When I woke up this morning, I spent some time in devotion. Well, what I really did was talk to God without giving him the time and chance to talk back to me – I am repentant. Between that time and getting ready for work, I had a situation that spawned an unholy anger in me. Before long, I had gone lengths I didn’t want to first thing in the morning, especially after being with Jesus. Dashing off, I quickly broke bread, said a prayer, and headed out the door.
Being a sovereign and loving God, He took a moment to give me a word:
They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. John 8:6
The passage above shows that these folks had planned their actions to elicit a certain response from Jesus. Their ultimate goal was to test, try, tempt, and trap him in order to gain evidence for his sentencing. Now Jesus had had his moments ‘saying it as it was’ like John did calling the Pharisees ‘brood of vipers’ and some other things that cost him his head.
A few verses down, he would be calling the Jews liars – a softer tag than ‘hypocrites’ and ‘white washed tombs’. I am sure he wouldn’t have had any difficulty telling them how close they were to being disinherited despite being heirs according to the promise, I would have …. but he didn’t!
He probably considered the woman in front of him being accused of adultery but more so, the outcome of his actions, would it make things better or worse? Whatever he did, he’d be justified – he could get away with it; worst case, he’ll sort it out behind the scenes during a one on one with the Father but for the sake of this one woman and many onlookers, he took a different approach. In fact, he may have done himself a favour too because those people were so cruel they would not hesitate stoning him to death or pushing him down a cliff. In any case, it worked out together for good in the end.
Today, there is a huge market for the spoken word which is impacting the demand for paper copies. Audiobooks are growing and gradually taking over the print industry. Both styles of communication are effective depending on the time, place, event, and audience. There are times I shy away from making certain phone calls because I believe an email/letter would best convey my intentions, other times, I ring to avoid being misconstrued.
In the above scenario we see Jesus doing something similar – he was in no way short of words to say but he took time to reflect on a few points, construct his response, and delivery method. He probably ended up saying same thing but in a different way – aptly and calmly, but first he bent down as though he was writing while thinking silently.
My situation earlier in the day would have escalated to the point I made some calls and saying things I probably would be regretting about now, but thank God for the power of the word! I can testify that the test to provoke me to a disastrous act failed – the issue was resolved without my involvement, and hopefully this written piece would impact someone in better ways than my words could.