have been following this sermon helper, you know I talk a lot about how these stories are just interpretations of earlier stories that eventually go back to stories we can no longer recover. If you don't accept my interpretation, maybe a Bishop of the church might convince you. In thesis number 5 here he says the references in this passages are "interpretive symbols", linking earlier stories to Jesus.