Month: April 2020

Week 14 Psalm 34

A while ago I created three categories of psalms using my Title Underlining System:
     Good psalms (not underlined in my bible);
     Really good psalms (underlined in black);
     Best psalms (underlined in red).
Today I landed on: PSALM 34 (red underlined, so one of my best).
Verse four caught my attention: I sought the Lord, and He answered me, and delivered me out of all my fears.
While I’m reading the bible two things are going on. First, I’m reading my chapters to get through. Secondly I’m asking: is there any kind of mutuality going on here – anything in play between me and the text? Is there some derivative for me? 
But then there’s something else going on. Let’s say I find a derivative that makes good sense to me. If I do that’s pretty satisfying.
But what if I find a derivative that doesn’t make sense? Let’s say the text says: I prayed to the Lord, and he answered me, freeing me from all my fears. But what if my real life experience is that I prayed to the Lord, and he didn’t answer me, and didn’t free me from all my fears?
Sure, one solution is to just say the bible is useless. But my rule-to-self is: you gotta make distinctions between what the text says and what the text means. If the bible was a grade-three reader I maybe don’t need the rule. But I’m thinking it isn’t. 

Note: quote from the NASB and the NLT.

Week 14 I Samuel

Saul was Israel’s first king, and he started out pretty well. The Lord endorsed him, put his spirit on him, helped him get established. But in chapter thirteen something happens. After that it’s all down, down, down for Saul.
The tricky thing for the bible reader is that what Saul did seems wrong, but it’s also understandable.
What he did was to offer a sacrifice to God. Since he wasn’t a Levite he shouldn’t have. So when Samuel arrived he asked Saul a probing question: what is this you have done?
But Saul had an answer, had his reasons…
     My troops were panicking
     You didn’t get here in time
     The Philistines were ready to attack
     A sacrifice needed to be made
These were all true, and under the circumstances made logical sense. But Samuel paid no attention to Saul’s excuses. He just said: how foolish! You have disobeyed the command of the Lord your God. Then he added that the Lord was looking for a king who – unlike Saul – was: a man after his own heart. Obedience and heart. 
This juxtaposing of OT-law-and-your-heart has come up before. I saw it in Deuteronomy, quite a few times. Now here it is again. OT obedience isn’t so much looking like a mechanical legalism, isn’t like dancing with a droid. I think it’s more like finding an Andalusian gypsy who wants to fandango.

Notes: quotes from I Samuel 13:11, 13, 14. Deuteronomy  6:4-9 is a nice example of religion of the heart.

Week 14 I-II Samuel

Israel was battling the Philistines. Idiotically they decided to take the ark of the covenant into battle – a kind of big, good-luck charm.
The Philistines won anyway. Even worse, they captured the ark.
The ark landed in Ashdod. Right away an epidemic began. People died. As pre-scientifically dopey as the Ashdod Philistines were they started putting two-&-two together.
They shipped the ark to Gath. Epidemic arrived in Gath.
Gath shipped the ark to Ekron. Epidemic ravaged Ekron.
It seemed pretty clear: the ark was a health hazard. But they decided to run a more definitive social scientific-type case study to test the link between the ark and the plague. They put the ark on a cart and pointed the cows toward Israel. The logic was that if the cows left Ekron then: we will know it was the Lord who brought this great disaster upon us. But if the cows did the natural thing and stayed home: we will know that the plague was simply a coincidence.
The Philistines proved to their satisfaction that the plague was not a chance epidemic. Which is all they wanted to know. Philistine theology seemed to be that geographic proximity was a factor for gods. Get far enough away and you’re safe. Which is a pretty handy idea. A god who could transcend distance would obviously be a bit more of a concern.

Note: quotes from I Samuel 6:9 (NLT version). The ark is described back in Exodus 25-27.