I have to make two more observations about Hebrews 2.1 – 4 that I quoted a couple of days ago. Here’s what it looks like in Olive Tree, the Bible app I use on my iPad:
What’s the significance of the green highlight, you ask? I have marked all verses I have memorized. I don’t remember when I memorized this or whether I chose it or it was suggested by a scripture memory plan of some sort. What’s interesting is that my memory plan did not include verse 4, separated by verse 3 by a comma!
In other words, I left out “signs and wonders and various miracles and by gifts of the Holy Spirit…” Why? Because such things are largely outside my experience and that of my tradition. It’s amazing how we reinforce our own perspectives while ignoring other parts of scripture. In an effort to remedy this omission, most of my blog posts in Acts focus on the POWER, which you know if you’ve been following along.
The other obvious observation, which I’ve alluded to before is:
…gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will
How clear can it be? There are a lot of gifts of the Spirit listed in the New Testament, and we don’t even know if these lists get them all.
- 7 in Romans 12.3 – 7
- 9 in 1 Corinthians 12.4 – 11
- 8 in 1 Corinthians 12.27 – 28
- 5 in Ephesians 4.7 – 11
(If you read all the texts, you know that there is some overlap among the listings.)
A key principle is diversity:
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? (1 Corinthians 12.12 – 19, ESV)
I love baseball, but among all the skills one needs to play the game well, all I could claim when I was younger was range: I could cover a lot of ground in the outfield. I couldn’t hit well, and I didn’t have a good arm. Once I was lamenting to a friend my inability to throw hard, and he said something like, “Bob, you can teach the Bible, you can play the piano, you can do math; you can’t do everything!” Sigh…
If I can’t do everything…in baseball or in the Kingdom, maybe I should surround myself with people who can do what I can’t. And that’s what we don’t do very well, do we? Each church seems to have people with a small subset of the gifts rather than a cross-section of them all. I don’t know how to fix that.
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. (1 Corinthians 12.4 – 7, ESV)