Daily Word, Pentecost 6A

Daily Word, Pentecost 6A

Daily Bible Readings for the Week of the Sixth Sunday of Pentecost, Year A

Join us for Morning Prayer in the chapel, Monday through Friday* at 8:30am, where we read and discuss these Scriptures and pray together. We do the same during Vespers in the parsonage Sunday evenings at 6pm. Join us! The parsonage is across the street from the church. 

Our readings for the week of the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost are listed below. Each verse is linked and will open to Biblia so you may read online. Click the link to read online or read in your Bible. The additional reading each day speaks to the common conversation between the three readings.

Judgment and Restoration 

Our readings this week show us the mercy of God arching from human rebellion to divine restoration through mediating sacrifice and the formation of a new covenant community. The progression moves from judgment through intercession to ultimate redemption.

God’s holiness stands as the central organizing principle, and obedience and disobedience determine whether the people maintain orientation toward God. The Numbers passages chronicle escalating rebellion — from the people’s refusal to enter Canaan, through Korah’s challenge to Moses’s authority, to Moses’s own transgression — each violation met with judgment that disciplines but does not destroy.

Despite judgment for sin, God remains with the people, protects them, and retains them as his chosen people. Moses responds to the people’s continued failure with intercession, and in response to Moses’s intercession, God relents and allows the people to live. The pattern repeats over and over throughout the Old Testament: rebellion, judgment, intercession, grace.

The Romans passages reframe this pattern theologically. Where Numbers shows human failure met by God’s mercy through a mediator’s intervention, Romans reveals the cosmic principle underlying it: sin and unbelief, especially rebellion, reap the judgment of God. But human sin and rebellion will not thwart divine purpose. A whole generation may be lost but the plan of God moves forward. Christ’s obedience, death, and resurrection accomplish what no human mediator could: the justification of the ungodly and the establishment of a new covenant community.

Matthew’s passages show this redemptive arc enacted: the people’s rejection of Jesus’s authority, his sacrificial death, and his vindication through resurrection. While God cannot ignore disobedient unfaithfulness, the people are neither destroyed nor abandoned. The promise is delayed but then restated. The wilderness becomes not merely a place of punishment but the crucible where a new generation emerges, prepared to inherit what the old generation forfeited.

Sunday: Numbers 14:26–45; Acts 15:1–12; Luke 12:49–56

Man plucked the forbidden fruit, and dearly was that apple paid for in the fall of all our race. The Lord redeemed us in his boundless love, but not without a price: the free mercy of God cannot work its way among men except heaven’s best treasure be spent to purchase men from bondage. Expense occurs everywhere in our salvation: “The price of pardon was the Saviour’s blood;” “To buy our souls it cost his own.”

C. H. Spurgeon, “Travelling Expenses on the Two Great Roads,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, vol. 11 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1865), 181–182.

Monday: Numbers 16:1–19; Romans 3:21–31; Matthew 19:13–22

A phenomenon of unhappy significance [...] began to appear in the fifth and sixth centuries, which must be noticed and sketched, if we are to understand the obscuration of the truth of justification at the opening of the sixteenth century. The religious life of the Church was undergoing a great change. It was lowered in tone, and the sense of sin was declining. Under the growing claims of priestly power and the hierarchical construction of the Church as an external organization, in alliance with the State, and its self-identification with the “kingdom of God,” there came a loss of spiritual life and of conscious relation to the necessities of sinful humanity. It brought, on the one hand, a declining sense of the need of redemption and forgiveness by grace, and, on the other, a large use of human substitutes in the form of piacular masses, penances, indulgences, bodily mortifications, and special good works. Forgiveness of sins was made attainable through these means. The complete atonement, “made once for all,” was practically discounted, and men were put upon the effort to work out a righteousness of their own.

Milton Valentine, Christian Theology & 2, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Lutheran Publication Society, 1906), 218.

Tuesday: Numbers 16:20–35; Romans 4:1–12; Matthew 19:23–30

And this is the intention of the apostle Paul when in this article he so diligently and earnestly emphasizes the exclusive particles, i.e. the words whereby works are excluded from the article of justification: absque operibus, sine lege, gratis, non ex operibus, i. e. “of grace,” “without merit,” “without works,” “not of works.” These exclusive particles are all comprised in the expression: “By faith alone in Christ we are justified before God and saved.” For thereby works are excluded, not in the sense that a true faith can exist without contrition, or that good works should, must and dare not follow true faith as sure and indubitable fruits, or that believers neither dare nor must do anything good; but that good works are excluded from the article of justification before God, so that in the transaction of the justification of the poor sinner before God they should not be introduced, inserted, or intermingled as necessary or belonging thereto

Henry Eyster Jacobs, ed., The Book of Concord; Or, The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia: General Council Publication Board, 1916), 576.

Wednesday: Numbers 16:36–50; Romans 4:13–25; Matthew 20:1–16

But if all is to be placed on the new ground of grace, with which, indeed, the whole bearing of the later labourers accords, then (as St. Paul also shows) the labourers who murmured were guilty either of ignorance in failing to perceive the sovereignty of grace—that it is within His power to do with His own as He willeth—or else of malevolence, when, instead of with grateful joy, they looked on with an evil eye—and this in proportion as ‘the Householder’ was good.

Alfred Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, vol. 2 (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896), 419.

Thursday: Numbers 17:1–11; Romans 5:1–11; Matthew 20:17–28

The self-emptying of Christ in the incarnation, then, meant the retention of divine qualities and powers, but under the restraints and limitations of a human life. There was a voluntary suspension of the full exercise of divine attributes in the incarnation. But potentially all divine resources were present. For the time and purpose of the incarnate life there was in part a self-reduced form of being. “He emptied himself.” “He took the form of a servant.”

Edgar Young Mullins, The Christian Religion in Its Doctrinal Expression (Philadelphia; Boston; St. Louis; Los Angeles; Chicago; New York; Toronto: Roger Williams Press, 1917), 184–185.

Friday: Numbers 20:1–13; Romans 5:12–21; Matthew 20:29–34

There has been a long battle in this world between man’s sin and God’s grace. If it had been a fight between man’s sin and God’s justice, it would soon have come to an end... But, happily for us, the conflict with which we are just now concerned is not that between justice and sin but that between grace and God’s milder attribute of mercy has entered the field, and in our text Paul tells us the result of the battle. It looked for a time as if sin would gain the victory, for it abounded more and more; but at the last the banner of grace waved triumphantly over the battlefield, for “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.”

C. H. Spurgeon, “Grace Abounding,” in The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, vol. 58 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1912), 253.

Saturday: Numbers 20:14–29; Romans 6:1–11; Matthew 21:1–11

Christ’s death is too great, too singular to typify anything. Our little inward death to sin which was made possible by his mighty death for the world’s sin only resembles his death and no more. And the resemblance lies in this that, as he died and rose again, so we died to sin in order to enter a new life. 

R. C. H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (Columbus, Ohio: Lutheran Book Concern, 1936), 399.

*We do not meet in the chapel on Saturdays. On Sundays, we meet in the parsonage at 6pm to discuss the readings.

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