Month: June 2020

Week 27 Jeremiah

I finished reading Jeremiah today.
In chapter 51 there’s a pretty interesting story I’d use if I was a fiction writer. My novel would have adventure, intrigue, danger, exotic locales, and life-threatening risk. I’d be Indiana Joe, an archaeologist searching for the Lost Babylonian Scroll of Jeremiah.
It’s kind of totally plausible. After Jeremiah finished his one-hundred-plus verses of withering oral denunciation against Babylon he had it transcribed (which is absolutely perfect since I’ve got nothing to search for unless I get Jeremiah’s spoken prophecy into writing). Better yet, he gave the scroll to a guy named Seraiah, told him to read it publicly in Babylon, and then to throw it into the Euphrates River!
So there I have it – an actual-tangible-for-real archaeologist-friendly document at the bottom of the river for me to discover.
Okay, I know the bible doesn’t say that Seraiah sealed the scroll in a watertight container that would last for twenty-five-hundred years. But not to worry – that’s why we have fiction.

Note: the story of Jeremiah getting his oral speech into text-form is in Jeremiah 51:59-64. The scroll likely contained our Jeremiah 50:1-51:58.
Added note: I calculated my end-of-month numbers. Total pages read from January – June = 1115. So I’ve read 64.45% of the bible. I feel pretty good about that. But…then I checked last year’s numbers. I’d finished the entire OT by July 12, 2019 – 77% in 6.5 months – but on December 31 I still had 50 unread psalms. Hard to believe. So anyway I won’t count my chickens yet.

Week 27 Jeremiah

The story in chapters 41-43 goes like this…
Nebuchadnezzar had sacked Jerusalem and then gone home.
He left a puppet-administrator in place – Gedaliah.
Before long Gedaliah was assassinated and a military commander named Johanan stepped into the leadership hornet’s-nest. Nebuchadnezzar would be mad, and Johanan’s plan was to escape to Egypt.
So: to run or not to run? 
The people decided to ask Jeremiah.
This part of the story is pretty interesting because the people give Jeremiah an ironclad guarantee that they’d do whatever the Lord said: whether we like it or not, we will obey.
The Lord showed Jeremiah that if the Judeans wanted to stay alive they had to stay in Jerusalem. And right away the people’s reaction was: you lie! The Lord our God hasn’t forbidden us to go to Egypt!
A lot of times prophecy is a prediction about something that hasn’t happened yet. And the general idea is that whether-I-like-it-or-not I’ll accept it.
In reality it’s more like: I’ll endorse prophecies I prefer and veto the ones I don’t.  When it comes to a prophesy’s acceptability the key thing is personal preference.
About three months ago I read the story of king Ahab. His view of Micaiah was: I hate him. He never prophesies anything but bad news for me.
So the secret of popularly successful prophecy is: find out what people want to hear and tell them that.

Notes: quotes from Jeremiah 42:6 & 43:6; and I Kings 22:8 (NLT version)

Week 27 Jeremiah 

During the long siege of Jerusalem the Lord told Jeremiah to buy some land in his home town of Anathoth. It didn’t seem like a wise investment choice because Nebuchadnezzar would soon own that land.
So after the deed was signed and sealed Jeremiah prayed: O Sovereign Lord! You have made the heavens and the earth by your great power. Nothing is too hard for you!
It’s a pretty emphatic comment. Nothing is too hard for you! Nothing takes in pretty much everything.
But then Jeremiah’s prayer ended with an and-yet. You’re the greatest and most powerful and you can do anything: and yet, O Sovereign Lord, you have told me to buy the field – paying good money for it before these witnesses – even though the city will soon belong to the Babylonians.
Jeremiah knew for sure that the Lord was way past the borders of any known limitation – he was a permanent resident of nothing-too-hard country, a spirit of hyper-potent and insuperable capacity.
And yet Jeremiah was concerned about his property.
It’s like I win the lottery and I’m distressed about my broken gate-latch.
Normally you’d think that being totally personally certain about one big thing that by definition took care of everything else would – in a natural, seamless kind of way – carry-over and guarantee total personal certainty about other small things.
But Jeremiah was concerned about his gate-latch.

Note: quotes from Jeremiah 32:17, 25 (NLT version)

Week 26 Psalm 119

I read Psalm 119 today.
I didn’t plan to because it’s pretty long. At first I figured I’d group the twenty-two sub-sections into five-paragraph chunks, read one-a-day and finish the last two on June 30. But in the end I read it all.
The 119th is a psalm about how the bible can help me in some personal ways where I need personal help. I’d forgotten about how 119 hammers away at the importance of the bible. it doesn’t let up. Things it can help me do. Things it can help me avoid. Once I got started it wasn’t so hard to keep at it.
Here’s one example: how can a young man keep his way pure? It’s a pretty good question: how can I live and speak and think and act and feel my way through the day in as decontaminated a way as possible?
119 says the answer is: by living according to your word.
So a long and likely complex process (personal pollution-control-and-management) starts with a fairly simple exercise (read the bible).
I need to start with the reading-your-word part so I can locate the track that I need to start tracking so I can actually start the living-according-to-your-word part so I can begin becoming more immaculate than I am right now.
Becoming a more pristine guy will no doubt have untidy, disconsolating, hit & miss, and complicated days, so it’s fortunate that it begins simple.
It begins with starting to read.

Note: quote from Psalm 119:9 (NLT version)

Week 26 Jeremiah

Chapter 26 is a day-in-the-life-of-a-prophet story.
That morning the Lord told Jeremiah to go to the temple and give a public speech: if you will not listen to me…then I will destroy this temple…and I will make Jerusalem an object of cursing.
Not exactly a feel-good speech, and when Jeremiah was finished the audience’s reception was very cool. In fact they wanted to kill him for being unpatriotic. Serious questions about whether the temple would, or could, or might possibly in fact be destroyed weren’t up for discussion. Jeremiah had broken a non-negotiable-topics taboo. Which couldn’t be tolerated.
Fortunately for him the crowd was divided on the death penalty. The temple priests and the prophets lined up in favour of capital punishment. But the crowd and city officials wanted to hear him out. Some of them remembered a story, a precedent from long before. The prophet Micah had spoken a darkly critical omen against Hezekiah but the king didn’t execute him. So in a better-safe-than-sorry decision Jeremiah’s life was spared.
This was probably a tenser day than usual for Jeremiah.
But based on what he’s been saying for the last 25 chapters you wonder how frequently he operated close to the cultural no-fly zone.

Note: quote from Jeremiah 26:4-6 (NLT version). The Micah-Hezekiah story might be from II Chronicles 32:24-26. (Micah comes 147-pages after Jeremiah in my bible, but he prophesied many decades before him.)

Week 26 Jeremiah

I’ve been tracking the things that Jeremiah prophesied against. Since idolatry was one of the top-ranked problems I was thinking about idolatry. So Psalm 115 surprised me because it talked about idols:
They have mouths, but cannot speak
Eyes, but they cannot see…
Ears, but cannot hear
Noses, but they cannot smell…
Hands, but cannot feel
Feet, but they cannot walk.
Idols have none of the normal sensory capacities a person does. As far as being human goes, idols are sub-human.
But 115 says something unexpected: those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.
I guess I shouldn’t have been caught off guard. A couple of weeks ago Isaiah was talking about a carpenter going into the forest, cutting down a cypress tree and carving it into a god. Then what happens? He bows down to it and worships. He prays to it.
His icon gains the carpenter’s trust. Eventually he’ll become like what he made.
What’s he becoming if he’s becoming something less than human?
This is a pretty worrisome question.
The bible contrasts an idol’s nothing with the Lord’s something.
The bible says I can devolve to a point where I prefer the nothing to the something.
I have the capacity to trade in being human, and once that’s done I can start working at becoming nothing.

Notes: quotes from Psalm 115:4-7, 8; Isaiah 44:17 (NIV & NASB versions)

Week 26 Jeremiah

When the Lord told Jeremiah to quit praying for Jerusalem because prayers were now useless Jeremiah reacted. He was a never-say-die pro-Jerusalem guy and so he argued.
He figured the Lord should consider the fact that the people in Jerusalem had been lied to by their leaders. Q: since they’ve been propagandized with false information don’t you think you should cut them some slack?
The Lord admitted: the prophets are prophesying lies in my name. I have not sent them or appointed them or spoken to them. They are prophesying to you false visions, divinations, idolatries and the delusions of their own minds. The next verse says that the propagandists would be punished.
Okay…and what about the people who’d been propagandized? Will they be absolved? Verse sixteen doesn’t reassure Jeremiah. Those gullible people will: be thrown out into the streets.
The way Jeremiah frames his argument is that there are two categories of people: guilty people who propagandize and innocent people who are propagandized.
But the Lord groups it differently. Deluders and the people they delude are both guilty. It’s people who are propaganda-resistant who are innocent.
Chapter fourteen is a good reminder. If I have a bunch of lies coming at me I need some kind of self-protective lie-detection-alert-system because I can’t blame the liar for fooling me with his lies. Just myself for believing them.

Note: quotes from Jeremiah 14:14, 16 (NIV version)

Week 25 Psalm 111 & 112

I read Psalm 111.
Before I flipped over to Jeremiah I glanced at Psalm 112.
111 & 112 both start with praise the Lord.
Both have ten verses.
Both have a paragraph break at verse-seven.
Might not mean much but there’s a kind of visual symmetry.
I walked into the other room and scanned pages 866 & 867, scissored-out the two psalms, taped 111 together at the page-break, then clipped them onto a sheet of yellow 8½ x 11. I lined them up side-by-side.
The content is different: 111 is about the Lord; 112 about a person who reveres the Lord.
But I see that 111:3b says the Lord’s righteousness endures forever, and 112:3b says the person’s righteousness endures forever.
111:4b says the Lord is gracious and compassionate. 112:4b says the person is gracious and compassionate.
I disregard the verse-numbers and count the number of phrases in 111. There’s 22. 22 in 112, too.
So I’m thinking that maybe something’s going on, something I didn’t see before. Maybe some kind of literary form. A kind of Hebrew sonnet.
How many times do I ask: couldn’t he have written this in an easier way?
Maybe he could have. And maybe he did. Maybe he wrote a soothing ancient-near-eastern sonnet that only translated into teeth-grinding contemporary English.
While I’m looking at bible content I can’t forget about content’s submerged side. Maybe culture, or language, or 22-line sonnets.
So it’s useful to remind myself: if you want low-demand reading go look at a Canadian news magazine.

Note: quotes from NASB version.

Week 25 Jeremiah

The Lord is quoted in Jeremiah six. He’s speaking to people who’ve lost their way: stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it; and you shall find rest for your souls.
Another version: stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.
Another version: stop right where you are! Look for the old, godly way, and walk in it. Travel its path, and you will find rest for your souls.
A couple of years ago I read an essay where a guy was quoted saying that: post-modernism is xenophobic to the past. Hmmm. I’m not sure how much fear contemporary people have of the past. Some I guess. Personally I think a more common feeling is to disregard it. Different? Check. Contemptible? Check. Inapplicable? Check. Irrelevant? Check.
But the Lord says I should look back. Back might feel foreign, but it’s a good way. There’s rest in back, something for my soul in back.
It isn’t an easy choice, no doubt about that. Which is too bad because what I decide about the ancient paths makes a pretty big difference.

Notes: quote from Jeremiah 6:16 NASB, NIV & NLT versions. Makoto Fujimura ‘Walking Backward Into the Future’ in refractions: a journey of faith, art, and culture (Navpress: Colorado Springs, 2009) 133, quotes Thomas Oden’s After Modernity…What? (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1990).

Week 25 Jeremiah

By verse three I know that Jeremiah worked as a prophet during the time of three kings of Judah: Josiah, Jehoiakim and Zedekiah. Jeremiah was there right up until Jerusalem was sacked and the people exiled to Babylon.
But that doesn’t catch me totally by surprise. I read that history seven weeks ago.
I turn back to Chronicles. Josiah reigned thirty-one years.
I flip over two pages. Jehoiakim reigned eleven years.
On the same page I see that Zedekiah reigned eleven years.
31 + 11 + 11 = 53 years of kings.
Jeremiah says in verse 2 that he became a prophet when Josiah had been king for thirteen years. So 53 – 13 = 40. The ninety-six page Book of Jeremiah covers about forty years of Jeremiah’s life.
While I’m looking at the last chapter of Chronicles I see that Zedekiah, last king of Judah: did evil in the sight of the Lord his God; he did not humble himself before Jeremiah the prophet who spoke for the Lord. And nine verses later the Babylonians totally deconstruct Jerusalem: to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah.

Notes: Josiah II Chronicles 34:1; Jehoiakim 36:5; Zedekiah 36:11. Scanning through I realized I’d forgotten about two other kings during that time. Neither lasted more than four months and Jeremiah didn’t include them: Jehoahaz (36:1-2) and Jehoiachin (36:9). Quotes from 36:12, 21 (NASB version).