This evening was so very wonderful. I managed to get to my bible study with the help of the pastor who teaches it. You see, I really have rather rotten short term memory. Those brain cells seem to be those most affected by those things wreaking havoc in my body. I make lists. I plan. I set up reminders. I used electronic aids. Still, I forget.

The pastor, bless his heart, emailed me several reminder, the last one in all caps. Even so, I had come home and crawled into my pajamas and thrown myself on the couch before I remembered once more that I was going to make my way to the bible study come rain or sleet or snow.

The bible study, as I have mentioned before, is one my writing student's mother found on the Internet. It is taught by a Lutheran pastor and attended by members of his congregation. It meets every other week when not in conflict with the church calendar, i.e., that is not during advent or lent. Oh, yeah, the people who come are all quite old.

When G and I first arrived, I looked around, felt stupid for crashing some geriatric gathering, and wanted to leave. However, half way through the bible study I realized what a privildege it was to be with folks who still hungered for the Word of God after an entire lifetime.

The pastor teaches as if it were some sort of seminary class. Well, at least he teaches straight from the bible, giving historical and theological background. Each time I go, I am blessed by my time there. I am challenged by God's Word. And I revel in the time of study.

Anyhow, G picked me up and off we went. I was keen to get there because this was to be the only one before Lent begins, which means that we wouldn't be meeting again until after Easter. Since this was a one-timer, the pastor was teaching on a separate topic, rather than continue our study of Isaiah. He chose to read about the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts 8. Read that chapter and then Isaiah 53 (where the Eunuch was reading by the side of the road) and then in Isaiah 54 and 56 (where he most likely continued reading).

If you read in Acts, you learn that this nameless official of the court of Candace (a rank, not a name), you would learn that he was coming back from Jerusalem where he went to worship the Lord. Now, if you are like the Pastor, you would remember how Deuteronomy tells us that eunuchs were not allowed in the temple. And if you carry a layout of the temple in your mind, you would remember that the court of the Gentile was the outermost place. So, you would realize that this was a very disappointed man having been rejected in his attempt to worship the god he had been reading about in the Isaiah, the purchase of which points to his commitment to to discovering truth given the outlay of monies that purchase would have involved. However, all I knew was that he was on his way back from Jerusalem...that is, it was all I knew until Pastor started teaching.

The Holy Spirit sent Philip to meet the eunuch. When the apostle heard him reading, he asked him to share. The passage that follows in Acts is a quote from Isaiah 53, the passage of the suffering servant.

He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He did not open His mouth; like a lamb that is led to slaughter, and like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, so He did not open His mouth. By oppression and judgment He was taken away; and as for His generation, who considered, who considered that He was cut off out of the land of the living, for the transgression of my people to whom the stroke was due?

The eunuch was moved by hearing of Christ, seeing how He, too, was rejected and He, too, had no hope of descendants. He asked Philip, probably rather tentatively, if, given that there was water nearby, there were any reason why he could not be baptized. He probably was expecting to be rejected once more. However, Philip replied with the Truth that the eunuch should have encountered in Jerusalem. All that was necessary was for him to believe in Christ.

He confessed his belief and was baptized. The Holy Spirit whisked Philip away. And the eunuch went on his way rejoicing.

Pastor asked us how Luke could have known that the eunuch went on his way rejoicing. A good question, eh? He posited that perhaps the eunuch, thrilled by what he had discovered in chapter 53 of his Isaiah scroll, kept reading, especially since he had a long drive home in that chariot of his. If he did, he would have read how God would use the barren one to establish His generations. The eunuch was barren. Another connection.

If he read further, he would have found that the text written 700 years before he took a breath were the lines that shaped his life. In chapter 56, he would see that God would preserve justice, far from treatment the eunuch found at the temple. He would see that God would have the foreigner welcomed and the eunuch given a name and a house within His walls and generations beyond him. Justice. A Name. Belonging. Future Generations. Promise after promise that spoke to the empty corners of the eunuch's heart.

Still, that is only supposition, right? How did Luke know that the eunuch went on his way rejoicing? Well, tradition among early Christians holds that this eunuch went on to become the father of the Coptic church in Ethiopia, one of the oldest expressions of Christianity that survives to this day, a church from which came Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Athanasius. It is a church hard pressed on all sides, yet one that has stood fast against the rise of Islam to hold to the Truth of God's Word.

2,000 years later, I am reading in God's Word of a man who read God's Word written 700 years before him. I am reading of the power of faith even when faced with absolute opposition. I am reading of a man who was nameless and barren and had no place. Yet God had a plan. He spoke to Isaiah for all the generations to come. He also spoke to a single man. And He spoke to me.

The eunuch was in the desert, literally and figuratively, when He was quenched by the Living Water of Christ. The eunuch's life had been as God had purposed to bring him to a point where he was reading a scroll of Isaiah on a road at a time and place that was perfect in God's time and in God's plan.

Is not God's sovereignty a marvelous and wondrous mystery?