July 19

Psalm 15
"Lord, who may dwell in your sanctuary?"
This is a checklist psalm. And while we as Christians assign all this psalm to the person of Jesus, Jews do not. They use this as list of what THEY are supposed to do in order to follow God's commands. Of course, no one is perfect and so the list is unattainable but Jews are supposed to TRY.
I stood in a small group recently, listening to a heated debate about this very issue between one of my friends who is close to an Orthodox Jew and his friend who is a fundamentalist Christian. It made me really uncomfortable listening to each of them fuss at the other -- the Jew for following rules and regulations rigidly even when he knows 'some of them are foolish' and the Christian for 'not even trying to be do the right thing because Jesus would forgive'.
While neither of them referenced this psalm specifically, when I read it this afternoon, I realized that, for me at least, I need the rules and the regulations. I love having the list. Checklist queen, they call me at work. And it is very comforting to me.
So, how do you feel about this psalm? Does it make you uncomfortable to think that this is what you are being called to behave like? Or do you also think it is just a personification of Jesus and want to leave it at that?
And if you leave this psalm to Jesus, do you have another list or do you just simply fly by the seat of your pants with "What would Jesus do?" wristbands in action?

OT - 1st Chronicles 28:1-29:30
Yet another example of the weird layout of Chronicles because now we are back in the story of David handing over the kingdom to Solomon. It was a nice speech but this story bears almost no resemblance to Kings and forgive me for saying so but I doubt all his older brothers weren't grumpy that Father David gave young Solomon the keys to the kingdom over them. Especially since Father David left all his personal fortune to the church treasury. "What about me????" cries must have been heard big in the palace that day.
I looked up Gad the seer and we have no fragments of his records and no original texts of the works of Nathan or Samuel although 1st and 2nd Samuel and 1st and 2nd Kings appear to draw heavily on those works. Too bad. It would be interesting to read the story from THEIR perspective.