A book with 500 pages can be daunting. If I have a book of this nature recommended to me I will most often look to Amazon for an executive summary. If I’m really honest, there are times I’ll read that, a few of the reviews and then decide to stop. The idea of wading through the whole script seems just too daunting a task.

Jesus has a knack for ruining a good thing.

He does it here—turns everyone’s bubbling affection into murderous rage. One minute they’re ready to carry him on their shoulders, the next toss him off a cliff. And he ignites that with an incendiary speech.

“’I know who you are! You are God’s Holy One. . . . You are the Son of God!’ . . . the demons . . . knew he was the Messiah” (v 41).

One thing you can’t fault the devil for is his orthodoxy. He is one sharp dogmatist. His favourite subject is theology.

Sometimes Jesus’ recruitment strategies seem counter intuitive. Designed to dwindle the ranks, not swell them. Devised to chase potential donors and followers away, not attract them.

This passage raises a question, raised elsewhere in the gospels, about the so-called messianic secret: that Jesus spent the first stretch of his earthly ministry on a kind of stealth mission, in a kind of game of cloak-and-dagger.

Sometimes when we read the Old Testament we forget that the people living then did not have the New Testament with the full revelation of God that we have in Jesus. Still less did Job and his contemporaries, who did not even live in Israel and were probably not Jewish. There is no evidence that they had access to any of the Old Testament. So how did they know about God?

Have you been the target of venomous words? Have you been the victim of cruel and malicious people? Bullying is rampant in our schoolyards.