It’s never a bad time to be reading the Bible in a year. If you’re coming to this page after we’ve published each week’s notes and study guide, scrolling forever to get to the week you need might be a bit daunting. Fear not! You can use the links below to navigate to the post for each week.
December 22-26
[M] Job 28-30; Revelation 18
[T] Job 31-33; Psalm 102; Revelation 19
[W] Job 34-36; Revelation 20
[T] Job 37-39; Psalm 103; Revelation 21
[F] Job 40-42; Psalm 150; Revelation 22
Dwell Plan Day 256-260 | CSB | Digital PDF | Printable PDF
Notes from Jon & Chris
Monday
Job 28:23–28 | Job reminds us that true wisdom is not something we discover by effort or ingenuity, but something that belongs to God alone. While humanity can mine the depths of the earth and uncover hidden treasures, wisdom remains beyond our reach unless God reveals it. He alone sees the whole of creation, orders it with understanding, and defines what wisdom truly is. And what He gives us is strikingly simple: the fear of the Lord is wisdom, and turning away from evil is understanding. In other words, wisdom is not primarily about information, but about relationship and reverence. It begins not with mastering life, but with trusting the God who already knows its end from its beginning.
Revelation 18 | The fall of Babylon is one of the great narrative turning points of Scripture, a moment the Bible has been moving toward from the very beginning. Babylon is not just a city, but a symbol that stretches across redemptive history—human civilization organized in defiance of God, marked by pride, violence, exploitation, and idolatry. From the tower in Genesis, to the empire that exiled Israel, to the prophetic warnings of Isaiah and Jeremiah, Babylon represents the world’s attempt to secure life, glory, and security apart from the Lord. Revelation 18 shows that this story finally reaches its end. What looked powerful, permanent, and invincible collapses in a moment under the judgment of God.
This chapter reveals that history is not an endless cycle of rising and falling empires, but a directed story with a moral conclusion. Babylon’s fall is mourned by kings, merchants, and sailors—not because it was good, but because they benefited from the empire. Scripture exposes the cost of its success and the hollowness of its promises. In contrast to Babylon’s sudden ruin stands the coming city of God, marked not by exploitation but by righteousness and peace. Revelation 18 declares that God will not allow human rebellion to have the final word. The systems that oppose Him will fall, and all of Scripture’s longings—for justice, for renewal, for God’s reign to be unchallenged—converge here. Babylon falls so that God’s kingdom can be seen for what it truly is: the only lasting home for the world.
Tuesday
Job 32:6 | Elihu being young, and waiting to speak because of his youth, is a beautiful example of age appropriate respect. It’s a Godly cultural norm, and young folks should follow Elihu’s example. It’s meant to reveal the nature of Elihu’s real wisdom. But beyond the beauty of tongue control and respect for your elders, this is also a persistent theme in God’s kingdom. He uses young people. That doesn’t sound too amazing or earth shattering to us because we live in a culture that worships youth. The ancients didn’t do that. Young people were just speculation back in the days when life expectancy didn’t go much past 40. Lots of kids didn’t make it before vaccines and antibiotics. So youth was not valued. So much so that Jesus had to correct His own disciples not to dismiss children out of hand! Young people lack wisdom, experience, and hard won expertise. But, in God’s kingdom, He uses young people in amazing ways. Joshua is one of them, Timothy another. David’s heroism began when he was just a kid, and we see Jesus being amazing at only 13. All of those instances reveal how it’s got to be God’s power, not these young people. Don’t let folks look down on you because you’re young—God loves to use the things that others think are useless to build the kingdom where His Son gets all the glory. That’s an encouragement to all of us. Praise Him!
Job 32–37 | Elihu enters the story as a surprising and unsettling voice. Younger than the others, he has waited respectfully, but now he speaks with urgency and anger. He is frustrated with Job for justifying himself rather than God, and with the friends for condemning Job without answering him. From an evangelical perspective, Elihu is not simply another failed counselor. He rightly insists that God is just and that Job’s suffering cannot mean God has acted wrongly. He also rejects the friends’ shallow assumption that suffering must always be punishment for specific sin. Elihu is trying to clear space for a bigger view of God, one that refuses to put the Lord on trial and instead calls for humility before Him.
What Elihu contributes most clearly is a different way of thinking about suffering. He argues that God may use pain not to condemn, but to warn, correct, or rescue His people—to turn them from pride and keep them from destruction. This is an important step in the right direction and fits well with the broader wisdom of Scripture. Yet Elihu still goes too far. He assumes that suffering must always have a discernible purpose that can be explained if we think carefully enough. In that sense, Elihu improves on the friends’ theology but keeps the same impulse: to make suffering manageable through explanation rather than received through trust.
That tension is exactly why Elihu matters in the flow of the book. His speeches prepare us for what comes next, because God does not step in to affirm Elihu’s explanation. Instead, the Lord answers Job by revealing His greatness, wisdom, and freedom. Elihu moves the conversation away from blame and toward humility, but even he cannot deliver the final word. Job does not ultimately need a better theory of suffering; he needs to encounter God himself. Elihu points in the right direction, but the book of Job teaches us that hope is not found in understanding why we suffer, but in trusting the God who reigns even when explanations fall silent.
Revelation 19:1-8 |Take a step back when you’re reading here (and elsewhere) when the book suddenly, without any real warning, just begins to describe praise. It syncopates the book and the narrative visions. Praise in heaven is weaving in and out of the conflicts and judgments that are spilling out over the earth. Take a pause in these chapters and sing a song yourself. Stop and open your music app and listen to a whole worship song before you keep reading. The power of praise is transformative, but it’s also illuminating. Praise regularly opens up exegetical insight. The Bible is teaching us information, but it’s also showing us how to process this information in real time. You can’t do the work of interpretation without the work of praise, or it’s just an intellectual exercise at best. Knowing without praising just leads to conceit and pride. Let worship guide your exegesis as you read Revelation, so you can actually experience it like John did. You can see he got confused in this very chapter—that should be a good encouragement to you if you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed and unable to comprehend! So was John!
Revelation 19:6-10 | For people in the ancient world, a banquet was not ordinary—it was extraordinary. Daily life was repetitive and often marked by scarcity. Most people ate the same simple food, did the same work, and lived within tight limits day in and day out. A feast broke that rhythm. It was abundance instead of lack, joy instead of routine, celebration instead of survival. When Scripture describes the future of God’s people as the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, it is drawing on the most joyful image the ancient imagination could hold. God does not describe the end as an escape or an abstract spiritual state, but as a long-awaited celebration, the kind of day people marked on calendars and talked about for years.
That image tells us something essential about the heart of God and the shape of our hope. The culmination of history is not merely judgment, but joy; not merely victory, but communion. Christ does not simply defeat his enemies—He gathers His people to a table. The Marriage Supper is the public celebration of a relationship already secured by grace, where the bride finally shares uninterrupted joy with her bridegroom. Revelation invites us to imagine the best day we have ever known and then to realize that God promises something far greater. History is moving toward a feast, and the call of the gospel now is to live as people who already know an invitation has been issued.
Revelation 19:13 | The detail that the robe is already dipped in blood before the battle begins is intentional and theologically loaded. Jesus does not win by first shedding the blood of His enemies, but by having already shed His own. His victory flows out of His self-giving sacrifice, not brute force. The cross stands behind every scene of judgment and triumph in Revelation, reminding us that Christ’s authority to rule and judge comes from His obedience unto death. This is how Jesus conquers: by giving up His life, by bearing judgment Himself, and by overcoming evil through sacrificial love. Before the final victory is displayed publicly, it has already been secured privately at Calvary by the Word of God who was willing to bleed.
Wednesday
Revelation 20:1–6 | The Millennium | (This is a long one, sorry about that folks, hopefully it'll be helpful.)
This passage describes a vision in which Satan is bound for a thousand years, preventing him from deceiving the nations, while those who belong to Christ reign with Him. John speaks of a “first resurrection,” of martyrs coming to life, and of a reign that precedes a final judgment and the ultimate defeat of evil. The imagery is symbolic and tightly connected to what comes before and after this text in Revelation, raising the central interpretive question: is this thousand-year reign a future earthly kingdom, or a symbolic description of Christ’s present reign and the church’s vindication?
Christians have historically answered that question in four main ways. Dispensational premillennialism teaches that Christ will return before a literal thousand-year reign on earth, distinct from the church age and closely tied to ethnic Israel. Historic premillennialism also expects Christ to return before the millennium, but without the sharp Israel–church distinction and with more symbolic elements. Postmillennialism sees the millennium as a future golden age brought about through the spread of the gospel, after which Christ returns. Amillennialism understands the millennium symbolically as the present reign of Christ, begun at His resurrection, during which Satan is bound in a real but limited sense until the final return of Christ.
I (Jon) grew up in a dispensational church, where the millennium was always framed as a future timeline to decode. Later, I became persuaded by historic premillennialism, which felt more grounded in the broader storyline of Scripture. A few years ago, though, reading Sam Storms’ book Kingdom Come forced me to slow down and ask harder questions about how Revelation works as apocalyptic literature and how Revelation 20 fits within the whole Bible rather than standing alone as a roadmap of the future.
What ultimately persuaded me toward the amillennial position is how well it accounts for the New Testament’s repeated emphasis that Christ is reigning now and that the decisive victory over Satan has already begun through the cross and resurrection. The binding of Satan makes sense in light of the gospel going out to the nations, and the reign of the saints coheres with the consistent biblical theme that believers are already seated with Christ. More than that, amillennialism offers deep hope—not by promising a temporary golden age, but by anchoring our confidence in what Christ has already accomplished and in the certainty of His final return to make all things new.
At the same time, Revelation 20 reminds us how careful and gracious we must be with one another. Faithful, Bible-loving Christians have landed in different places on this passage for centuries. These are difficult texts, filled with symbolism, and humility is required. Our unity is not grounded in getting the millennium exactly right, but in the shared confession that Jesus reigns, evil will not win, and history is moving toward the day when Christ returns in glory.
All that to say, I think I'm pretty grounded in the amillennial position—but to my dispensational friends—I guess I'm also willing to change my mind mid-air.
Revelation 20:7–15 | This passage confronts us with the biblical reality of hell in a way that our culture consistently resists. There is a strong temptation today (even within the church) to soften, explain away, or quietly remove hell from the story of Scripture. Yet Revelation presents final judgment as real, personal, and unavoidable. As Tim Keller often argued, if you remove hell, you do not end up with a kinder Christianity; you end up with a smaller one. You diminish the seriousness of sin, the reality of justice, and ultimately the meaning of the cross itself. If there is no real judgment to be rescued from, then the love displayed at Calvary is reduced to sentiment rather than sacrifice. Rebecca McLaughlin, in her book Confronting Christianity, presses this same point: the biblical story insists that evil matters, victims matter, and God’s justice is not a myth. Hell is not an embarrassment in Scripture; it is part of the moral gravity that makes the gospel good news.
Revelation 20 also corrects many of the popular images of hell that shape our imaginations far more than the Bible does. Much of what people picture comes not from Scripture but from Dante’s Inferno or pop culture—the ideas of Satan ruling hell, demons gleefully torturing souls, and hell functioning as his evil kingdom. But this passage tells a very different story. Satan is not in charge; he is judged. Hell is not his domain; it is his doom. It was prepared for him and for all who joined his rebellion, not designed as a playground for evil. What we see here is not Satan pouring out wrath, but God doing so. Final judgment belongs to the Lord alone, underscoring that evil is not eternal or rivalrous—it is defeated and condemned.
Finally, the imagery itself matters. Revelation describes books, fire, a lake, and judgment scenes that are unmistakably apocalyptic. These images are likely symbolic, but that does not make them less real, only less literal. Apocalyptic imagery always points to realities greater than the picture itself. Fire and destruction are not meant to trivialize hell, but to communicate its seriousness and finality. Hell represents complete separation from the life, goodness, and presence of God.
Revelation 20 is not meant to satisfy our curiosity, but to sober our hearts. It reminds us that God’s justice is real, His victory is final, and the grace offered now in Christ is unimaginably precious precisely because judgment is not pretend.
Thursday
Job 38–41 | God’s response to Job does not begin with an explanation of suffering, but with a series of questions that reframe the entire conversation. Speaking from the whirlwind, the Lord draws Job’s attention to creation, the natural order, and the governance of the world—realities far beyond human control or comprehension. The questions are not meant to humiliate Job, but to expose the limits of his perspective. God shows that Job’s suffering cannot be understood in isolation from the vast, complex, and wisely ordered world God sustains. By highlighting Job’s inability to create, govern, or even fully understand the natural world, God reveals the flaw in Job’s demand for a moral accounting: Job lacks the vantage point necessary to judge God’s rule.
In the later chapters, God turns from the created order to the untamable forces within it, particularly the figures of Behemoth and Leviathan. These creatures represent powers that no human can master, yet they exist fully under God’s sovereignty. God’s point is not simply that He is stronger than humanity, but that He governs a world that includes danger, chaos, and forces beyond human control without losing authority or wisdom. Rather than explaining why Job suffered, God demonstrates that He is capable of ruling a world far more complex than Job imagines. The divine speeches do not resolve the problem of suffering through logic; they resolve it by reestablishing trust in the wisdom, freedom, and majesty of the Creator.
Psalm 103:6–14 | This psalm invites us to slow down and simply look at the heart of God. He is a God who works righteousness and justice, yet whose defining posture toward His people is mercy. He does not deal with us according to our sins or repay us according to our iniquities. Instead, He reveals Himself as compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The psalmist wants us to just sit right here with this idea; to let the weight of who God is press into our souls, not as an abstract doctrine, but as a lived reality.
That posture is especially striking when we remember who we are. God knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust. He is not surprised by our weakness or disappointed by our limitations. Like a father who shows compassion to his children, the Lord bends toward His people with tenderness. This is not a God who tolerates us at arm’s length, but one who draws near with understanding and care. The greatness of God is not diminished by this nearness; it is revealed through it.
As we wrap up our reading plan tomorrow, this psalm reminds us of why we’ve been reading in the first place. The hope is not that we would simply accumulate information in order to boost a sense of self-superiority, but that we would walk away more aware of how astonishing this God is. My hope for all of us is that this year has been marked by moments of awe—moments where the truth of who God is moved from our heads into our hearts. Scripture is meant to do more than inform us; it is meant to form us, shaping us into people who stand amazed at the mercy, patience, and love of the Lord we worship.
Friday
Job 40:3–5; 42:2–6 | When Job finally encounters the majesty of God, his questions fall silent and his posture is transformed. He does not receive an explanation for his suffering; he receives a revelation of who God is. Faced with the Lord’s greatness, Job moves from demanding answers to humble repentance, recognizing how small and limited his perspective has been. This posture is meant to be the posture of every believer. Unlike Job, we have more of the story. We know that we come to this holy God through Jesus Christ. At the cross, God’s majesty and mercy meet; His greatness is not diminished, but made accessible. Christ bears our pride, our accusations, and our need to be right, and brings us safely into the presence of the God before whom Job could only bow in silence. True faith is not found in our understanding and righteousness, but in trusting Him—and in Christ, we are invited to do so not as condemned sinners, but as forgiven children who can humble themselves without fear.
Job 41 | I (Jon) was going to write about Leviathan, but then I remembered Chris is going to end the year by preaching this passage on the 28th. So I deleted what I wrote so that you'll all have to come hear him explain it better than I could.
Revelation 22:1–5 | The closing vision of Scripture brings us back to where the story began—but transformed. The imagery is unmistakably Eden-like: a river of life, the tree of life, fruitful and healing, God dwelling with His people. Yet this is not a return to the garden so much as its fulfillment. In Eden, access to the tree of life was lost; here, it stands open and abundant. The curse that fractured the world in Genesis is explicitly named—and explicitly removed. What sin broke, God does not merely repair; He restores and completes.
At the center of this restored world is not humanity’s achievement but God’s presence. His servants see His face. His name is on their foreheads. Night is gone, not because creation has no rhythms, but because nothing remains that needs hiding or guarding against. The hope of Revelation 22 is not escape from the world, but the renewal of it under the direct, joyful reign of God. This is where history is headed: not toward loss, but toward life; not toward distance, but to communion; not toward survival, but to reigning with God forever. And knowing that end reshapes how we live now, as people already anchored in the future God has promised.
Revelation 22:18 | John is literally the last man standing. We know both from the Scripture and from outside our biblical witness, that John outlasted and outlived all of the other apostles. We don’t know the true outcome of what happened to all of them, but of those we do know, it was violent, and for the others we don’t know with certainty, every legend sends them to a martyr’s end. Jesus predicted as much for them. But not for John. John was probably the youngest of the bunch, but he certainly lived the longest. The report is that he died of old age.
But what is interesting is he is also the last writer of the New Testament. When you read this chapter, you get the sense that the author is aware that he’s writing the last book to be written. It feels like an ending to the whole Bible. It isn’t, but then it amazingly is. It certainly wasn’t written to be a sign-off of the Bible. That’s clear. It’s the ending of Revelation, and it’s consistent with how the book started, in its first paragraphs. But here’s another interesting note. Every copy of the New Testament we have, where there’s more than one book, they are always in the same order, with Revelation at the end. The order of the New Testament books is how we received it from the manuscript evidence. So that makes Revelation consistently the last book, and it’s odd that it ends with that sort of tone. Perhaps it was selected to be last for that reason. That’s what I (Chris) suspect. But I also suspect, based on John’s literary choice to “disappear” in his own gospel narrative, that John was the one who quietly collated and organized the books of the New Testament. I imagine he put his gospel and his letters last (except for Jude) as a part of that humble habit. This is merely speculation, and we can’t base any interpretation on such ramblings, but it’s the reflection not of an academic, but a pastor. And, thinking like a pastor, which is how I imagine John thought, I sense a pastoral heart organizing and arranging this material. And it works; it feels like the last chapter of the Bible. And it is—postured to show us how to wait now for Jesus. Praise Him!
December 15-19
[M] Job 12-14; Psalm 100; Revelation 13
[T] Job 15-17; Revelation 14
[W] Job 18-20; Psalm 141; Revelation 15
[T] Job 21-23; Psalm 101; Revelation 16
[F] Job 24-27; Revelation 17
Dwell Plan Day 251-255 | CSB | Digital PDF | Printable PDF
Notes from Jon & Chris
Monday
Job 12:3; 13:2 | “I am not inferior to you.” | You could translate this as “stop talking down to me!” This repeated comment gives you an insight into the tone and tension of this conversation. Job is written in an exalted poetic style, not in the way that folks just naturally talk, but it still has the attitudes and sentiments that are in ordinary conversations! “Stop talking to me like I’m an idiot” is something we’ve all felt, even if we haven’t said it out loud. But this points out a real pitfall in helping folks that are suffering: don’t teach them or talk down to them like they really need your advice. That attitude happens way too much when “nice people” are trying to help out. Beware of this in your own heart or practice. Folks who are suffering badly do not often need your advice or insight, and even if they do need it, they don’t want it in the middle of their affliction. Well meaning friends can be devastatingly unhelpful at times. To be humble before someone who is suffering is much harder to do, but is the only attitude and posture that can ever bring healing.
Job 13:15 | Job’s words capture the deep tension of real faith. He’s saying, “Even if God lets my life fall apart, I’m still holding on to Him. And I’m still bringing Him my questions.” This isn’t a quiet, polished confidence; it’s the gritty trust of someone who refuses to walk away even when he doesn’t understand what God is doing. Job hopes in God while also arguing his case before Him. It’s honest, raw, fully human faith—a faith that clings to God in the dark and trusts His character even when His ways feel hidden.
And this kind of faith finds its ultimate anchor in the death of Christ. At the cross, God Himself stepped into our suffering, taking on the worst evil and injustice the world could offer. Jesus was “slain,” yet in that very moment He secured our hope forever. The cross shows us that God doesn’t abandon His people in their pain; He enters it, bears it, and transforms it. So when we echo Job’s words, we’re not grasping for a distant God. We’re holding on to the One who suffered for us, loves us, and promises that even the darkest valleys cannot separate us from His mercy.
Job 14 | Job’s reflections on the brevity of life remind us that wise, gospel-shaped people think often and honestly about their own death. Jonathan Edwards even resolved to “think much on all occasions of my own dying,” not morbidly, but so he could live with clarity, humility, and hope. Christians aren’t meant to avoid the thought of their death; we’re meant to see it in light of Christ’s victory. That’s why we can hold both thoughts in a way that sounds so strange to the world: “I don’t want to die, but I can’t wait to be dead.” There’s something deeply Christian in that tension. We’re not eager for pain, but we are eager for the presence of Jesus. Thinking about death isn’t fear for the believer—it becomes fuel for living faithfully, gratefully, and eternally minded right now.
And this is exactly the kind of heartbeat Paul shows in Philippians when he says he longs “to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better,” yet remains gladly in the work God has given him. Christians live right in that space: fully present, fully engaged in this world, yet quietly longing for the day when all sorrow is healed and all joy is made whole. Job’s longing, Edwards’s resolution, Paul’s tension—they all point us to a life anchored in resurrection hope. We don’t rush death and we don’t fear it. We walk toward it one day at a time knowing that on the other side stands the One who defeated it. And that hope—steady, eternal, unshakeable—frees us to live today with courage, peace, and open hands.
Revelation 13:10; 14:12 | Both of these verses use the expression of a “call for endurance” to the saints. It’s the application note in the middle of the vision, giving us an immediate practical use for all of this imagery and prophesy: learn to wait and endure the crazy. And the crazy is being described in horrific and mysterious detail. But what’s the point of the specific numbers and durations and imaginative descriptions? Our God knows we have vivid imaginations, He made us that way. So why does God include this jumble of word pictures and numbers?
One thing to remember is something Christ taught us about how God reveals things: sometimes God obscures things intentionally. He has purposes in it, purposes to frustrate smart people who think they can figure everything out, purposes for His own glory, and purposes that will become clearer at the time of prophetic fulfillment.
But it’s the stated purpose that we have to be mindful of: So that you can endure. So that you make it through. So that after all the chips fall you’re still the one standing. And if you’re not standing, it’s not because you gave up, it’s because you’re with Him. The crazy is coming, that’s one thing we know for certain when we read these chapters. It’s coming, you can count on it. And what are all of these wild predictions and visualizations? Just what the text says they are: a call for the endurance of the saints.
Revelation 13:18 | For a long time, the number 666 has been turned into a kind of Christian jumpscare. People have pointed to presidents, popes, credit cards, microchips—almost anything—to try to prove the “end” was right around the corner. But this is exactly the kind of fear-based reading Revelation warns us against. John invites Christians to respond with wisdom, not panic. The number isn’t meant to terrify believers but to help them see what beastly, anti-God allegiance looks like in every age. When 666 is ripped out of its context and treated like a superstition, we lose sight of what Revelation was really given for: not to spook the church, but to steady it.
And when you look closely at John’s world, the most likely interpretation becomes clear. The number 666 functions as an anti-Shema—a twisted parody of Israel’s daily prayer that called God’s people to love the Lord with all their heart and bind His commands on their hands and foreheads. Instead of loyal love for God, the beast demands loyalty to its violent, self-exalting kingdom. And the number itself likely points to Nero Caesar, whose name in Hebrew letters adds up to 666. Nero embodied everything the beast represents—brutality, ego, and a counterfeit claim to divine authority.
The encouragement for us? Revelation isn’t warning you to fear a number. It’s reminding you that every empire built on pride and coercion eventually collapses. But those who follow the Lamb—those sealed with His name—belong to a kingdom that cannot be shaken. Stay close to Him. Let His mark—His mercy, His humility, His presence—shape your hands and your heart today.
Tuesday
Job 15–21 | This is the second cycle of speeches, where the conversation between Job and his three friends becomes sharper and more entrenched. This time, the friends repeat the same basic argument but with greater intensity: they insist that the world works on a simple principle (good things happen to the righteous and suffering happens to the wicked) so Job must be hiding some sin. Their tone grows more accusatory, even harsh. Job responds with equal honesty, pushing back harder and insisting that their neat moral formulas don’t match reality. He knows he has not committed the kind of evil they’re accusing him of, yet he can’t explain why God has allowed such devastation. As the cycle progresses, you can feel the breakdown in the dialogue: the friends stop listening, Job becomes more anguished, and the gap between them widens. Reading these chapters helps us see the limits of human wisdom—how easy it is to speak truth wrongly, to try to defend God with oversimplifications, and to wound people who are suffering.
Revelation 13:16-14:1 | The mark of the beast! Is it a QR code? Is it a tattoo? Is it a surgically implanted chip? This is such a well known biblical meme that it’s a modern cultural artifact. In the 1980’s there was a scare in the Christian world, a fear that gripped the church so much they came up with a name for it: the satanic panic. Pretty catchy. There were stories, which were later discovered to be made up, about covens sacrificing children all across America. Those sorts of things do happen, people are as wicked as the Scripture says they are and they aren’t showing any signs of stopping. But there really wasn’t any widespread ritualistic satanism in every suburban neighborhood. It was fearmongering for money. It sold books and speaking junkets for years. But here’s the problem with many interpretations of Revelation, and many other texts as well, they don’t read context. They don’t read one sentence into the next chapter. The saved people get QR codes/tattoos/implanted chips too, except theirs are the name of the Lamb and His Father. Everyone gets marked. Everyone—it’s just a question of which mark you get. So this “mark of the beast” meme is all wrong. It isn’t about figuring out the special “brand” or logo or number that the beast is going to use, it’s about whether you have God’s mark or evil’s mark all over your life. It’s about the binary choice of eternity, and how that choice becomes visibly distinguishable as history unfolds and your life is lived. As we were told by Jesus: by their fruit you will know who they are.
Revelation 14:1–5 | In this scene, the 144,000 aren’t a literal headcount of elite believers or a spiritual “cutoff number” for heaven the way some groups teach. Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, claim this refers to a fixed group of 144,000 who alone will be with God in heaven—an idea the passage itself doesn’t support. Others teach that this number represents a future group of ethnically Jewish believers sealed during a specific period of history. But Revelation is saturated with symbolic numbers pulled from the Old Testament, and in that world 12×12×1000 is a picture of completeness—the full people of God, the redeemed family of the Lamb. As the Bible Project video explains, John hears the number (144,000) but then sees the multitude standing with the Lamb later, showing that the number is symbolic of all who belong to Jesus, marked by His name and shaped by His faithfulness. The picture isn’t about exclusivity or scarcity—it’s about the security, purity, and joy of God’s whole rescued people, standing with Christ as the new creation dawns.
Wednesday
Job 19:25–26 | Some scholars argue that the Hebrew Scriptures have little or nothing to say about life after death, as if Israel’s hope were limited to this world alone. But Job is widely considered the oldest book in the Hebrew Bible, and here—right in the middle of Job’s deep suffering—we find one of the clearest, boldest statements of resurrection hope anywhere in scripture. Job expects to see God “in my flesh,” even after his skin has been destroyed. His confidence reaches beyond the grave, beyond decay, beyond everything that has been taken from him. Whatever uncertainties Job wrestles with, his deepest confession is that his Redeemer is alive, and that death itself will not keep him from standing before God. This alone is enough to overturn the claim that early Israelite faith had no category for real life beyond death, because right here, at the very beginning of the biblical story, Job is clinging to it.
And for us, these words open straight into the heart of the gospel. The Redeemer Job longed for is the Redeemer who came, who stood upon the earth, entered our suffering, and then rose bodily from the grave. Because Jesus lives, Job’s hope becomes our hope: a real physical resurrection, a restored body, and the joy of seeing Christ face-to-face. That’s why Christians can stare down the hardest parts of life without collapsing. Our Redeemer lives. He will stand again upon the earth. And in our own resurrected flesh—renewed, healed, whole—we will see Him with our own eyes. This is not wishful thinking. It is the beating heart of Christian hope.
Job 20 | Zophar’s speech shows a worldview that looks a lot like karma: you get what you deserve, good or bad, and life always pays people back in neat predictable ways. But that kind of universe is ultimately hopeless—because who among us could ever bear the weight of getting exactly what we deserve? Grace has no place in a world like Zophar’s. But the gospel tells a completely different story. Instead of karma, we live under the mercy of a God who doesn’t treat us as our sins deserve and who stepped into our brokenness to bear the judgment we could never carry. When the world feels unfair, or when suffering doesn’t make sense, the answer isn’t to tighten our grip on formulas that promise control. It’s to rest in the God who loves sinners, carries sufferers, and rewrites our story with unearned kindness. In Christ, we don’t get what we deserve—we get what He deserves.
Thursday
Job 21:22 | Job’s question exposes a sin that is everywhere in our modern world: the assumption that we stand above God, that our instincts, desires, and judgments are more trustworthy than His. We elevate the individual so highly that we start to believe we can correct God, revise Him, or sit in judgment over His ways. But Job reminds us how absurd that is: the God who judges the highest beings doesn’t need our instruction. And here’s the grace-filled twist: God’s ways are infinitely better than ours. If we were in charge, salvation would be something we earn, achieve, or prove. But God, in Christ, gives it freely to sinners who could never earn it. Instead of resenting God’s authority, we should rejoice in it. His ways are not just higher—they are kinder, wiser, and filled with mercy we would never have written into our own story.
Job 23:13–17 | In his suffering, Job begins to feel the sheer weight of God’s greatness, not in an abstract theological way, but in the raw, trembling nearness of a God who cannot be controlled or cornered. Job realizes that God’s purposes stand, that nothing can ultimately turn His hand, and the thought overwhelms him. Yet this fear is not the fear of running from God; it’s the fear of someone who is beginning to grasp just how vast, sovereign, and holy God truly is. Suffering has stripped away Job’s illusions of control, leaving him face-to-face with the God whose plans reach far beyond his understanding. And strangely, this is grace. Because the more we sense God’s awesomeness, the more we’re freed from the crushing burden of trying to run our own universe. The God who feels overwhelming is also the God who holds us, sees us, and bends all His sovereign purposes toward our good.
Revelation 16:7 | Here we are given a glimpse into something our modern world rarely reflects on: the righteous judgments of God. When the heavenly altar proclaims that God’s judgments are true and just, it’s not celebrating cruelty—it’s celebrating goodness. Scripture shows that the wrath of God is not an outburst or divine irritation. It is His steady holy opposition to all that corrupts, destroys, and dehumanizes His creation. If God truly loves what is good, He must stand against what is evil. A God who shrugs at injustice or brushes aside wickedness would not be loving; He would be indifferent. Revelation reminds us that God is anything but indifferent.
And while the idea of God’s wrath can feel unsettling, it is actually a profound source of hope for believers. In a world where abuse, violence, oppression, and cruelty often go unanswered, the wrath of God means that evil will not have the last word. God takes seriously what we would prefer to ignore. His justice is not cold or mechanical; it is moral, holy, and rooted in His character. The worship of heaven affirms God’s judgments because He is finally putting the world right. Without divine wrath, darkness would win. With it, goodness prevails.
But the gospel reveals something even deeper: the God whose judgments are true and just is the same God who stepped into history to bear His own judgment on our behalf. On the cross, Jesus absorbed the wrath our sin deserved, standing in our place so that we could stand before God forgiven and free. This is where justice and mercy meet—God satisfies righteousness while pouring out undeserved grace on sinners. Jesus received what we deserved so that we might receive what He deserved. This is the heart of redemption.
And this is why removing the wrath of God in an attempt to make Him “more loving” actually erases the most loving act that has ever occurred: the cross. If there is no wrath, then Jesus bore nothing for us. There is no substitute, no atonement, no rescue. The cross becomes inspiration rather than salvation. But when we hold Revelation 16:7 alongside the cross, we see the full beauty of the gospel: the God whose judgments are perfectly just is the same God who justifies the ungodly through the self-giving sacrifice of His Son. The wrath of God is not the part of Christianity we hide—it is the backdrop that makes the mercy of Christ shine all the brighter.
Friday
Job 25 | Bildad’s final speech is strikingly brief, almost as if he has run out of arguments. His whole point boils down to this: in comparison to God’s majesty and purity, humans are insignificant and morally polluted, like maggots or worms. And while there’s a grain of truth in what he says, it’s twisted by the same mistake the friends have made throughout the book. Bildad uses God’s greatness not to comfort Job but to condemn him, leaving no room for compassion, relationship, or grace. He reduces humanity to nothing and leaves Job without hope. What he misses (and what the rest of Scripture makes clear) is that God’s greatness doesn’t erase His love; it magnifies it. The God whose holiness dwarfs all creation is the same God who draws near to the brokenhearted, restores the suffering, and lifts the dust-bound sinner into dignity, forgiveness, and eternal life.
Job 26–31 | These chapters form Job’s final extended speech before Elihu enters in chapter 32. Here Job responds to his friends one last time, rejecting their rigid belief that suffering must always be the direct result of personal sin. He reflects on God’s majesty, laments the injustice he sees in the world, remembers the goodness he once knew, and ultimately declares his integrity before God. Job is not claiming perfection; he is insisting that the friends’ simplistic formula cannot explain the depth of his suffering. This literary unit shows Job at his most honest, humbled, frustrated, reverent, and hopeful, opening his heart before God and preparing the reader for God’s answer.
Job’s speech contains several movements: in chapter 26, Job rebukes his friends’ empty counsel and celebrates God’s greatness and the mysteries of creation. In chapter 27, he holds firmly to his integrity while acknowledging the ultimate judgment of the wicked. Chapter 28 breaks into a poetic hymn on the nature of true wisdom—wisdom hidden from human effort but known to God alone. In chapters 29 and 30, Job contrasts the honor and blessing he once experienced with the humiliation and suffering he now endures. He closes in chapter 31 with a series of solemn oaths, calling down curses on himself if he has committed various sins, and boldly asks for a hearing before God. This structure prepares the reader for the dramatic moment when God finally speaks.
Revelation 17:6, 14 | This text shows the terrifying power of evil in the world; evil that is not just abstract but actively hostile to God’s people. The woman drunk with the blood of the saints is a picture of systems, cultures, and powers that have always opposed God’s kingdom and harmed His people. But the hope of the chapter comes in verse 14: these powers can make war on the Lamb, but they cannot defeat Him. The Lamb conquers—not by coercion or brutality, but by His sacrificial love and sovereign authority. And those who belong to Him are described as “called, chosen, and faithful,” not because they are strong enough to stand against the world’s darkness on their own, but because they are held by the One who already won. Revelation reminds us that even when evil looks overwhelming, the Lamb reigns, and all who stand with Him will share in His victory.
Revelation 17:8 | Every week we (Cross & Crown) begin worship with a song called the Gloria Patri, which means to the glory of the Father. In this ancient and short song we repeat one of the Bible’s beautiful descriptions of God’s eternal nature. We declare that as it was in the beginning, it is also now, and also ever will be. We adore our God’s nature and His immutability—He is beyond all change. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. We cling to this, because what is true about our God is also true about His words and His choices.
This beautiful expression of praise becomes a horror when it describes the beast in Revelation. The whole expression is turned upside down. This is the anti-Christ spelled out for us. “The beast who was, is not, is to come.” The intrinsic nature of evil is how it empties meaning, how it is anti God. It is defined this way: it has no real definition in itself, because it cannot even make itself or sustain itself. It’s inconstant. It was something at one point. Then it was zero, just nothing at all. Then it was something that comes along. It is nothing like God.
The contrast is striking. We are the folks written in the Lamb’s book before the foundations of the world—like before the earth and the sun and the moon were even things. That’s how we’re defined, and it's a definition that rests and relies on God being who He is: unchanging and eternal.
Revelation 17:14 | A lamb wins. A lamb. It makes the beast and the whore of Babylon and the dragon all seem pretty weak and stupid. After all, they were beaten by a little lamb. Who wins wars with lambs? But that’s the wonderful comedy that sits in the text so plainly. We’ve read it enough not to chuckle at how absurd that line really is: the Lamb will win. Are you kidding me? Lambs are for butchering.
But that’s the gospel from the first words of Jesus in the New Testament: blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Christ wins when He dies, executed on a trash dump in a backwater city of an ancient empire. Folks executed on a Friday don’t have any victory to offer on a Sunday or Monday morning or another day for the rest of time. Except for the Lamb. Kings and kingdoms will wage wars and billionaires will plot takeovers. But they can’t compete with the Lamb. And we don’t have the power to stand against them or to protect ourselves from being used and victimized. Apart from the Lamb. Praise Him! For this reason we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered, and we win.
December 8-12
[M] Neh 10-13; Revelation 8
[T] Malachi 1; Psalm 2; Revelation 9
[W] Job 1-3; Psalm 29; Revelation 10
[T] Job 4-7; Psalm 99; Revelation 11
[F] Job 8-11; Revelation 12
Dwell Plan Day 246-250 | CSB | Digital PDF | Printable PDF
Notes from Jon & Chris
Monday
Nehemiah 13:1–3 | When we read a passage like this, it can sound harsh to modern ears, as if God were banning people because of their ethnicity. But that’s not what’s happening. In the ancient world, religion, nation, and identity were tightly interwoven. To be an “Ammonite” or “Moabite” didn’t simply mean you were from a different ethnicity; it meant you belonged to a people whose worship revolved around gods that opposed Yahweh and whose values actively pulled Israel away from the covenant. This text is about faith and allegiance, not skin tone or ancestry. The Old Testament is full of beautiful counterexamples that make this clear—Ruth the Moabite becomes part of God’s people and even part of the line of Christ because she turned to the Lord. Rahab the Canaanite does the same. Foreigners who embraced Israel’s God were always welcomed.
A modern parallel would be something like church membership today. Churches aren’t making ethnic distinctions when they say, “You need to profess faith in Christ to be a member here.” They’re recognizing that the spiritual life of a community depends on shared belief and shared worship. Nehemiah 13 is doing something similar. Israel was called to be a people centered on God’s covenant. The concern here isn’t nationality but faithfulness—protecting the community’s spiritual integrity so that they could continue to be a light to the nations, welcoming anyone who truly wanted to follow the Lord.
Revelation 8:1 | An interpreter of this chapter noted this: if more folks stopped right here for thirty minutes while reading, meditating silently for a half hour, like they did right here smack dab in the middle of John’s vision, then maybe a lot less weird interpretive nonsense would happen over the next few chapters. That’s meant to be a bit tongue and cheek, but it’s still quite startling that there’s silence in heaven. And this isn’t like one of our modern “moments of silence” we can barely keep past a count of ten. This is long enough to make you think and reflect. This is enough time for the shock and awe of all of the heavenly worship to set in. This is enough of a stretch to start unpacking the drama of finding someone worthy to open the scroll. After all of this singing and thundering it seems right there should be an intermission. But somehow that doesn’t quite explain it either. This isn’t entertainment and the Bible doesn’t describe a bunch of folks loitering around. This isn’t a break. This is intentional reverent silence.
We aren’t told what it means. Perhaps it’s simply applying something repeated in the poems of God: be silent and know that I am God. That would make some sense. God commands silence as a kind of worship in His Presence. Perhaps it’s simply the silence of awestruck wonder. Flashing “BE QUIET” signs or a general announcement aren’t mentioned. The immediate setup is the Lamb opening the seventh seal. That’s a bit heavy, and perhaps the silence itself is a universal acknowledgement of that in the moment. Perhaps it’s like Job’s silence, the “Wow, God is so awesome, and I really have nothing to say about anything I thought I would” kind of silence?
Perhaps it’s even more. Perhaps it’s ultimately a statement of how we get to the end of all language, that describing our God and praising our God are all inadequate. He’s so much greater than language can convey. And how can the finite have any real perspective on the infinite? And the silence of heaven says all of that, emphasizing our contemplation of Jesus. Praise Him!
Revelation 8–9 | The trumpet judgments aren’t random catastrophes. They’re a symbolic retelling of the Exodus plagues, showing how God repeatedly confronts the powers of Babylon in every age. Just as the plagues exposed the emptiness of Egypt’s gods and revealed God as the true King, the trumpets reveal the same pattern throughout history: whenever empires build themselves on violence, idolatry, and self-exaltation, God allows their false foundations to crack. These aren’t literal predictions of specific future disasters but visionary portraits of what happens when human kingdoms reject God’s rule. The trumpets pull back the curtain and show that the clash between Babylon and the Kingdom of Christ isn’t novel; it’s the same story told again and again until Jesus finally makes all things new.
Revelation 8-12 | Angelology (it’s a real thing these days) is the study of angels. These folks love to speculate about the functions and hierarchies and lives of angels, usually alongside a similar description of demons. It’s speculative religious fan fiction, and it’s been around since biblical times. Some folks get distracted and fascinated by it. To our modern scientific minds, any discussion of angels sounds quite fanciful, which only proves how blind and wrong our modern mindset can be. The biblical mindset isn’t superstitious, but it is supernatural. One of the Bible’s core claims, which we only rarely see, is how God administers His works in the world through the agency of angels. As you read through these chapters and the whole book, note how many things angels do and are involved in. The heavenly spiritual pattern is that God operates through secondary agents to perform His wonders, deliver His messages, and execute His judgments. These angels are involved everywhere, from causing the prayers of the saints to blaze and crash into the earth, to landing meteors on the ocean. What does this glimpse into the heavenly pattern mean for us? What’s true of God’s work through them is also true for His work through us—God operates heaven, the universe, and His kingdom through secondary causes and choices. Our status is greater (we’re called sons and daughters!) and our power is God’s direct work in and through us; we’re His agents with the same sort of vital importance.
Tuesday
Malachi 4 | Malachi closes the Old Testament by pointing Israel toward the coming Messiah and urging them to prepare their hearts for Him. After centuries of prophets, promises, and failures, God ends the storyline with both warning and hope: judgment will expose everything that is false, but for those who fear the Lord, a new dawn is coming—the “sun of righteousness” rising with healing in its wings. The people are called to remember God’s Word through Moses and to expect a final prophetic voice like Elijah who will ready them for the Lord’s arrival. It’s a cliffhanger ending meant to cultivate longing. The Old Testament shuts its door with anticipation, preparing God’s people for the moment when Jesus steps onto the stage as the fulfillment of every promise and the beginning of God’s new creation work.
Psalm 2 | This poem is another one of those who-the-heck-is-this-talking-about sort of poems. There’s a bunch of these mysterious psalms that delighted Jesus, like the whole “order of Melchizedek” thing. Under the direct power of the Holy Spirit, these poems take on a mystical life of their own. Trying to interpret them in their own context is especially hard, because context is rarely given. We don’t even know the name of the author of this one. What is described are the purposes and plans of the nations, and in response there is the LORD, but there’s also His anointed One, and His Son. In many ancient cultures it was not uncommon for the king to claim to have “divine” blood and to be directly descended from a god. It was a great way to claim lots of power. But that’s what makes this so remarkable of a text; that kind of idea or language is totally absent in all of the Old Testament. It’s nowhere. No divinely descended kingship is ever claimed in Israel or Judah. So what is this? This is figurative language that the ancient poet was using, as it described what he was experiencing, it also predicted and described who Jesus actually was—not just what He would experience. Jesus didn’t experience being the anointed son of God, that’s what He actually was. This ancient king (who may have been David) experienced a great intimacy with God that the Holy Spirit used to describe the mysteries of who Jesus is. The poet’s metaphor for intimacy and love ultimately became reality in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Wednesday
Job 3 | This chapter opens the poetic core of the book, and it’s crucial to understand that the speeches we’re reading are poetic retellings of real conversations. The Bible isn’t giving us a courtroom transcript or a word-for-word recording; it’s giving us Spirit-inspired poetry that captures the emotional and theological weight of what was said. In the ancient world, poetry was the natural way to express the deepest human experiences—grief, confusion, worship, lament. So Job’s curses, questions, and cries aren’t less true because they’re poetic. They’re actually more honest, because poetry lets us hear the heart behind the words.
The structure of Job reinforces this. After the prose prologue, the book shifts into a long dialogue cycle: Job speaks, then his friends respond (Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar) and this pattern repeats three times, though the final cycle breaks down as the friends run out of answers. Each friend represents a different flavor of the same theology: that suffering must be punishment and good people shouldn’t hurt this badly. Their speeches get harder, sharper, and more rigid as Job refuses to accept their formulas. The poetic form allows us to feel the emotional intensity and spiritual tension rising with each exchange, showing how inadequate their explanations really are.
Later, a new voice appears (Elihu) who claims to offer wisdom but still can’t grasp the mystery of what God is doing. And finally, God Himself speaks from the whirlwind, reframing the entire conversation with overwhelming majesty and surprising tenderness. All of this happens in Hebrew poetry, not because the events are fictional, but because poetry is the best medium for truth this deep. Job invites us into the real wrestling that happens when suffering meets faith, and it does so in language strong enough and beautiful enough to carry the weight of that struggle.
Psalm 29:3–4 | In the ancient world, the sea wasn’t a peaceful image; it was the great symbol of chaos, danger, and forces far beyond human control. Water represented everything unpredictable and overwhelming. So when David says that the Lord’s voice thunders over the waters, he’s making a claim of absolute supremacy: God rules the very thing people feared most. The sea may roar, but it is not sovereign. Chaos does not have the final word, God does. His voice carries more power than the wildest storm and more weight than the deepest waters. The psalm gives us a picture of a God whose authority extends over every threat we face—external or internal, physical or spiritual.
This is why the story of Jesus calming the Sea of Galilee is so stunning. It’s not just a miracle; it’s a direct echo of Psalm 29. When Jesus stands up in the boat, speaks a word, and the storm drops to silence, the disciples aren’t just shocked by the weather—they’re realizing who is in the boat with them. The God whose voice thundered over the chaotic waters in Psalm 29 is now speaking with human breath.
Revelation 10 | It’s right at this chapter that the visions get harder to interpret, not that they haven’t been weird and wooly already. But that’s a feature of the prophetic witness, it’s intentionally obscure. This is not saying that the prophet is trying to be difficult, but it’s also not denying that God Himself may be being intentionally difficult. Jesus gave us a heads up about this when He told His disciples about His teaching methods using parables. He’s blunt about it: I’m intentionally being unclear. Why would Jesus do that? He tells us, to show us how His truth can only be spiritually understood. It’s a lesson we must learn, and Jesus is sharply intentional about it. So that means these chapters can only be spiritually discerned and understood. That is not saying there is a secret code in them. It’s teaching us the Spirit and the word can guide us into interpretively unlocking much of what is in Revelation—but did you notice the “thunders” that John heard in verse 4? Those don’t get written down. So there’s stuff that he heard that we haven’t heard. And we intentionally don’t know about it. Which means that that’s the point: God’s telling us we’re dealing with “known unknowns” in the future. That’s what they are to us, but not to Him. These chapters are a tour of “known unknowns” to read through. The images and storyline are extraordinary and allegorical at times, wild and fantastical at others. Many interpretive theories are out there. Don’t waste time on them. For a first time reader, just read it all imaginatively and creatively. Understanding it isn’t the goal, just follow the thread of God’s glory and triumph. That’s what it’s all about. For the more seasoned reader, learn to read like a novice.
Thursday
Job 6–7 | In Job’s response, we hear a man crushed by suffering yet still refusing to turn away from God, and his honesty points us forward to a deeper hope. Job cries out for someone who could plead for him, someone who could bridge the gap between human anguish and God’s holiness. He longs for a mediator who understands his pain and can speak for him before God. That longing is fulfilled in Jesus. Christ enters our suffering, bears our weakness, and stands before the Father on our behalf with compassion that Job could only imagine. Where Job felt abandoned, Jesus has promised never to leave us. Where Job searched for someone who could understand, Jesus took on flesh and walked through sorrow Himself. Job’s honest cries prepare our hearts to see the Savior who meets us in our darkest moments—not with condemnation, but with intercession, mercy, and a love that refuses to let go.
Revelation 11 | The two witnesses are not meant to be read as two individual end-times prophets, but as a symbolic picture of the faithful church in the world—God’s people bearing witness to Christ in word, life, and endurance. The imagery draws from Moses and Elijah because the church carries forward their mission: speaking God’s truth, calling the world to repentance, and confronting the idols of every age. Their fire, plagues, and prophetic authority are apocalyptic symbols of the power of the gospel—powerful enough to expose false kingdoms, challenge corruption, and shine light into darkness. The beast’s attack and their temporary defeat reflect what Jesus promised: that the church’s witness will be costly, resisted, and will sometimes appear crushed. Yet the breath of God raising them to life is a picture of the church’s ultimate vindication—nothing can silence the testimony of God’s people. The pattern is: suffering, witness, apparent defeat, and then resurrection power.
This vision is meant to steady the church. We are living in a world where the dragon rages and Babylon flexes its strength, but Revelation reminds us that our calling is not to retreat, it is to bear faithful witness. We fight not with violence or fear but with perseverance, holiness, love, and the courageous proclamation of Jesus. The world may mock, oppose, or even wound the church, but it cannot stop the mission. The two witnesses show us who we are: a Spirit-empowered people whose testimony cannot be extinguished, whose hope cannot be stolen, and whose victory is guaranteed by the risen Christ. So stand firm. Speak boldly. Live faithfully. The dragon may roar, but the Lamb reigns.
Revelation 11:14 | This is the central verse in the Hallelujah Chorus in Handel's Messiah. Have fun.
Friday
Job 8:1–7 | Bildad is absolutely convinced he understands how the world works. In his mind, the universe runs on a simple formula: good things happen to good people, and suffering means you must have done something wrong. So he insists that Job’s pain must be his own fault, because that’s the only category his theology has room for. But his confidence is tragically misplaced. Bildad’s worldview is tidy, predictable, and utterly incapable of accounting for innocent suffering or the mystery of God’s purposes. His certainty leads him to wound his friend and misrepresent God, because he assumes that his limited understanding equals divine wisdom.
This sets the stage for the deepest truth of all: the cross exposes how wrong Bildad really was. Jesus suffered—not for His own sins, but for ours. The only truly innocent person endured the greatest suffering in history. The cross shatters the idea that pain always equals punishment. It shows that God’s ways are far bigger and more merciful than the simplistic formulas we try to impose on Him. Where Bildad assumes a moral math equation, the gospel reveals sacrificial love. And when we face our own pain, we cling not to Bildad’s certainty but to the Savior who entered suffering to redeem it.
Job 9:32–35 | This is one of the clearest passages in the entire Old Testament that shows our need for Christ—and it comes from the oldest book in the Bible. Job looks at God’s greatness and his own helplessness and realizes there’s no way he can stand before God on his own. He says, in effect, “God isn’t like me. I can’t argue with Him. I can’t reach Him. I need someone who can stand in the middle—someone who can put a hand on God and a hand on me.” It’s such an honest, human moment. Job isn’t being dramatic; he’s naming the problem every one of us has felt at some point. If God is holy and we’re not, who in the world is going to bring us together?
And that’s exactly where Jesus steps in. He is the Mediator Job was longing for—fully God, fully man, able to bridge the distance no one else could. Jesus doesn’t just understand our weakness; He lived it. And He doesn’t just speak on our behalf; He took our place at the cross so we could be welcomed without fear. The thing Job could only dream of—standing before God with peace and confidence—is now our everyday reality because Jesus stands between us and the Father with nail-scarred hands. Job’s ancient cry finds its answer in Christ, and it’s an answer that brings us home.
Revelation 12:11 | This chapter gives us the big-picture story behind all of history. The woman represents God’s people and the dragon is the Satanic power that has opposed God’s purposes from the beginning. The child she gives birth to is Christ Himself, and His ascension is portrayed as His rescue and enthronement. The whole scene is a symbolic retelling of the gospel story from heaven’s perspective: the dragon tried to stop the Messiah, failed, and now wages war on those who belong to Him. This isn’t a future crisis, it’s the spiritual conflict the church has always lived in.
But verse 11 shows us something surprising: God’s people don’t fight the dragon the way the world fights. There’s no brute force, political takeover, or coercive power on display. The victory comes through the blood of the Lamb—through Jesus’ sacrificial death that disarmed the powers of darkness. When the church clings to Christ’s finished work, they are already standing on conquered ground. The dragon’s accusations fall flat because the blood speaks louder. The Lamb’s victory becomes theirs.
And because of that, the church bears witness with courage. Their testimony isn’t backed by swords or influence but by faithfulness—holding fast to Jesus even when it costs them. “They loved not their lives even unto death” doesn’t mean they sought suffering; it means they believed Jesus was worth more than safety, comfort, or approval. This is how the church wages war: by trusting the Lamb’s victory, speaking His truth with love, and refusing to bow to the powers of Babylon—in suffering and sacrifice. In a world obsessed with force, Revelation calls us to conquer through the way of the cross.
December 1-5
[M] Esther 7-10; Revelation 3
[T] Ezra 7-10; Psalm 97; Revelation 4
[W] Nehemiah 1-3; Revelation 5
[T] Neh 4-6; Psalm 98; Revelation 6
[F] Neh 7-9; Psalm 140; Revelation 7
Dwell Plan Day 241-245 | CSB | Digital PDF | Printable PDF
Notes from Jon & Chris
Monday
Esther 8–9 | God was working through all the twists and turns of this story—through decrees, reversals, danger, and deliverance—to make sure His people were still there when the fullness of time came. If Israel had been wiped out in Esther’s day, there’s no Mary, no Joseph, no Bethlehem, no cross, no empty tomb. So even when it looks chaotic, God is quietly holding the line, keeping His promises alive, making sure the family line of the Messiah is protected. The whole rescue in Esther isn’t just about that generation, it goes further. It was about God guarding the story that would one day bring Jesus into the world for all of us.
Revelation 3 | These seven letters have this ideal quality to them—not that these churches are ideal in any sense—they aren’t. What is “ideal” is the sort of example these seven churches are of all churches and all believers in all ages; that’s the point of the seven imagery. But what really hits hard are the anchors in each letter, the parts that are the same every time. Every time, Jesus says these three things, as if God is saying, this is the universal core message to all My people:
1. I know you. He says it every time, as if the reminder was essential itself! I know your circumstances. Your suffering, obedience, and disobedience are all personally known to Me. I’m paying attention and I care what you do, how you live, and how you worship. Wow. This is and always has been a personal God.
2. “To the one who conquers” is the next phrase repeated each time. To the folks that last until the end, who have the victory of perseverance, repentance, and faithfulness, all the winners in Him will have a series of rewards. All sorts of rewards, some mysterious like hidden manna, and some more clear like clean clothes. There’s so much at stake for us and so much promised to incentivize and encourage us. This is our victory in His great triumph over sin, death, and judgment.
3. The action commanded in every instance, repeated as a kind of mantra, so pithy and short you’ll always remember it: “he who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” What’s the baseline command? Listen up, listen carefully, listen fully. Pay attention! Because in reading and knowing and practicing His words is victory and life and hope. His words will never be empty of power. Praise Him!
Revelation 3:15 | In our culture, we hear “hot or cold” and think in terms of good or bad because of that kids’ game where you get someone to guess by saying, “you’re getting warmer… colder…” But in the first century, Jesus is talking about something very different. Laodicea had terrible water. Nearby Hierapolis had hot, healing mineral water. Colossae had cold, refreshing mountain water. Both hot and cold were useful. But Laodicea piped in lukewarm, mineral-filled water through long aqueducts, and it often made people sick. So when Jesus says he wishes they were hot or cold, he’s not telling them to be “on fire” or “totally far from him.” He’s saying, “Be spiritually useful. Be life-giving. Don’t be a church that leaves people worse off.”
And that’s a word for churches in San Francisco. With so much need, pressure, confusion, loneliness, and spiritual hunger around us, Jesus wants his people to offer something real—something that heals, refreshes, strengthens. Something that actually helps. He’s warning us not to drift into a comfortable, lukewarm middle where our faith is polite but powerless, present but not impactful. He wants our communities to bring the kind of warmth that comforts the hurting and the kind of cold refreshment that wakes up the weary. In a city like ours, that kind of church is a gift. A lukewarm church just blends in. A hot-or-cold church points people to Jesus.
Tuesday
Psalm 97 | These praise poems that describe God in His majesty and glory all find their purpose and visualization in the images of Jesus in the book of Revelation. The pictures of the poet are all of fire and the earth melting like wax before a holy God. Who could this be describing? Who had ever seen the things that John saw in his vision? But here they are, vivid and electric with light, sound, and drama. Michael Bay is a hack at creating visual wonder next to our God. This consistency of visual drama about God does several things: The Jewish readers, who knew their scriptures, would have tracked the grand imagery of Revelation right away. This is the transcendent and holy God, the very same one from poems like this, imagined and prophesied with supernatural clarity centuries before John saw his revelation. They would have caught on to the parallels and similarities quickly and all that they reveal. This reveals the character of God, the great unchanging Lord who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. This reveals the plan of God, a plan to judge and reveal His glory to all humanity. This reveals the splendor of God, who lives in unapproachable light. This reveals, for those who have the Spirit, that this same LORD of the Old Testament poems is truly our Lord Jesus Christ. Praise Him.
Revelation 4 | Revelation 4–5 is probably my (Jon’s) favorite section in the whole Bible. John pulls back the curtain and lets us see ultimate reality—not the chaos on earth, but the throne of God in heaven, steady and glorious. It’s the reminder that all of history sits under a throne that never shakes, and a God who never panics. This is where the story is really headed, and where it’s already anchored right now. When everything on earth feels unstable, this vision tells us what’s actually true.
John’s description of God’s throne reaches back to Ezekiel’s vision in Ezekiel 1—full of light, color, movement, and overwhelming holiness. Ezekiel saw living creatures, flashes of lightning, and a throne that seemed too glorious to describe. John sees that same God, the same blazing beauty, the same worship echoing around the throne. It’s as if both prophets are trying to put into human words the sheer majesty of a God who cannot be contained or simplified, only adored.
And this is the God who loves us, who listens to our prayers, who sent His Son for us. The One who sits on that throne is the same God who carries you through your ordinary days, hears your worries, and holds your future. Revelation 4 isn’t meant to intimidate us, it’s meant to lift our eyes and steady our hearts. The world can feel loud and unsettling, but above it all is a throne, and on that throne is the God of Ezekiel and John, ruling with perfect wisdom, power, and kindness.
Revelation 4:8 | This is going on right now. Right. Now. It was going on before you were born. It was going on before trilobites scampered across the oceans. It was going on before our sun, moon, and planets were shaped. Isaiah saw it. Ezekiel saw it. Both of them fell down. Notice that the whole falling down thing keeps happening—even in heaven. No one seems to need to be told to do it. God wonderfully picks folks back up again with tender words. There’s over a century between Isaiah and Ezekiel, and then another 600 or so years before John sees it here. It’s consistent and it’s trinitarian and it’s worship. There’s consistently four angels; we don’t know why. Angels are not the odd and ephemeral human bird-winged-creatures from Hollywood, they’re bizarre, and even more bizarrely different each time they’re seen by humans. But their message is all the same: nothing is more holy than our God. These messengers aren’t robots either, they’re persons too, which means this constant praising gig is a choice. This is what they want to do, or rather, there is nothing better or more wonderful than this to do. And all of these other folks are joining them. Which means this is not just a preview or merely for information. This is an invitation. This is going on right now. Right. Now. Will you join in?
Wednesday
Nehemiah 1:6 | Confession matters because it brings us back into honesty with God. Nehemiah’s whole story begins with one man dropping his guard and naming the truth about himself and his people, and God moves in power through that. Confession isn’t about beating ourselves up; it’s about agreeing with God about what’s broken and inviting Him to heal it. When the people of God confess, we stop pretending, we stop hiding, and we open the door for real change. It’s the place where grace gets in.
Nehemiah 2:4 | It’s life-giving to note the prayer habits and attitudes of the men and women of God. Nehemiah describes for us a crisis moment that he’s having. The pressure is on. Unintentionally Nehemiah had been wearing his heart on his sleeve, and the king notices his sadness. As the cupbearer to the king, he’s right in the king’s personal space all of the time. As cupbearer he’s also deeply trusted. He’s the king’s last line of defense against poison. So Nehemiah panics when the king notices his grief. What’s going on here?
Ancient kings were true tyrants, often born into their position and often believed to be a god or descended from one. If you so much as irritated or annoyed them, they were known to just get rid of you. Permanently. Nehemiah also had seen what sort of man Artaxerxes was first hand. Which is probably why he actually tells us he was “multiplied with fear” in the Hebrew. He’s in full panic mode. Pulse is quickening, respiratory rate beginning to increase, adrenaline is pulsing through his body. We’ve all experienced what that flush of terror feels like, making it hard to think.
And Nehemiah tells us “I prayed to the God of heaven.” What follows is not that prayer: what follows is what he says to the king. Which means he was praying in his head to God right before he started talking out loud, right in the middle of a back and forth conversation with someone who could destroy his life. Praying in real time. Battle prayer. Pleading on the go. Desperately crying out in one’s heart right after being put on the spot in front of everyone. God loves that sort of prayer. We must practice this sort of prayer. We need more of this kind of prayer. Catching these heroes of faith in the act of having faith, and seeing the circumstances and even results of God’s immediate action, should make us so bold.
Revelation 5:5–6 | I (Jon—obviously—Chris is too chicken) have a tattoo on my left forearm of the lion and the lamb. Of all the images I could have chosen, I landed here because this picture of Jesus has shaped me so deeply.
Look at how this works in the flow of the text: in verse 5, when one of the elders tells John the Lion of Judah is coming, we all brace for fierce strength and overwhelming power. Lions are scary. And we wait in suspense to see the Lion come forward in all of its power. But when John looks, in verse 6, the one who steps forward isn’t a roaring lion—it’s a bloody Lamb who has been slain. That surprise is the whole point. The Lion wins not by force but by sacrifice. The greatest power in the universe is revealed in self-giving love.
This image shows us the true heart of Christ and the true nature of His kingdom. He won by losing. He brought life by dying. He conquered not by crushing His enemies but by giving Himself for them. The Lion and the Lamb are not two different sides of Jesus—they’re one reality. Real strength looks like humility. Real glory looks like a cross. Real kingship looks like service. And when we see Him that way, we start to understand what kind of Savior we’re actually following.
And that’s the whole invitation of Revelation. This book isn’t here to scare us or entertain us with symbols; it’s here to strengthen the army of the Lamb—ordinary believers—so we learn to fight the way He did. Not with violence, not with dominance, but with sacrifice and love. We follow a Lamb who suffered and died and then walked out of the grave, and we trust that our path will look similar: suffering now, glory later. The Lamb leads us through the hard places and into eternal joy, and He teaches us to overcome the world by walking the same road He walked.
Thursday
Nehemiah 4:1 | This rage and anger against God’s people and God’s purposes is a recurring theme in the scripture, something we see most clearly in Jesus. They hated Him for no reason. There’s a running pressure across the Bible about this, a sort of constant conflict between those who know God and those who don’t. Cain kills Abel, and for what really? Jealousy about his sacrifice to God? What an irrational response, but how consistent. Here Sanballat plays the part, raving and troubling the Jews over and over again.
What do we learn from this? We should expect it, and not be caught off guard or dismayed by it. There will be resistance to God’s love and God’s purposes, and it won’t make much sense. It can come from other religious folks or from the world. It leaves you scratching your head. There really isn’t room enough in this town/ office/ family/ neighborhood/ club/ team for both of us? We see these conflicts in the world too, but there’s usually something at stake, something everyone wants and will compete for. It will make some sort of sense. But when you see that same sort of conflict with God’s kingdom, it doesn’t make any sense. What Nehemiah experienced is something we’ve experienced, and it’s just like He told us (which is why you can trust Him so deeply) “if they hated Me, they will also hate you.”
Revelation 6 | A lot of people read the seven seals and the trumpets and bowls that follow as a strict, literal timeline of events that will happen in a tight seven-year window right before the end of the age. That approach treats these visions like a newspaper from the future, mapping everything out in order. But that’s probably not what John is doing. Revelation is full of symbolic imagery, and the seals are meant to be seen, not charted. They show us patterns of how the world has always worked under human rebellion and spiritual darkness.
A better way to understand these visions is to see them as repeating cycles. Each set (the seals, the trumpets, the bowls) covers the same ground from a different angle. They describe the way Babylon, the world system opposed to God, keeps showing up across history: violence, economic injustice, oppression, idolatry, war, famine, plague—real things the world experiences again and again. And they show how God’s people, the army of the Lamb, respond with endurance, faithfulness, and sacrificial love. These cycles aren’t locked into one short period at the end; they’re describing the whole age between Jesus’s resurrection and His return.
This makes Revelation deeply relevant for the whole church in every generation. Instead of a book that only makes sense for a future seven-year crisis, it becomes a book that speaks into every moment of history. Believers in the first century, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, and modern-day Christians in persecuted countries all recognize these patterns. They’ve lived through war, plague, corrupt empires, and spiritual deception—and they’ve clung to the Lamb in the middle of it. Revelation wasn’t written to satisfy our curiosity about the end; it was written to help the church stay faithful in the present.
The overly literal/chronological approach struggles because it flattens these visions into a rigid timeline and removes the poetry, symbolism, and prophetic imagination that John is using. It leaves the global church with a book that feels distant instead of urgently helpful. But when we read Revelation as a set of repeating, symbolic cycles, we see exactly what John wants us to see: Babylon is always rising, and the Lamb is always reigning. And in the middle of it, God’s people are called to endure—to hold fast, to love sacrificially, to stay loyal to Jesus even when the world feels dark. Faithfulness in the face of Babylon is how the Lamb wins, and it’s how His people conquer too.
Friday
Nehemiah 9 | This is a beautiful picture of how God’s people are meant to remember. The whole chapter is one long retelling of God’s faithfulness: from creation, to Abraham, to the Exodus, to the wilderness, to the promised land. Israel stands together and rehearses the story, not because God forgot it, but because they needed to remember it. This is how faith is strengthened: by looking back at what God has done and letting it shape how we live right now. And this is what we’re called to pass on to the next generation of believers, not just rules or traditions, but the story of a God who keeps rescuing, keeps forgiving, keeps leading His people home. Nehemiah 9 shows us that remembering isn’t optional for God’s people; it’s how we stay grounded, hopeful, and faithful in every season.
Revelation 7:9–17 | This scene of every tribe, nation, people, and language standing together before the Lamb is one of the most beautiful pictures in scripture. It shows us that the gospel doesn’t erase what makes us different, it flattens the things that divide us while celebrating the unique ways God has made us. John doesn’t see a colorless crowd; he sees a diverse family, shoulder to shoulder, worshiping the same Savior. What unites them isn’t culture or background or preference—it’s the Lamb who rescued them and made them his own.
And this is a glimpse of what God is building right here in our partnership between Petra, The Porch, and Cross & Crown. Our churches are all very different and filled with all kinds of people. We have no earthly reason to get along, but we have every heavenly reason to. That’s what makes this partnership so special. When we stand together, serve together, and worship together, we get to preview that Revelation 7 crowd. We get to show our city a unity that doesn’t make sense apart from Jesus. And one day, we’ll join that great multitude and lift our voices too—different stories, different cultures, one Savior.
November 24-28
[M] Zechariah 9-11; 1 John 5
[T] Zechariah 12-14; Psalm 94; 2 John 1
[W] Ezra 5-6; Psalm 95; 3 John 1
[T] Esther 1-3; Psalm 139; Revelation 1
[F] Esther 4-6; Revelation 2
Dwell Plan Day 236-240 | CSB | Digital PDF | Printable PDF
Notes from Jon & Chris
Monday
Zechariah 9:1 | For the LORD has an eye on mankind. | The prophet says it so casually, as if to say: of course He does, He knows and sees all things. We can read this first as a theological statement about God’s knowing stuff. It is true that God knows all things. But “keeping an eye” on people is not the same as knowing the details of their lives. This isn’t about data, or accumulating data, or even surveilling your data. Perfectly knowing everything is a baseline idea about an eternal God. It’s assumed and affirmed.
But again, “keeping an eye” on folks is something very different. This means and implies a number of things. First, what we do is important. It might not feel like it to you, and your life may seem boring and irrelevant to you, but it isn’t to God. He is a moral person, and He has moral convictions and standards. The universe exists for His glory; another way to say that is the universe is a personal and moral place. It matters what you say, what you do, what you look at, and what you love. All of it matters and all of your choices about it matter. This might make you feel nervous, which brings up the second implication of “keeping an eye”. If God is paying attention to what you do, then you’re answerable for it. That’s the point about the nations, about Tyre and Sidon in this chapter. We’re all accountable, in a real and personal way, to God. There’s no escape from it. He’s paying attention, and when God pays attention, judgment can’t be far behind. But that brings us to a third implication of this language. Verse 1 goes on to say “and all of the tribes of Israel.” But that’s really odd. Zechariah is preaching after the exile, so to put it bluntly, there are no tribes left to speak of. This is about a bigger promise, which means a bigger fulfillment. We get the details on that bigger fulfillment in Zechariah 9:9, about their king coming in and riding a donkey. And here’s where this expression “keeping an eye” starts to really expand into a new meaning. The “tribes” are now all those that God loves. All of us. This is a commitment to God’s expanding love and plan. This is also a commitment of a lover’s eye for His people, His eye that watches with passion and compassion on those He loves. And that love, in a stunning turn of cosmic proportions, becomes a promise. That our God would actually take on a human pair of eyes in Jesus—and guess what—His eye is on you now.
Zechariah 9:9–17 | Zechariah is speaking to a worn-down people who’ve come home from exile but still feel small, vulnerable, and surrounded by stronger nations. Into that discouragement comes this promise: God himself is sending a King, not the kind of king who rides a war horse to intimidate enemies, but one who comes humble and righteous, bringing real salvation. This King will break the weapons of the world, speak peace that actually lasts, and free His people from every pit they’ve fallen into. And when you follow the thread forward, it lands squarely on Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey—God’s quiet, unexpected King who brings a kingdom bigger than empires and deeper than political power. In Him, prisoners become prisoners of hope, the fearful become safe, and ordinary people shine like jewels in the crown of their God.
1 John 5:6–8 | Even though this passage is confusing on a first pass, John is actually trying to clear up some confusion created by false teachers who were slicing Jesus apart—wanting a “spiritual” Christ who inspired people, but not a crucified Savior who actually paid for sin. So when he says Jesus came “by water and blood,” he’s grounding everything in real history. The water points to Jesus’ baptism, when the Father publicly declared him the beloved Son. The blood points to Jesus’ real, physical death on the cross. The ESV Study Bible notes that some early teachers claimed “the Christ” only came upon Jesus at His baptism and then abandoned Him before the crucifixion. John says absolutely not. Jesus didn’t come by water only, He came by water and blood. The same Son who stepped into the Jordan is the same Son who hung on the cross, and that unbroken unity is the heart of the gospel.
Then John brings in the “three that testify”: the Spirit, the water, and the blood. This is Old Testament courtroom language; truth gets established by two or three witnesses. The NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible explains that the Spirit testifies internally in every believer’s heart, confirming who Jesus really is. The water (His baptism) testifies publicly, marking the beginning of His mission. The blood (His cross) testifies climactically, marking the fulfillment of His mission. And the key is that all three agree. There’s no mixed message. Together they point to one Jesus: the divine Son who came in the flesh, lived for us, died for us, and now gives life to all who trust Him.
Tuesday
Zechariah 12:10| In its original setting, Zechariah is speaking to a people who know their own failure all too well, promising a future day when God will pour out a “spirit of grace” that softens their hearts and leads them to mourn over the One they pierced—a grief that isn’t driven by despair but by awakening. And when the New Testament picks this up, it’s unmistakably pointing us to Jesus on the cross: the Son of God pierced not by accident, but in love, bearing the sins of the very people who rejected Him. The promise is that God’s grace doesn’t just forgive; it opens our eyes. It leads us to look at Jesus crucified and realize, “My sin did that. And His love endured that.” And that kind of seeing—seeing both our guilt and His grace—creates the very repentance and renewal Zechariah longed for, the kind only the pierced Savior can give.
Zechariah 14 | This chapter paints this sweeping, end-of-the-age picture where God steps in, fights for His people, renews creation, and establishes His reign over all nations. In its original context, it’s God promising Israel that the story isn’t going to end with exile, weakness, or fear; there will come a “day of the Lord” when He personally intervenes, defeats the nations that attack Jerusalem, and brings a kind of healing and holiness so thorough that even the cooking pots in the city are “holy to the Lord.”
But like so many prophetic passages, this chapter has layers of fulfillment. The first layer is historical hope: God really did protect and preserve his people after the exile, keeping a remnant and keeping the story alive. The second layer is Messianic: Jesus’ first coming brings the true “living waters” that flow out from Jerusalem (John 7) and begins the universal reign of the Lord as King over all the earth. And the final layer is future and climactic: the ultimate “day of the Lord” when Christ returns, evil is finally judged, creation is restored, and God’s presence fills everything so completely that holiness becomes the air we breathe. Zechariah 14 is like looking at a mountain range from far away—the peaks blur together, but as you get closer you realize they’re different mountains across different ages, all pointing forward to the same thing: the Lord himself coming to rescue, renew, and reign.
Zechariah 14:20 | Let’s do a thought experiment together. Using your imagination, wherever you are right this moment, look around yourself. Do you see any pens? Do you see a phone, or a coffee cup? Maybe a water bottle? Perhaps there are some dishes nearby and some utensils. Right now I can see a small box of staples under my computer monitor. Now, imagine that everything you see has been marked. Every item, no matter how big or small, has been inscribed with a message on it. In fact, imagine that I open my box of staples and empty it on my desk. Then with a magnifying glass I pick them up to look for where the inscription is, and every individual staple is carefully and beautifully inscribed with this message “Holy to the Lord.” Can you imagine such a world? Such a universe? Well you don’t have to, because it’s actually the one you live in! These are the eyes of faith that the prophet is wearing and describing here, and what they see is the total work of God to redeem all things. God is interested in His holiness and glory all the way down to the subatomic level and all the way up to the superclusters of galaxies. And His intention to redeem every bit of it is as expansive and extensive as all the known universe, from stars and planets to bowls and bells. Praise Him!
Wednesday
Psalm 95:7-8 | “Today if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts” | This warning comes up again and again in the Bible. It’s meant to address spiritual procrastination. It’s a call to action. It’s a call for response. Something about its urgency, the todayness of it, that is so striking. The moment to turn, to repent, to run to God is always right now for His children. It’s always right now and right away with Him. The main implication is: don’t think about it. There’s a figuring we do, an evaluating of options, a study we make of what our costs and benefits are, and we aren’t allowed to do any of that when God tells us to obey and follow Him. Many of us approach God and say, “I want to do Your will, but first I need to know what Your will demands of me.” That’s negotiating with God. God doesn’t negotiate. What this text does is teach us a different response. When God says jump, your only response is how high? Hardening your heart is when you start procrastinating and evaluating the merits and/or liabilities of obedience. Let’s cry out for the Holy Spirit to work in us His repentance, to turn us to Him with soft and pliable and surrendered hearts. We need to walk in the strong joy of this poem, with tons of God’s joyful noise of praise in us!
3 John 1:4 | As pastors, Chris and I feel this verse in our bones, because nothing brings us deeper joy than seeing you folks grow in Jesus—not just knowing things about Him, but actually walking with Him, trusting Him, and finding real joy in Him. There are plenty of hard days in ministry, plenty of moments that stretch us, but seeing Christ formed in you makes every late night, every tough conversation, every ounce of effort absolutely worth it. When we watch you leaning into the truth, taking steps of faith, opening the Bible, praying with hunger, loving people well, it lights us up. That’s the kind of joy that keeps pastors going, and we’re grateful we get to see it in you.
3 John 1:9-10 | Diotrephes is the villain here. He’s one of the early rebels against apostolic authority, and he’s got plenty of friends these days. Everyone wants to reject the authority of the apostles and the Bible. It’s the nature of our sin nature. We want to be our own boss. But notice this: bad teaching creates bad morals. It always does, and that’s why Christ taught us “by their fruit you will know them.” What’s the fruit of not following the apostolic tradition? What evil comes with these lies? A “me first” mentality that results in no hospitality. Wow. In the kingdom of our Savior, we should pay close attention to these patterns, noticing how they cluster together. Folks who reject Biblical teaching will reveal who they really are, and you’ll see it in the need to be the most important person in the room. You’ll see it in self-centered patterns of life. You’ll see it when folks are irritated that they aren’t thanked or acknowledged. And that’s just half of the fruit to look for, because they will also ignore and put others down. They won’t be welcoming of others’ gifts or perspectives or needs, unless they serve their own need to virtual signal to others. That’s what Paul is dealing with in this letter. Why are these very brief letters so important? They give us real application of biblical principles in action. Learn from the apostle about what to expect, and then learn how to respond.
Thursday
Esther 2:7–18 | When you slow down and actually sit with this passage, it’s painfully clear how dark and broken the situation really is. A pagan king is treating young women like possessions, gathering them into a harem, and choosing a queen through what is essentially a state-run beauty and sex contest. Nothing about this is good, godly, or admirable, and the Bible never asks us to sanitize it. This is what sin-soaked power looked like in the ancient world, and it should strike us as disturbing. Esther herself is caught in a system she didn’t choose and couldn’t escape, swept into the machinery of a kingdom where the powerful take what they want and the vulnerable have almost no say at all.
And yet, in the middle of all that mess, God is quietly at work. He doesn’t endorse the king’s behavior; He overrules it. The same harem that reflects everything broken about human power becomes the place where God positions Esther to preserve His people, a people through whom the Messiah will one day come. That’s the strange beauty of Esther: God’s name is never mentioned, but His fingerprints are everywhere. Even in the ugliest circumstances—circumstances we would never call good—His sovereignty is weaving redemption. The story reminds us that God doesn’t need ideal conditions or righteous rulers to accomplish His purposes. He can take the very things that grieve us, confuse us, or offend our sensibilities, and turn them into the stage where His saving plans quietly unfold.
Psalm 139 | Read this every day for a month. Pray through it every time you read it. Or try to memorize it. It’s worth its weight in gold for you and your worship.
Revelation | A lot of Christians feel unsure about the book of Revelation. Some churches basically ignore it because it feels confusing or intimidating, while others swing to the opposite extreme and treat it like a horror movie storyboard—complete with charts, timelines, and end-of-the-world scare tactics. Neither approach actually helps people. Revelation isn’t meant to frighten believers or sit untouched on a shelf. It’s meant to reveal Jesus, steady the church, and help ordinary Christians see their moment in history through God’s eyes.
Revelation is first and foremost an apocalyptic book, which means it communicates through symbols, images, and visions rather than straightforward narrative. It’s the kind of literature that uses numbers, colors, and creatures as theological metaphors, not literal data points. So when we read about “sevens” or “horns” or “144,000,” we’re meant to ask what the symbols mean, not how to plug them into a calculator. That doesn’t make the book confusing, it actually makes it rich. Revelation pulls back the curtain on the spiritual reality behind what God’s people are experiencing, helping ordinary Christians understand the bigger picture of what God is doing in the world. If we miss the symbolic nature of the book, we’ll miss the whole point: this is a vision meant to reveal truth, not hide it.
One of the biggest themes that helps Revelation make sense is the idea of patterns, especially the pattern of Babylon. Babylon is not only a literal empire in Israel’s past but a recurring symbol for human kingdoms that build themselves on violence, corruption, idolatry, and self-exaltation. John shows us Babylon rising again and again in different forms throughout history, whether ancient Rome, modern superpowers, or any cultural system that opposes God. That means Revelation isn’t primarily predicting a tiny sliver of the future right before the end, it’s giving us a set of lenses to understand the whole age between Jesus’ resurrection and His return. The cycles of judgment, persecution, and spiritual conflict aren’t arranged like a timeline, they’re more like repeating waves that show up in every era. And in all of it, God is telling his people: “This isn’t new. I know the script. Stay faithful. I’ve already won.”
There are also several major ways Christians have interpreted Revelation over the centuries. Historicism reads the book as a symbolic overview of church history, though this can become speculative as people try to match every image to a specific event. Futurist historic premillennialism sees much of the book as pointing toward a future period of suffering before Christ returns. Futurist dispensationalism treats Revelation almost like a coded map of end-time events and often separates God’s plan for Israel from his plan for the church—an approach that tends to flatten the book’s imagery and miss its pastoral purpose. Preterism sees most of Revelation as fulfilled in the first-century upheavals surrounding Rome and the fall of Jerusalem. Idealism views the visions as timeless pictures of the ongoing spiritual conflict between the kingdoms of God and the kingdoms of the world. And an eclectic approach brings together the strengths of these perspectives—taking seriously the first-century context, acknowledging future hope, and recognizing that Revelation’s visions often work in repeating cycles that speak to every generation of believers. This approach sees Revelation not as a secret code but as a symbolic, pastoral book that equips the church for faithful endurance in every age.
And that’s really the heart of the book: Revelation is written to encourage God’s people to endure. It’s not about predicting newspaper headlines; it’s about forming a people who follow the Lamb wherever He goes. The saints don’t overcome through violence or political power but through faithfulness, witness, love, and sacrifice. The Lamb conquers by laying down His life, and His army conquers by doing the same. Revelation reminds the church that no matter how loud Babylon gets, no matter how fierce the dragon rages, Jesus has already triumphed and will bring creation to its promised rest. This book isn’t a riddle; it’s a rallying cry. It tells weary believers in every age: You’re on the winning side. Stay faithful. Keep loving. Keep worshiping. The Lamb reigns.
Revelation 1:17 | This is a bit of a formula, but only because it’s what happens every time: you see God you fall down terrified. You don’t take a quick selfie or text your friends what happened. No, you fall on your face and wait for the death blow. And that’s what happens every time. A holy God does not mix well with a fallen and sinful people. But this moment is different from the others in one special way. John wrote about Jesus, and we know the details from his gospel, the book of John. One of those details, a detail that sticks out for many, is John anonymously describing himself in his book as “the disciple that Jesus loved.” And with that moniker, in one memorable moment, he lays his head on Jesus’ chest. It’s at the last supper, at the dinner where Jesus instituted communion. So, John knows Jesus’ voice and what He looks like. They were close friends for years. Yet when John sees Jesus in Revelation, he still does the whole “you see God you fall down” thing. There’s something to learn here, something we’re supposed to see as a revelation of God’s plan for us. Even as God seeks intimacy with us and relationship with us, He does not give up or sacrifice or negate His majesty and transcendence. That’s why the familiar voice sounds like a blaring trumpet. That’s why the familiar eyes are burning. And when all of that glorious and terrifying splendor reaches out and puts His hand tenderly on John and says “don’t be scared,” we can now see the combination of transcendence and immanence—being so far above and yet being so very close—in John’s retelling his story.
Friday
Revelation 2:4 | Jesus isn’t talking to outsiders here; He’s talking to committed, church-going believers who on the surface are doing all kinds of things right. The Ephesian church had great doctrine, solid endurance, and a strong spine against false teaching, but somewhere along the way the fire of their early love faded into a kind of cold dutiful religion. And that warning should land on us with real weight, because it’s so easy to stay busy for Jesus’ church while slowly drifting away from our friend and Savior—Jesus. Leaving our first love doesn’t usually happen in a dramatic moment. It’s a slow leak, a quiet slide, a heart that begins to settle for correct theology without warm affection, or serving without delight, or worship without wonder. This verse calls us back to the simplicity and joy of loving Christ, the love that first awakened us, first changed us, and still holds the power to renew us if we’ll return to Him.
Revelation 2-3 | Seven short letters (more like eternal memos with amazing memes) each with its own punchy promises, sweet encouragements, and stiff exhortations. But don’t miss the forest by staring at the trees. This number seven is symbolic. To say that these seven churches are symbolic is not saying that they aren’t historical. One of the benefits of having a God who talks is that He can arrange symbol and fact so that they’re both true at the same time. But what truth are we to understand from the number seven? It’s meant to be a number of completion, a finished and perfect sort of completion. That’s why the number is used in the creation story: God did it right; that’s the message behind the first seven in the Bible. God made the world completely. So we are the new creation in Him. In one sense, since Christ rose on the first day of the Jewish week, we should see His resurrection as a new startup of all creation. Who is on the ground floor of this startup? Us. So, these seven churches and their problems, issues, contexts, and needs represent the church as a whole. As you read, look for your church experiences in these letters. They’re in there! These then become an inventory for all of us, a kind of spiritual diagnostic tool for the church ever since. Which one do you think is most like Cross and Crown? What would be the implication?
November 17-21
[M] Ezra 1-2; John 21
[T] Ezra 3-4; Psalm 92; 1 John 1
[W] Haggai 1-2; Zechariah 1; Ps 138; 1 John 2
[T] Zechariah 2-5; Psalm 93; 1 John 3
[F] Zechariah 6-8; 1 John 4
Dwell Plan Day 231-235 | CSB | Digital PDF | Printable PDF
Notes from Jon & Chris
Monday
Ezra-Nehemiah | In our English Bibles, Ezra and Nehemiah show up as two books, but for most of history they were read as one continuous story. The earliest Hebrew manuscripts treat them as a single work, and the flow of the narrative makes that clear—Ezra begins with the first wave of exiles returning home, and Nehemiah picks up the same storyline as more return to rebuild the city, its walls, and its spiritual life. Together, they paint a picture of a people who are trying to find their footing again after decades of exile, carrying both the excitement of a fresh start and the disappointment that everything feels smaller and harder than before. It’s a book steeped in real history: the Persian Empire, royal decrees, foreign rulers, political tension, slow progress, and a community trying to rediscover its identity under God.
What makes Ezra-Nehemiah so important in the canon is the way it shows God faithfully rebuilding His people, not just physically, but spiritually. The temple is rebuilt, but more importantly, worship is restored. The walls go up, but more importantly, the people renew their covenant with the Lord. And even though the ending feels incomplete—there’s still sin, opposition, longing—the book points our hearts toward the bigger story God is writing, one that ultimately leads to Christ rebuilding what we could never rebuild on our own. Ezra-Nehemiah reminds us that God is committed to restoring His people, but the restoration we most desperately need isn’t architectural or political: it’s the restoration of the heart.
Tuesday
Ezra 3:10 | When the foundation of the new temple was finally laid, it must have felt like the first deep breath these people had taken in seventy years. They had lived with the memory of their temple in ruins; an open wound of shame, judgment, and despair. Their national identity had been shattered, their worship cut off, their people nearly wiped out. So when the priests stood in their robes, the trumpets sounded, and the Levites sang praise “according to the directions of David,” it wasn’t just a construction milestone—it was a moment of unbelievable grace. God was giving them back what they thought was gone forever. The foundation wasn’t just stone; it was hope. It was God saying, “I’m not done with you. I’m rebuilding what was destroyed.” And in that moment, you can almost hear the mix of laughter, tears, and stunned joy as exiles realized that the God who disciplined them had also brought them home to begin again.
Wednesday
Haggai-Zechariah | Haggai and Zechariah spoke into the same moment we see in Ezra and Nehemiah: a group of discouraged returnees who came back from exile ready to rebuild the temple but ended up quitting when the opposition got loud and life got complicated. For about sixteen years the project sat unfinished, and the people drifted into survival mode. So God sent these two prophets to shake them awake. Haggai’s message is basically, “You’ve put God on the back burner—let’s fix that,” while Zechariah comes alongside and says, “And don’t forget, God is doing far more behind the scenes than you can see.” Haggai calls them to refocus their priorities and get back to the work, and Zechariah lifts their eyes to the bigger story of God restoring, cleansing, empowering, and ultimately sending the Messiah. Together they remind us that small faithful steps matter, that God hasn’t forgotten us, and that He’s leading everything toward the glory of Christ.
1 John 2:2 | When John says Jesus is the “propitiation” for our sins, he’s using a word that gets right to the center of the gospel. Tim Keller puts it plainly: “Propitiation literally means to turn aside the wrath of somebody through a payment.” God’s wrath isn’t an emotional flare-up, it’s His settled just opposition to sin. And the incredible news of the gospel is that the payment that turns aside that wrath wasn’t demanded from us, but was provided for us. Jesus—God Himself in the flesh—steps into our place, absorbs the judgment we earned, and satisfies divine justice fully. Keller (in a 1990 sermon) compares it to an unpaid electric bill getting settled by someone else: the wrath of the shutoff is turned aside, and the lights come back on. At the cross, God doesn’t suspend justice or soften it, He fulfills it perfectly by taking it upon Himself. Wrath and love meet in one moment, both fully expressed.
John goes further by reminding us that this saving work isn’t small or narrow. Jesus is the propitiation “not for ours only,” meaning this salvation isn’t restricted to a tiny corner of humanity. His sacrifice is big enough and sufficient enough to save people from every tribe and tongue. It is global in scope, powerful in effect, and overflowing with grace. Reformed theology has always held these truths together: Christ’s atonement is sufficient for all but applied to His people with unbreakable power.
And here’s where this becomes deeply personal: if Jesus is your propitiation, then the wrath you fear no longer has your name on it. There is no leftover anger, no part of the debt waiting for you to resolve, no judgment hovering in the background. The payment has been made in full by the One who loves you more than you love yourself. So when you feel the weight of your failures or replay your sins, remember this: the wrath has been turned aside, and the Father’s face toward you is one of welcome. The gospel isn’t “try harder.” The gospel is “the payment has already been made.”
1 John 2:18 | Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come | In a lot of sensationalized Christian teaching, the word antichrist gets thrown around like a scare tactic. Every time a politician gains popularity, a foreign leader gains power, or culture shifts in a way we don’t like, someone somewhere claims to have finally identified “the” antichrist. But John’s point in 1 John 2:18 isn’t to make us obsess over a single future villain—it’s to make us wise about a recurring pattern.
Across Scripture, the theme of Babylon represents a kingdom set against the purposes of God: a kingdom built on self-exaltation, oppression, exploitation, violence, and injustice. Babylon isn’t just an ancient city or an end-times symbol; it’s a spiritual pattern that shows up in every age. And John says the spirit of antichrist—leaders, movements, and systems that oppose Christ and His kingdom—has already appeared. It’s not about hunting for one final figure; it’s about recognizing the ongoing, repeated emergence of this pattern in history and in our own time.
And that changes how we respond. Instead of bunker-style fear or end-times paranoia, John calls us to resistance shaped by the Lamb. Revelation shows that the Lamb conquers not by mirroring Babylon’s violence but through sacrificial love, patient endurance, and faithful witness. The warning about antichrist isn’t meant to terrify Christians, it’s meant to train us. It’s a call to see where the kingdom of Babylon still shows up in the world, where power is used to crush rather than bless, where injustice is protected rather than healed, and where leaders set themselves against the way of Christ. And it’s a call to stand against those patterns not with outrage or worldly strategies, but with the self-giving love of Jesus. As His people, we get to participate in His victory—spreading His kingdom one act of mercy, one word of truth, one costly obedience at a time.
Thursday
Zechariah 2 | This text speaks into the moment when God’s people had returned from exile and were looking at a Jerusalem that felt small, vulnerable, and unfinished—and God steps in to say, “You don’t see what I see.” In the immediate context, this chapter is a promise that God Himself will be a wall of fire around the city and the glory within it, protecting His people while they rebuild and reminding them that His presence, not their strength, is what makes them secure. But down the horizon, this vision stretches into something much bigger—a picture of the future city of God where nations stream in, where God dwells with His people openly, and where His glory fills everything. It’s a glimpse of eternity breaking into a discouraged moment in history. God is saying, in effect, “Don’t measure your future by what you see right now. I’m building something far greater than you can imagine, both for you and for the world.”
Zechariah 3:8 | Zechariah points us straight to Jesus when he talks about the Branch—the One who would grow up from seemingly nothing and bring God’s restoration with Him. Joshua the high priest and the leaders around him were just signposts, but the Branch would be the real thing: a Messiah who doesn’t just rebuild a temple made of stone, but rebuilds people by cleansing them, covering their guilt, and making them fit for God’s presence. It’s a reminder that all of our hope hangs on a Person, not a project. And the good news is that the Branch has already come, already borne our sin, already begun His renewing work.
1 John 3:15 | This verse can sound harsh at first, like John is laying down some kind of legalistic rule that if you ever feel anger or bitterness, God slams the door in your face. But that’s not what he’s saying at all. John isn’t giving a checklist for earning eternal life; he’s describing the fruit of a life that already has (or doesn’t have) the life of Christ in it. In other words, hatred is evidence of a heart untouched by grace, while love is evidence of a heart brought to life by Jesus. He’s not saying, “Stop hating so God will accept you,” but rather, “Because God has accepted you and placed His life in you, hatred no longer fits.” This is gospel logic, not legalism. The command to love flows out of the new life God gives—not the other way around.
Friday
Zechariah 7:4–14 | In this passage, God exposes the difference between empty religion and the kind of faithful obedience that actually reflects His heart. The people want to know whether they should keep certain fasts, but God presses deeper—He asks whether their worship has ever really been about Him at all. True religion, He says, isn’t found in rituals performed out of habit or self-interest; it shows up in lives marked by justice, mercy, compassion, and care for the vulnerable. God reminds them that their ancestors ignored these very things—hardening their hearts, neglecting the poor, refusing to listen—and that’s what led to their exile in the first place. The warning is clear: religious activity without love becomes noise. But for those who know the gospel, who have tasted God’s kindness and mercy, the call to do justice and love mercy isn’t a burden, it’s the natural overflow of God’s love at work within us. True religion is simply the kingdom breaking out in everyday life.
1 John 4:10–11, 19 | Christian love never starts with us—it always starts with God. John makes that clear when he says that love is the defining mark of God’s children, not because they’re naturally more loving, but because they’ve been loved first. Jesus doesn’t look at us and say, “If you love well enough, I’ll let you belong to Me.” Instead, He gives us His love upfront—freely, fully, undeservedly—and that love becomes the root system out of which our love for others grows. This is why verse 19 can say, “We love because He first loved us.” Our love is not the price that buys God’s acceptance; it’s the evidence that His love has taken root in us. God’s initiating love is the soil, the water, the sunlight—everything we need to grow.
This is exactly what Jesus taught. When He gave the “new commandment” in John 13, He didn’t say, “Love others so that I will love you.” He said, “Love one another just as I have loved you.” His love comes first. Or think of the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18: Jesus uses it to show that people who truly grasp how deeply they’ve been forgiven naturally extend forgiveness to others. Paul says the same thing in Ephesians 4:32, “Forgive one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” The pattern is unmistakable all across the New Testament: God pours His love into us, and that love spills out onto others. We don’t grit our teeth and try to manufacture compassion; we look at the cross until our hearts soften.
And when that happens—when God’s love actually settles into our hearts—it changes the way we see people. It makes us patient with weaknesses, gentle with failures, generous with our time, and honest about our sin. It frees us from the exhausting cycle of trying to earn God’s approval because we already have it in Christ. And from that place of security, we’re able to love others without fear. Not to get something in return, not to perform, not to prove ourselves, but because God loved us first. That’s the miracle of Christian love—it’s not squeezed out of our willpower but produced in us by the God who lives within us.
November 10-14
[M] Ezekiel 46-48; John 16
[T] Daniel 1-3; Psalm 88; John 17
[W] Daniel 4-6; John 18
[T] Daniel 7-9; Psalm 91; John 19
[F] Daniel 10-12; John 20
Dwell Plan Day 226-230 | CSB | Digital PDF | Printable PDF
Notes from Jon & Chris
Monday
Ezekiel 47–48 | The book closes with a sweeping vision of restoration and hope. Ezekiel sees water flowing from beneath the threshold of the temple, deepening as it moves outward until it becomes a mighty river that no one can cross. Wherever the river flows, it brings life and healing—even the Dead Sea becomes fresh. Along its banks grow trees whose fruit never fails and whose leaves bring healing to the nations. This imagery echoes Eden and anticipates the new creation of Revelation 22, where a river of life flows from the throne of God and the Lamb. God’s presence, once withdrawn because of sin, now flows out to renew all things.
The vision culminates in the division of the land among the tribes of Israel and the description of a new city. At the very end, Ezekiel writes, “And the name of the city from that time on shall be, The Lord is There” (Ezekiel 48:35). That single phrase captures the whole purpose of redemption. The glory that once departed (Ezekiel 10) has returned. The exiles who longed for home are now shown that the true restoration is not merely a rebuilt temple or land, but the return of God Himself to dwell among His people. Everything in this vision points to restored communion—the life of God flowing into the world and the people of God living forever in His presence.
For believers today, this vision gives us a deep and steady sense of eternal focus. “The Lord is there” is not just a prophecy—it’s our ultimate reality in Christ. Even now, through the indwelling Spirit, the river of His life flows within us, but one day that union will be perfected when faith becomes sight. Our future is not defined by uncertainty or decay but by nearness to God. Every longing we have for peace, beauty, and belonging will one day be satisfied in His presence. The story of Scripture ends as it began—in a garden filled with life, where God walks with His people, and all creation declares: the Lord is there.
John 16:7 | Jesus tells His disciples, “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you.” That would have sounded impossible to them—how could His absence ever be better than His presence? Yet through the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, what seemed like loss became the means to a deeper intimacy than they had ever known. While the disciples once walked beside Christ, the Spirit now enables believers to have Christ dwell within them. The Spirit makes the presence of Jesus personal, constant, and transforming—illuminating His Word, convicting our hearts, comforting our sorrows, and empowering our obedience. The same Spirit who hovered over creation and raised Jesus from the dead now abides in us, bringing us into fellowship with the living God. So let us draw near through prayer, lingering in His Word with open hearts, asking the Spirit to make the voice of Christ clear to us. As we do, we will find that the very presence Jesus promised is not distant or abstract, but near, warm, and alive—our hearts burning within us as He speaks to us through His Word.
Tuesday
Daniel 3:17–18 | Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego’s courage wasn’t grounded in the certainty of rescue but in the certainty of who God is. They believed God was able to save—but even if He didn’t—He was still sovereign, still good, and still worthy of their full devotion. This is what real faith looks like: trusting the power of God without demanding a particular outcome. They didn’t obey because they knew how the story would end; they obeyed because they knew the One who writes the story.
This same kind of faith anchors us when life doesn’t go the way we hoped. God’s people have always been called to trust His wisdom, not just His works—to believe that He is in control, even when deliverance doesn’t come right away. The fiery furnace reminds us that God’s glory, not our comfort, is the ultimate goal. Sometimes He rescues us from the fire; other times He walks with us through it. Either way, His purposes never fail. The cross of Christ proves that even suffering is not wasted—God can turn what looks like defeat into victory. So may we learn to pray with the same heart: “Lord, I know You are able. But even if not, I will trust You.”
John 17 | This is one of the most amazing chapters in the whole Bible. It’s Jesus’ prayer to the Father right before He goes to the cross—a moment where we get to listen in as He pours out His heart. Every sentence of this prayer could be its own sermon. There’s so much here about who Jesus is, what He came to do, and how deeply He loves His people. He prays for His disciples and for everyone who would one day believe in Him—which means He was praying for us. Take time to read this chapter slowly, word by word, and let it sink in. Don’t rush. Ask the Spirit to help you understand and feel the love of Christ in these verses. As you do, you’ll see that the same Jesus who prayed for His people then is still praying for us now.
Wednesday
Daniel 4:28–5:12 | Daniel records two kings who shared the same throne, the same pride, and the same opportunity to humble themselves before God—but with very different endings. Nebuchadnezzar, lifted up by power and success, boasted in his own glory until God struck him down and drove him into the wilderness to live like a beast. But through that humbling, his eyes were opened. When he lifted them to heaven, his reason returned, and he confessed that “those who walk in pride He is able to humble” (Daniel 4:37). His words sound less like a pagan king and more like a redeemed man. Many scholars believe that Nebuchadnezzar was genuinely converted—his repentance real, his worship sincere. There’s every reason to think you’ll meet him in heaven, a trophy of grace rescued from the depths of self-worship.
His son Belshazzar, however, learned nothing from his father’s story. In Daniel 5, he mocks the living God by drinking from the vessels of the temple and praising idols of gold and silver. The hand of judgment literally writes his doom on the wall. He had all the warnings—his father’s fall, his father’s repentance—but hardened his heart instead of humbling it. By the end of the night, the king who thought himself untouchable lay dead, and his kingdom was gone. Pride destroyed what privilege could never preserve. Where Nebuchadnezzar’s humiliation led to life, Belshazzar’s arrogance led to death.
The New Testament echoes this same truth: “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5). Pride is still the root of every sin—a refusal to depend on God, a desire to be our own lord. The gospel calls us to the opposite posture: the humility of Jesus, who emptied himself and became obedient to the point of death (Philippians 2:8). Nebuchadnezzar’s story reminds us that no one is beyond God’s reach. Belshazzar’s story warns that no one is beyond His judgment. Our hope is to learn the lesson of the father, not the son—to lift our eyes to heaven before God must bring us low, trusting that every act of humbling is grace meant to lead us to life.
John 18:6 | When the soldiers and officers came to arrest Jesus, He stepped forward and said, “I am he.” But in the original Greek, the “he” isn’t there—Jesus simply says, “I am” (ego eimi), the divine name God used when revealing Himself to Moses in Exodus 3:14. At that moment, the power and authority of His divine identity broke through, and everyone who came to seize Him was thrown backward to the ground. This wasn’t an accident—it was a glimpse of who was really in control. Even in the chaos of His arrest, Jesus wasn’t overpowered; He was willingly giving Himself up in obedience to the Father’s plan. The same voice that spoke creation into being could have stopped the mob in an instant, but instead He used His power to surrender, showing that God’s sovereignty and love meet perfectly in the cross.
John 18:10 | Think about what's really going on here. Nobody tries to cut off someone's ear with a sword. Peter was likely swinging to lop off his dome, and Malchus probably turned his head at the last second, causing the blow to glance off and sever his ear instead. The moment reveals Peter’s impulsive zeal and his failure to grasp that Jesus’ kingdom would not advance by violence.
Thursday
Daniel 9:24–27 | The prophecy of the “seventy weeks” in Daniel 9:24–27 is one of the most debated passages in Scripture, but Sam Storms, in his book Kingdom Come: The Amillennial Alternative, helps bring clarity by reading it through the lens of Christ’s finished work. Storms argues that the seventy weeks should not be read as a strict timetable of literal years leading to a future seven-year tribulation, but as a symbolic framework describing God’s plan of redemption culminating in the coming of the Messiah. The six purposes listed in verse 24 (“to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal both vision and prophet, and to anoint a most holy place”) are all accomplished in Jesus Christ through His death and resurrection. As Storms puts it, “The seventy weeks of Daniel find their ultimate fulfillment not in the rebuilding of an earthly temple but in the redemptive work of the true Temple, the Lord Jesus Christ himself.”
Storms challenges the popular dispensational view that introduces a long “gap” between the sixty-ninth and seventieth weeks. In that system, the final week is pushed to the end of history as a future seven-year tribulation period involving a rebuilt temple and a personal antichrist. Storms contends that such a gap is not demanded by the text. Instead, the prophecy unfolds seamlessly: the “anointed one” who is “cut off” (v. 26) refers to Christ’s crucifixion, and the covenant confirmed in the final week (v. 27) is the new covenant established by His blood. The desolation that follows, he argues, is the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, a historical judgment that visibly confirmed God’s rejection of the old covenant system and the triumph of Christ’s kingdom.
Storms emphasizes that this prophecy reveals both the depth of God’s sovereignty and the unity of His redemptive plan. Daniel’s seventy weeks show that all of history—Israel’s exile, the coming of the Messiah, the church age, and the final consummation—is one continuous story centered on Jesus. The “anointed one” fulfills every promise and completes every purpose of God’s covenant. Storms writes, “Daniel’s seventy weeks are not a countdown to catastrophe but a declaration that redemption has been accomplished and that God’s kingdom has been inaugurated in Christ.” This means that the prophecy is not primarily about a future timeline, but about the unfolding of salvation through the work of the Son.
For those who want to explore this more deeply, Sam Storms’s Kingdom Come is one of the clearest and most compelling modern works on amillennial theology. I (Jon) highly recommend it. He patiently walks through the text verse by verse, showing how Christ stands at the center of biblical prophecy and how Daniel’s vision fits within the “already-but-not-yet” framework of God’s kingdom. If you’ve wrestled with the seventy weeks or felt confused by competing end-times charts, Storms’s book offers a refreshing and Christ-centered alternative. His approach helps us see what Daniel longed to see—that God’s plan has not failed but is being fulfilled perfectly in Jesus, who reigns now and will one day bring all things to completion.
John 19:30 | When Jesus declared “It is finished,” He used the Greek word tetelestai—a term that means “paid in full” or “brought to completion.” In the ancient world, it was often written across receipts to indicate that a debt had been completely settled. Jesus wasn’t saying that His life was simply ending; He was declaring that His mission of redemption had been fully accomplished. Every demand of God’s law, every prophecy pointing to the Messiah, every requirement for atonement—finished. There is nothing left for us to complete because He left nothing undone. As Paul later wrote, “By a single offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14). The cross isn’t the beginning of our contribution—it’s the end of all our striving.
This means that salvation is not a partnership between our effort and Christ’s work but a gift of grace from start to finish. Paul writes in Ephesians 2:8–9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” To try to add to what Jesus has finished is to imply that His work was somehow incomplete. The gospel invites us instead to rest, to trust that what Jesus declared on the cross still stands true today. Our obedience flows not from trying to earn God’s favor but from the joy of already having it. As Galatians 2:21 reminds us, “If righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.” Because He said tetelestai, we can live in freedom and gratitude, knowing that our debt is paid, our standing secure, and our salvation complete in Him.
Friday
John 20:17 | When Jesus tells Mary, “Do not hold on to me,” He isn’t forbidding physical touch. In fact, later He invites Thomas to touch His hands and side (John 20:27). The issue isn’t contact, it’s clinging. Mary had just watched Him die, and now He was alive before her eyes. Naturally, she didn’t want to lose Him again. But Jesus was teaching her that their relationship, and the way His followers would now know Him, was about to change. He would soon ascend to the Father, and through the coming of the Holy Spirit, His presence would no longer be limited to one place or one person. He was leading her—and all of us—into a deeper kind of closeness.
In this moment, Jesus is inviting His followers to release their hold on the old way of knowing Him and to embrace the new reality of His risen ascended presence. By ascending, He would become present to all believers everywhere through the Spirit, not just to those who could physically see Him. The comfort we have is that we don’t need to cling to Jesus to keep Him near—He holds on to us. His Spirit abides within us, uniting us to the same Savior who stood before Mary that morning. Our call is to trust that He is closer now than ever before and to go, as Mary was sent, to tell others that the risen Lord is alive and reigning—and that He is ours forever.
John 20:24–29 | Thomas gets a bad reputation for being the doubter, but his story is one of grace and restoration. When the other disciples told him they had seen the risen Lord, Thomas refused to believe unless he could see and touch the wounds himself. It wasn’t that he wanted to believe the impossible—he just couldn’t accept that what he saw on the cross could ever be undone. A week later, Jesus appears again, meeting Thomas right in the middle of his unbelief. He doesn’t scold him or shame him. He simply offers His scars and says, “Do not disbelieve, but believe.” Jesus doesn’t crush Thomas for his questions—He meets him with mercy, showing that real faith isn’t the absence of doubt but the willingness to bring our doubts to the risen Lord.
Thomas’s response is the climactic confession of the Gospel of John: “My Lord and my God.” It’s deeply personal. The same man who refused to believe now bows in worship. He doesn’t just acknowledge that Jesus is Lord and God—he claims Him as his Lord and his God. In that moment, unbelief becomes belief, and skepticism turns to surrender. The resurrected Christ moves Thomas from distance to devotion, from cynicism to worship. That’s what grace does—it turns hardened hearts into worshiping ones.
Jesus tells Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” That’s us. We haven’t seen His hands or touched His side, yet by the Spirit, the same risen Christ meets us still. He’s not asking for blind faith but is inviting us into a living one—a faith built on testimony, community, and the Spirit’s work in our hearts. Just as Thomas’s encounter sent him out as a witness, our encounters with the risen Jesus send us out to tell others. The more we see Jesus at work—in our lives, in our church, and in the lives of others—the more our own doubts give way to confidence and joy. The story of Thomas reminds us that Jesus doesn’t wait for perfect faith before He comes near; He comes near to make our faith whole.
November 3-7
[M] Ezekiel 31-33; John 11
[T] Ezekiel 34-36; Psalm 86; John 12
[W] Ezekiel 37-39; Psalm 87; John 13
[T] Ezekiel 40-42; John 14
[F] Ezekiel 43-45; Psalm 135; John 15
Dwell Plan Day 221-225 | CSB | Digital PDF | Printable PDF
Notes from Jon & Chris
Monday
Ezekiel 31 | This chapter gives us the image of Pharaoh as a towering cedar and is more than a story of one arrogant king: it’s a parable about the pride rooted in every human heart. Pharaoh’s downfall came because he mistook borrowed glory for his own, just as we so easily take the good things God gives (our talents, strength, even our moral efforts) and use them to climb higher than others, hoping to impress the very God who gave them. That’s the quiet pride of self-righteousness: thinking our goodness can earn God’s favor. But the gospel reminds us that the tree that reaches upward in pride must fall, while the one cut down in repentance will be raised. True righteousness doesn’t grow from our works up to God; it flows from his grace down to us in Christ.
Ezekiel 32:1–9 | This passage shows God giving the prophet a sobering task: to proclaim judgment over Pharaoh and Egypt, even though the message would be heavy and unpopular. Ezekiel’s role wasn’t to soften God’s words but to faithfully speak them, trusting that light sometimes comes only after the darkness is named. That same call echoes in the life of every believer. Jesus has given us a message that cuts deeper than Ezekiel’s, not one of judgment alone but of redemption—yet it still requires courage, clarity, and compassion. Like Ezekiel, we’re sent to speak into a world that’s confident in its own power and blind to its own downfall. The Great Commission calls us to do what Ezekiel did in a greater way: to carry God’s truth to the nations, warning of sin and offering hope in Christ, the One who faced judgment for us so that others might find life.
John 11:35 | Jesus knew he would raise Lazarus, but He still entered fully into the grief of that moment because His heart beats in perfect sympathy with His people. He isn’t detached or clinical; He stands among mourners, feels their pain, and weeps with them. His tears show that God’s holiness doesn’t make Him distant; it makes Him tender. Yet His sorrow runs deeper than compassion alone. He’s grieving the greater tragedy behind all funerals: sin’s intrusion into the world He made good. Death is the unnatural end of rebellion, and Jesus feels the weight of that cosmic fracture. His tears are both personal and theological—He weeps because He loves, and because sin’s curse has stolen what love was meant to preserve.
Tuesday
Ezekiel 34:11–24 | This passage gives us one of the most tender promises in the Old Testament. After condemning the false shepherds of Israel—leaders who fed themselves instead of their flock—God declares that He Himself will come to seek the lost, heal the wounded, and bring back the scattered. He will raise up one shepherd to rule over them in justice and peace. For exiles who had been failed by kings and priests, this was a staggering hope: God himself would step into the pasture and take responsibility for His sheep. The Holy One would become the caretaker, not just of a nation, but of hearts.
That promise comes to life in Jesus Christ. When He says, “I am the good shepherd,” He’s claiming to be the fulfillment of Ezekiel’s vision—the divine Shepherd who has come in person. But He doesn’t just lead from beside still waters; He walks into the valley of death for us. He lays down His life for the sheep, taking on the punishment our sin deserves, so that we might be gathered into His fold forever. Through His cross and resurrection, the scattered are brought home, the hungry are fed, and the lost are known by name. Jesus is the Shepherd God promised—and the Shepherd our souls were made for.
Ezekiel 36:24-32 | There’s so much graphic violence and darkness in Ezekiel, especially with that strident refrain “And they will know that I am the LORD” over and over again, as if Samuel L. Jackson wrote this part of the scripture. But then sunshine as radiant as heaven, filled with grace and hope, just pours out of the prophet. The proportions of gloom vs. gladness are a bit heavily weighted, but what glory shines when it does! These proportions are different with every prophet who speaks for God, but praise our God the proportions never weigh out negatively. We aren’t ever left with despair. But it makes sense that the good news is indestructible. After all, that’s the quality and power of the life of Christ and of that life in us. As you read, do you find yourself looking and hoping for a little oasis of grace as you read through the laments and judgments?
John 12 | This is a sonnet I (Chris) wrote on the first event in this chapter:
Mary at Bethany (John 12)
I know that you are Son changed in the holy
Fire, the feet and tears of the foot washed
And God washing for all you are and washed
In all He is, the heaven’s high shout is holy
In the nard her hands pour to be washed
For the murder His hands felt to be holy
For the glory of what could not be holy
Except for the gory wood as blood washed
Linen on me. Oh that we were holy
And in that death’s death and Son’s fire washed
Born of that breath’s breath by the Spirit washed
Linen for you. The perfume of the holy
Washed whose praise is her joy in her glory,
Holy to the Lord is all your story.
Wednesday
Ezekiel 38–39 | This is a passage that is a) tough to understand and b) has been taught in some really unhelpful ways. But when you take this passage for what it is and not as some secret code to figure out the end times timeline and where to put Gog and Magog on a chart, it's actually pretty simple.
When Ezekiel names Gog from the land of Magog, he’s not describing a single ruler in Israel’s past or a specific one in our future. In Ezekiel’s day, “Magog” referred to distant nations at the edges of the known world. “Gog” becomes a symbolic name—an archetype of every arrogant world leader who uses power to dominate and destroy, who raises himself high and pushes God low. The list of nations in the text (Persia, Cush, Put, Gomer, Beth-togarmah) represents the global scope of this evil alliance. Gog is a stand-in for the kind of empire that mocks justice and refuses to honor God’s holiness. To Ezekiel’s exiled audience, beaten down by Babylon’s power, this vision was a reminder that even the strongest human kingdoms are still under the control of a higher hand. God is not passive; he turns Gog “with hooks in his jaws.”
Across these chapters, the language swells with apocalyptic images: earthquakes, hailstones, fire, the valley of mass burial. None of this is meant as a coded war map; it’s the language of divine justice. God paints judgment in colors big enough to match human evil. The battlefield becomes the stage where His holiness and sovereignty are displayed “in the sight of many nations.” And the detail that Gog’s fallen army must be buried for months to “cleanse the land” is not a grisly curiosity, it’s a picture of sin being fully dealt with, of the earth itself made clean from corruption. To exiles wondering if God’s name had been shamed by their defeat, Ezekiel proclaims that the day is coming when God’s greatness will be vindicated before the whole world.
Revelation 20 later picks up Ezekiel’s language: “Satan will go out to deceive the nations at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog.” The final enemy is not a geopolitical figure, it’s the ancient serpent behind them all. In Christ, the true King steps onto the field, not with armies and swords, but with His own blood already spilled. His robe is “dipped in blood” before the battle begins because He conquers through self-sacrifice. Gog’s pride meets its match in Jesus’ humility.
The message for us is what it was for the exiles: no matter how strong the Gogs of history appear, their story always ends the same way. God will make himself known. Evil will fall. And the Spirit He pours out will fill the world with life again.
Psalm 87 | What an odd little poem! It’s all about how great Jerusalem is—almost like one of the descriptions of a place you want to move and live—and how great it is to be from there. A biblical travelogue! And It is theologically grounded; after all, it tells you it’s all because God loves this place better than any other. This focus on a piece of real estate, and one that’s neither glorious nor Godly in our times, can be a bit off-putting to us. This poem could be cast as a bit of patriotic Israeli propaganda. But it isn’t. What’s going on here? Jerusalem winds up being a promise of incarnational love, a love fulfilled in Jesus’ own flesh. In a broad theological sense, you could also interpret this poem as an Old Testament preview of adoption. In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit imparts a sense of our adoption in our hearts. Romans 8 describes the Spirit causing us to call God abba, a child’s word for Father. Because of our connection to Jesus and welcome into God’s family, this Psalm teaches us to claim “born there” rights when it comes to the city of God.
Thursday
Ezekiel 40–46 | This vision of the temple has been a point of interpretive tension for centuries. On the surface, it reads like architectural blueprints—precise dimensions, regulations for offerings, priestly duties, even kitchen layouts. But the interpretive challenge lies in the fact that these plans were never built, and they don’t match the Second Temple constructed under Zerubbabel. The returnees wept when they saw that temple, not because it fulfilled Ezekiel’s vision, but because it fell so short—no glory cloud, no divine fire, no visible presence of God. So what are we to make of these chapters? Are they literal instructions for a future third temple in Jerusalem? Some groups read them that way and even gather materials in anticipation. But the text itself never commands building—it only calls Ezekiel to look and tell. It’s a vision, not a construction order, and the temple is already standing when he sees it.
The key to understanding these chapters is recognizing the kind of literature Ezekiel is writing. He’s not drafting a civic plan; he’s using apocalyptic imagery. God shows him a temple because that’s the image a priest like Ezekiel would understand most deeply. The temple, in the biblical story, represents the overlap between heaven and earth—the place where God’s glory dwells among His people. From Eden to the tabernacle to Solomon’s temple, this theme of divine presence runs like a thread through Scripture. When the first temple was destroyed and God’s glory departed in Ezekiel 10–11, it symbolized humanity’s greatest loss: separation from the presence of God. In this new vision, the glory returns—but not to a literal building—to something greater that all those earlier structures pointed toward.
That greater reality unfolds in Christ and the church. When the Spirit descends in Acts 2 as tongues of fire, it’s the same glory that once filled Solomon’s temple—but now it rests on people. The New Testament’s bold claim is that we are God’s temple; heaven and earth overlap not in stone courts but in redeemed hearts. Revelation then takes Ezekiel’s vision and stretches it to its completion: a world where there’s no temple at all, because “its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.” The conflict over how to read Ezekiel 40–46 resolves when we see the pattern—not a return to ritual sacrifices, but a promise that one day, God’s presence will fill everything. The glory that left the temple has returned for good, and it dwells in His people until the day when heaven and earth become one.
John 14:9 | Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father. | I don’t know words deeper than these. Jesus is on His way in a few hours to His betrayal and execution, and this part of John is pretty rapid-fire truth-intense. It’s one blockbuster teaching after another, with cryptic transcendent comments everywhere. It’s easy to overlook the remarkable things being said by Jesus as they fly by. He is last minute prepping all of the most important things to tell these men He loves so much. The other gospels give us more of the public part of Christ’s ministry leading up to the cross. There’s tons to tell, and it’s a gripping week leading up to the crucifixion. But John pulls back the curtain and lets us see some of the longer personal conversations that were happening. John knew the other gospels hadn’t really touched on these, so he includes a lot of details. Since the Gospel of John was written later, you can imagine Him filling in the blanks, answering the tons of questions folks must’ve asked over the years. In this conversational exchange with the disciples, which happens several times in this discourse, Jesus is speaking peace to them. He’s calming them before the coming storm, especially since at dinner He had told them about a traitor, and now just told them He was leaving. They’re a bit agitated. Then Philp, who’s usually pretty quiet in the gospels, speaks up and goes all in Old Testament style. “Show us the Father,” he says. That’s a very big biblical ask. Moses didn’t even get to see the Father. Who knows what he had in mind, but there are major problems with seeing God at all. Doesn’t go well. Period.
As heavy and loaded as that request was, Jesus’ answer is mind bending. “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” So what that implies is barrier-free access directly to God in and through and because of Jesus. And what it means is brain melting and completely impossible to explain or understand. “No man sees My face and lives.” That’s what God said. “Look at Me and see God.” That’s what Jesus said and could say. It’s a claim that stupifies the mind and should not be. It’s a self description that lifts and exalts and deifies Jesus far above all other humans, while at the same time being His own personal self-description as a fully human Person. Who has ever heard of a God like this? Praise Him!
Friday
Ezekiel 43-45 | These chapters can feel a bit dry with their details, but don’t let that get to you. You and I don’t know a shekel from a cubit, and it’s hard to track it all. But step back and look at how the visions unfold. The restoration of God’s glory is a trigger, and that creates everything that follows. God is in His house, now that the glory comes back, and so there needs to be an altar so He can be approached. And voila! The altar is now restored. But if you have an altar, you need priests to offer sacrifices there. So next the priesthood is restored. And this sets up what follows: the restoration of the land.
What do we do with the details? Read them as a reminder and prompt for your imagination. They remind us, like the original hearers, that God’s work is going to be tangible and measurable. It’s the promise of incarnation that breathes in these minute details, describing God’s commitment and involvement in the details of our lives. It’s reading stuff like this that probably led Jesus to make observations like “every hair of your head is numbered.” It’s the same sort of theological claim. Our hope in reading this should always be restoration for our lives and our times and our community. These chapters map out for us hopes for our own renewal as we seek God’s glory and He seeks to display His glory in Jesus today in our church. What an invitation to marvel at the scale and extent of renewal lives in Ezekiel’s visions!
John 15:4 | Jesus’ command to abide reminds us that good works are never the root of our salvation, but the fruit of our connection to him. In John 14, he promises the Spirit who will dwell in believers—our true power for obedience and love. That means every act of faithfulness, every moment of patience or generosity flows, not from human effort, but from divine life pulsing through us. James says that faith without works is dead, not because works earn grace, but because real grace produces living fruit. We don’t labor to gain God’s favor; we bear fruit because we already have it. Abiding in Christ means resting in what He’s done, while the Spirit makes that grace visible in the way we live.
October 27-31
[M] Ezekiel 16-18; John 6
[T] Ezekiel 19-21; Psalm 84; John 7
[W] Ezekiel 22-24; Psalm 134; John 8
[T] Ezekiel 25-27; Psalm 85; John 9
[F] Ezekiel 28-30; John 10
Dwell Plan Day 216-220 | CSB | Digital PDF | Printable PDF
Notes from Jon & Chris
Monday
Ezekiel 16 | This chapter tells the story of God’s choosing His people by using a romance metaphor, but it’s anything but romantic. In a graphic and almost gruesome description of a child dumped on the ground in childbirth, God tells the story of first meeting and choosing His people. There’s nothing sentimental about it: you were kicking in your blood. He chose life for His people at that moment, and He made them flourish. The romantic feeling part starts at this point, as God’s people are described as a woman of great beauty, pampered by the God who chose them. Adorned, decked out in jewels and fine clothes, God took care to make His people gorgeous to Himself. It’s like the story from Pretty Woman or My Fair Lady, where the love and care of one person transforms the other person into something beautiful and new. But in this story, the romance turns completely sour, and the girl runs off with any loser who will have her, giving her intimacy away like an addict chasing the next high. And it just gets uglier and uglier. This image of God as a jilted lover, a devoted husband who has been cheated on, brings the true Personhood of God into vivid emotional life.
This God is telling us just how personally He takes sin and rebellion. He’s telling us the personal lens He uses to understand our disobedience. He’s a passionate and jealous lover. All of this sin is just cheating and betrayal of the most vile kind. When God tells the story of how betrayed He feels with such visceral force, it’s meant to wake us up. We’re supposed to be alarmed. We’re to awaken to the nature of our sin and the depth of our offences before our God.
And in the end, at the very last line of the chapter, we still have the ardent lover that our God always proves to be. He will atone for His faithless bride. He will be the husband who takes His adulterous wife back and pays for her sin with His own blood. Praise Him!
Ezekiel 17:1–24 | Ezekiel tells a story about two mighty eagles and a small vine. The first eagle swoops down to the mountains of Lebanon, taking the top of a cedar tree and planting it in fertile soil by abundant waters. It grows into a low-spreading vine, sending out its roots toward the eagle that planted it. But soon another great eagle appears, and the vine turns its branches toward this second eagle, hoping to gain strength and flourish under its wings. Yet, because of this divided loyalty, the vine will be uprooted and left to wither in the dry east wind.
The meaning of the parable becomes clear when you dive into the historical context. The first eagle represents Babylon and its king, Nebuchadnezzar, who carried away the royal family of Judah and planted what was left of the nation under King Zedekiah. God allowed this arrangement as a form of discipline and mercy—a chance for Judah to live humbly under Babylon’s rule. But Zedekiah broke his oath and turned toward Egypt for help, violating the covenant he had sworn in God’s name. What looked like political strategy was actually spiritual rebellion. The Lord saw through it all and declared that this treachery would bring destruction, not deliverance.
For the original hearers, this message was a sobering warning: God’s people must not seek rescue through worldly power but through repentance and trust in Him. Yet the story ends with hope. God promises to take a tender sprig from the top of the cedar and plant it on a high mountain, where it will grow into a tree that gives shelter to all creatures. This is one of those Old Testament arrows that points forward to Christ, the true King from David’s line. Where human kings failed through pride and distrust, Jesus reigns in perfect humility and faithfulness—and under His branches, all nations find life and rest.
John 6:1–15 | The feeding of the five thousand is one of the clearest demonstrations that the Gospels are rooted in real history, not religious legend. This miracle was witnessed by an enormous crowd (five thousand men, plus women and children, perhaps twenty thousand people in all.) And it wasn’t performed in a private home or secret gathering, but on a hillside where thousands saw Jesus take five loaves and two fish and multiply them until everyone ate their fill. That’s why all four Gospels record it. When Mark wrote his account only a few decades after the event, there were still hundreds, perhaps thousands, alive who had been there. If this story were fabricated, it would have been easy to disprove. Yet no such correction ever appears, because those who saw it knew it had truly happened.
This matters deeply for our faith. Christianity stands or falls on the claim that God really acted in history—that Jesus truly lived, taught, died, and rose again. The Gospel writers were not composing myths to inspire, but testimonies to declare what they had seen and heard. The feeding of the five thousand reminds us that the same Jesus who provided bread for the crowds is the one who provides life for the world. You can trust what you read in Scripture, because it bears the weight of eyewitness truth and divine authority. Our faith isn’t a leap into the dark—it’s confidence in the God who stepped into history and proved His power and compassion in ways no one could deny. He actually fed the 5,000. He actually died. He actually rose again, and he is actually still working in our churches and in our world.
John 6:37–40, 44 | “All that the Father gives me will come to me” | Jesus’ words pull back the curtain on the mystery of salvation. He teaches that everyone the Father has given to the Son will surely come—and that none of them will ever be cast out. No one can come to Jesus unless the Father draws them, and those drawn are raised up on the last day. These verses are not about human initiative or religious performance, but divine grace from start to finish. The Father gives, the Son receives, and the Spirit draws. Salvation is not a possibility we create, but a certainty secured by God’s will. The same sovereign hand that spoke creation into existence now calls dead hearts to life through Christ.
Paul echoes this same truth in Romans 9, where he insists that God’s mercy does not depend on human desire or effort, but on His gracious choice. “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy,” the Lord declares. This doctrine of divine election humbles us—it silences our boasting and magnifies the glory of God’s grace. Yet it also comforts us deeply: the God who began our salvation will finish it. Our perseverance rests not in our grip on Him but in His eternal grip on us. If you belong to Christ, it is because the Father gave you to Him before the foundation of the world, and nothing can ever separate you from His love. Rest, then, in this unshakable truth: your salvation does not depend on your strength but on the steadfast grace of the God who called you, redeemed you, and will one day raise you up in glory.
Tuesday
Ezekiel 20:33–38 | In this passage, God declares that He will reign over His people with a mighty hand and outstretched arm, not only to judge, but to restore. He will bring His scattered people into the wilderness again, as He did after the exodus, to confront their rebellion and purge their unfaithfulness. Yet even in this severe language, grace glimmers through: God’s discipline is never to destroy His people, but to refine them. Through judgment, He brings them to repentance; through exile, He draws them back to Himself. This is the rhythm of Ezekiel’s message and the rhythm of the gospel—God’s love is so committed that He will not let His people remain enslaved to sin. In Christ, this purifying work is fulfilled once and for all; He bears the judgment we deserved so that we might be brought into the covenant of grace, cleansed and restored to the heart of the Father.
Psalm 84:1–2 | These verses overflow with desire for God’s presence, a longing that feels natural when our hearts are alive to Him. But what about when they’re not? There are seasons when our souls feel dull, our prayers lifeless, and worship feels more like duty than delight. Psalm 84 invites us not to fake emotion, but to ask for renewal. When we don’t long for God as we should, we can pray, “Lord, help me want You again.” The same Spirit who once awakened our hearts can stir them afresh. Don’t despair when the fire burns low; take that longing—or lack of it—honestly to God. He loves to meet cold hearts and warm them by His grace until they sing again.
Wednesday
Ezekiel 23 | This is the closest the Bible gets to pornographic images, and Ezekiel doesn’t hesitate to get awkward and graphic. No surprise there, that’s the tone, images, and language of Ezekiel. But first, right out the gate, what does it mean for a holy and pure God to use such horrific sexual images? These are shocking crossculturally, and the translators are keeping it G rated, which it isn’t in the Hebrew. I think it can only mean this: this is the only way the message can get through to these folks. Which means several things. First, we remember that it’s loving for God to even tell us of His judgments, and it was merciful for Him to warn those original hearers. That’s what a concerned person does, they warn people they care about. The shock tactics are meant to be loving, to reach past the cultural and religious veneers that we have and get to the heart. It also tells us these folks were immersed in these kinds of images, they’re the only images that make sense to a perverse people. It’s an insight into that time and the way those folks thought, what their society was like. Sexual imagery permeated the Baal and Asherah cults around Israel, which all worshiped fertility gods. Sex and temple worship were sometimes the same thing. It was a sex saturated culture, and we have our parallels to it. It was super gross, and so the prophet gets super gross. But this leads into another wonder. It’s amazing how far our God will stoop to reach folks with His mercy. What a humble and loving God.
Ezekiel 24 | This text marks one of the darkest moments in the prophet’s ministry and in Israel’s history. On the very day that Babylon laid siege to Jerusalem, God gave Ezekiel a parable about a boiling pot filled with choice pieces of meat. The pot represented Jerusalem, once God’s chosen city, now corroded by sin and violence. No cleansing would suffice; judgment had to come. That same day, God told Ezekiel that his beloved wife—the delight of his eyes—would die suddenly, and that he must not publicly mourn. The loss of his wife and the fall of Jerusalem are two sides of the same coin: both are precious things taken away as a sign that sin’s cost is devastating and real.
Historically, these events exposed the collapse of Israel’s false security. The people believed Jerusalem, like a strong iron pot, could not be broken. But when the city fell, their illusions shattered. Ezekiel’s personal tragedy was meant to mirror the nation’s: the loss of what they loved most would confront them with the seriousness of their rebellion. God was not being cruel; He was unveiling truth. Their covenant unfaithfulness had corroded their very souls, and the only path forward was through the purifying fire of judgment.
Yet even here, a deeper typology emerges. The God who commanded Ezekiel not to mourn is Himself a God who knows loss. In Christ, God experienced the grief of giving up His own Son for the salvation of His people. What Ezekiel endured symbolically, the Father endured fully—so that His people might be restored. As Hebrews tells us, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.” Jesus entered our pain, bore our judgment, and turned even death into a doorway of hope. Ezekiel’s sorrow pointed forward to the cross where divine love faced its greatest loss so that sinners might receive eternal life.
Psalm 134:1 | The word “bless” in Hebrew comes from the word for “knee.” The etymology is guessed to be about the posture that you take when you are being blessed, and the word is quite clearly about a superior being kind to an inferior. That’s the word used here. So how does that fly theologically? How can we “bless” God in any sense? This is amazing language.
Often we’ll read a verse like this and just supply the meaning “praise” for the word “bless” and that certainly is a part of its meaning. But I still get stuck on that “bless” idea implying the impossible: if I am so far below God in every way, how is it conceivable that I could bless Him? But this little poem supplies the beginning of the answer, because in verse 3 he asks for God to bless the very ones he’s been telling to bless God in verse 1 and 2. What’s going on here?
We learn later in Scripture that all things are “of Him, and through Him, and to Him.” Our ability to bless anyone is a result of the blessing of God in our lives to begin with, and the first fruits of that blessing is our desire and ability to now bless Him! It’s circular, but it’s a circle as big as God, so the whole universe fits inside of it. In this, and in our relationship with God, we see a corollary of this truth experienced in heaven. That is, an implicit expanding eternal feedback loop of wonder. The more blessed I am by God, the more and more I am a blessing to Him, and so an eternity of discovery becomes an experience of neverending joy. Blessing cubed? Praise Him!
John 7:53-8:11 | Here is the ESV Study Bible note explaining what's going on with this passage:
There is considerable doubt that this story is part of John’s original Gospel, for it is absent from all of the oldest manuscripts. But there is nothing in it unworthy of sound doctrine. It seems best to view the story as something that probably happened during Jesus’ ministry but that was not originally part of what John wrote in his Gospel. Therefore it should not be considered as part of Scripture and should not be used as the basis for building any point of doctrine unless confirmed in Scripture.
John 8:12 | When Jesus declares Himself the light of the world, He’s not introducing a new idea but revealing the fullness of what John had already said: “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men” (John 1:3–4). The same Word who created light in the beginning now steps into a dark world to bring spiritual sight and life to all who believe. In creation, light separated day from night; in redemption, Jesus separates truth from deception, hope from despair, life from death. Following Him means no longer stumbling through shadows, but living in the radiance of His presence. Every heart that turns to Christ is experiencing the same miracle that began at Genesis 1—God saying again, “Let there be light.”
Thursday
Psalm 85:9 | The heartbeat of redemption has always been God’s presence with His people. Salvation is not merely escape from judgment or a ticket to heaven; it is the restoration of fellowship with the living God. Psalm 85 captures this beautifully: salvation is “near,” not just in concept but in relationship, because God Himself draws near. The end of the story is not us achieving something, but Him dwelling among us. From Eden to the tabernacle, from Christ’s incarnation to the indwelling Spirit, and finally to the new creation where “the dwelling place of God is with man,” everything moves toward this one goal. Every blessing, every act of grace, every glimpse of glory—these are all foretastes of that final reality. Anything else we pursue, even good things, are side quests compared to this: God Himself with His people forever.
John 9 | This entire chapter is one complete story and makes one ironic spiritual point: the ones who think they can see and understand the best are often the most spiritually blind. Do you have spiritual perception? Who is the most blind person in this story? What is the nature of spiritual blindness? These are the sorts of questions this story provokes. One part of human spiritual blindness is to speculate about people’s karma. Karma is not a biblical idea, but a Hindu one; but the disciples' question in verse 2 reflects a karmic view of the universe and not a biblical one. Which makes sense of why Jesus quickly corrects them. What’s the immediate irony? The disciples are blind! This chapter is about the opening of their eyes and the blind man’s eyes—and even your eyes if you have faith! What is the world that Jesus sees with His true sight? A world where God His Father is orchestrating and working and preparing good works for Him to do. He lives in a God drenched world of possibilities, where God is presenting opportunities for His glory everywhere. Our responsibility is to perceive and respond to this world through spiritual insight, power, and healing.
Friday
Ezekiel 28:1; 29:3 | In Ezekiel’s oracles against Tyre and Egypt, we see two earthly rulers who embody the same spiritual sickness that began in Eden: the desire to take God’s place. The prince of Tyre boasts, “I am a god, I sit in the seat of the gods,” and Pharaoh claims, “The Nile is mine; I made it for myself.” Beneath their political power and national pride lies the same impulse that infects all humanity: the urge to lift up self and lower the glory of God. Sin is not just the breaking of rules; it’s the dethroning of the Creator in our hearts. Every act of rebellion begins with the assumption that we know better, that we can define truth, beauty, and good on our own terms. The tragedy of Tyre and Pharaoh is the tragedy of the human race: we want to be sovereign, and we cannot bear the thought of anyone ruling over us.
This is why Scripture describes sin not only as disobedience but as cosmic treason. From Genesis 3 onward, every story of human failure echoes this same theme—people exalting themselves to the place of God. Babel tried to reach heaven. Israel’s kings built altars to their own greatness. Even religious hypocrisy in Jesus’ day was pride dressed up as piety. Sin’s root is always this: the dethroning of God in exchange for self-rule. It’s why pride is the deadliest of sins—because it hides rebellion beneath the illusion of control. When we exalt ourselves, everything collapses inward; when we dethrone God, we unravel the very order of creation.
And yet, in the deepest irony of redemption, the cure for our rebellion came through the One who willingly stepped down from His throne. Where Adam and every human king grasped for glory, Christ emptied Himself. The eternal Son did not cling to His divine rights but took on flesh, humbled Himself, and hung from a cross. The rulers of Tyre and Egypt exalted themselves and were brought low; Jesus humbled Himself and was exalted above every name. The way back to life is not through self-elevation, but through surrender to the crucified King—the One who shows us that true glory is found not in taking the throne, but in bowing before it.
John 10:16 | There’s a bit of comedy for all dog owners when anyone else commands their dog. It might work; you may get a paw or a quick sit, but the animal won’t come easily and its obedience is merely a whim. But when the owner calls, everything is different. Sheep are even more like that. They get used to one voice (they’re too stupid to be taught any tricks) and once they know that voice, that’s the only voice they will even acknowledge.
This is what God’s people are like. We recognize Jesus. It’s how evangelism works. It’s really just folks recognizing who Jesus is; realizing it and knowing who Jesus is through real world data, God’s words, and spiritual experience. That’s how we all learn to “recognize” Jesus in different songs, sermons, and media. Folks will often ask how we got the books that are in our Bibles. That collection of books is called our “canon,” an old word for “rule.” In the early church a common set of books were recognized (there’s that word again!) by the universal consent of the early church. How? The early church was not a unified bunch. So how did the church form the canon? How did they ever agree? But I think this verse, where Jesus tells us that we’ll listen to His voice like sheep do their shepherd, is predicting how the official list of the books of the Bible formed. The church never formed the canon. The canon formed the church. The Bible creates who the people of God are—we are a people of the Word. Do you recognize His voice? Can you spot the counterfeit?
