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Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.
That's the key thing to me. Knowing how intricate his plan for people and events over thousands of years was, the plan that brought His only son to be sacrificed for us, is a blessing in itself over and above the portions of Scripture you're studying. The more you understand how interconnected His Word and plan is, the less you’ll ever doubt that He does watch over His own and does know when even a sparrow falls.
Regards
Quite a good treatise on Bible reading. I do wish Rome would apply such an impartial and encompassing respect for scripture to a good scrutiny of Her traditions.
“If an earthly king, our emperor, wrote you a letter, would you not read it with joy? Certainly, with great rejoicing and careful attention. You have been sent a letter, not by any earthly emperor, but by the King of Heaven. And yet you almost despise such a gift, so priceless a treasure....Whenever you read the Gospel, Christ Himself is speaking to you. And while you read, you are praying and talking to Him.” +Tikhon of Zadonsk
“In a lot of cases, the New Testament reading is prefigured in the Old Testament.”
One such case has given me a deeper understanding of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
I have often pondered the meaning of the phrase “give us this day, our daily bread” in the Lord’s Prayer. What is this bread that we ask to be given to us daily? The answer came to me in the readings for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B.
The first reading is from Exodus 16. In verse 4, The LORD said to Moses, “I will now rain down bread from heaven for you. Each day the people are to go out and gather their daily portion.” In verse 16, Moses tells the Isrealites, “This is the bread which the LORD has given you to eat.”
The Gospel reading ends with the following from John 6:30-35. So they (the crowd) said to him, “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you? What can you do? Our ancestors ate manna in the desert, as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” So Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” So they said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.
Further on in John:6, Jesus refers to himself several more times as bread. In verse 52 he says: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” To this the Jews said, “How can this man give us (his) flesh to eat?”
Jesus gives His answer at the Last Supper. From Matthew 26:26 - While they were eating, Jesus took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and giving it to his disciples said, “Take and eat; this is my body.”
So this daily bread that Jesus taught us to ask for from the Father is His body in the Holy Eucharist.