Month: July 2020

Week 31 Nahum

I read Nahum today. Nahum’s prophecy was an international forecast, written to Nineveh.
A couple of days ago I read Jonah’s story. He had a Nineveh interest too. He’d predicted that a catastrophe would hit the Assyrian capital in forty days but it turned out that the prophecy didn’t come true because the people believed Jonah and got a reprieve.
It’s many years later now. Jonah’s forty-days came and went many times over. Dozens of times. Maybe hundreds. Long enough ago that the Ninevites came full circle, decided to repent of their repentance. Now their time had come.
Nahum says: the Lord is slow to get angry, but his power is great, and he never lets the guilty go unpunished. Which are three pretty important things to know about the Lord.

Note: quote from Nahum 1:3 (NLT). Bible-reading note for July: in my bible the OT has 1334 pages. As of today I still have to read Ecclesiastes, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi in the OT – which is a total of about 36 pages. So on July 31 I’ve read 1298 pages, about 75% of the bible. July 2020 was a kind of ragged and distracting month for me so I’m satisfied with the 75% (even though finishing those last 36 pages would have been a nice way to end the month.)

Week 31 Jonah

Standing on one of the top rungs of the stories-in-the-prophets ladder is Jonah. It’s one of the best (I like Jeremiah a lot too).
The Lord told Jonah to travel east to Nineveh and so Jonah headed west – directionally-speaking Jonah couldn’t have made his preferences more clear. And so the Lord chastised him.
It’s hard to fathom a corrective event that could have been more terrifying and claustrophobic and suffocating and desperate than being partially-digested by a fish. When he escaped his near-death ordeal Jonah headed east.
One of the unique things about Jonah’s story is that it highlights the international range of the Lord’s interests. The Lord might be specially focused on Israel, but not in an exclusionary way.
I saw this a couple of days ago in Amos. Amos is a prophet to Israel but he spends the first chapter-and-a-bit talking about other states. So did Isaiah. And Jeremiah. And Ezekiel. And Daniel. And Joel. And Obadiah.
The Lord is pretty definitely interested in Israel. But that isn’t the same as saying he’s not interested in anyone else.

Notes: prophecies to foreign states are in Isaiah 13-23, Jeremiah 2-6, Ezekiel 25-32, Daniel 7-12, Joel 3, Obadiah 1. Like other prophets Jonah predicted disaster for the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. But the thing that makes Jonah’s story a surprise is that the people in Nineveh actually took him seriously. They actually believed and repented.

Week 31 Amos

Back in April when I was reading the Kings and Chronicles I thought about reading some of the prophets at the same time.
Jeremiah prophesied during the last years of Judah so he could be read right at the end of II Chronicles, or the end of II Kings.
And Jonah predicted some successes for the northern kingdom in II Kings 14:25. So I could have read his story right then for a nice change-of-pace.
Not a bad idea, but it’d take a whole new complicated reading plan. I did about a ten-second cost-benefit analysis and I figured it wasn’t worth the effort.
So in the spring I read the long histories. My summertime reading is the prophets.
Amos was one of the prophets who prophesied before the exile. He tells us that he had his prophetic visions about Israel: in the days of Jeroboam son of Joash, king of Israel.
This can be a bit confusing for a bible reader because there were two Jeroboams who were kings in Samaria. The story of the first Jeroboam – the son of Nebat – is in I Kings 11. I remember him because he is often described by expressions like Jeroboam-the-son-of-Nebat-who-made-Israel-sin.
Amos’ Jeroboam – Jeroboam II – lived many decades after the first Jeroboam and he doesn’t show up until II Kings 14.
This is a useful reminder that bible books aren’t in chronological order.

Note: quote from Amos 1:1 (NASB)

Week 29 Daniel

There are probably a few stories in the OT that are better than the one about Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in chapter 3. But only a few.
What happened was that Nebuchadnezzar had a huge statue built and then called a gathering of public officials and told them that when they heard horns, flutes, lyres, harps, bagpipes: and all kinds of music you are to fall down and worship the golden image.
So with the exception of SM&A all the government officials bowed down.
And SM&A learned the same lesson in Babylon that I learn each day in Alberta: you’ve gotta conform and if you don’t there’ll be a price to pay! For SM&A the price was physical incineration.
One thing that really stands out is the high degree of indifference the three men showed to social pressure. They told the king: if we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God whom we serve is able to save us and He will rescue us from your power, Your Majesty. But even if he doesn’t, your Majesty can be sure that we will never serve your gods or worship the gold statue you have set up.
The outcome made no big difference to them. Being normal guys they likely would have preferred staying alive. But who they worshiped was a bigger than mere life.
Worship the wrong god? You’re already dead.

Note: quotes from Daniel 3:5, 17-18 (NLT)

Week 29 Daniel

Today I read Psalm 137: beside the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept as we thought of Jerusalem. A picture of a melancholy guy on the bank of a sluggish Babylonian river watching the fish go by, depressed and thinking about home.
I’m pretty sure Daniel didn’t write psalm 137. But he could have. He’d been exiled to Babylon too. But he didn’t have much time to be disconsolate.
He was a very smart and capable guy and part of an elite group of Jews the Babylonian state decided to groom into the habits of the new country. So starting right now: a new educational program, new literature, new language, new names, new customs, new and better ways to think about things, a new scheme to overwrite the old. Let’s reprogram these Jews, make them just like us. Stock the big Babylonian lake with a school of little Jewish fish that’ll become big Babylonian ones.
And so Daniel swam, swam as well as the others, better than the others, learning all about the Babylonian lake. The thing the Babylonian state didn’t count on was a little Jewish fish staying a Jewish fish. Why would you want to?
In chapter one a conflict came up over kosher food, which seems like a pretty minor issue. But there was a bigger thing behind the smaller thing, and it was that Daniel wasn’t planning to evolve into an authentic Babylonian fish.

Note: quote from Psalm 137:1 (NLT)

Week 28 Ezekiel

In Ezekiel’s time people were using a parable that said: the parents have eaten sour grapes, but their children’s mouths pucker at the taste.
When they used it people were basically saying that they were suffering because of their parent’s bad actions.
Ezekiel’s chapter eighteen tries to explain that the parable is a crazy one to rely on.
He illustrates by mapping out a three-generational example:
Let’s say there’s a man who’s a good guy. Outcome: he will surely live.
That good guy has a son who’s a bloody and violent man. Outcome: he must die and must take full blame.
But then the vicious guy has a son who makes good choices. Outcome: he will not die for his father’s sins; he will surely live.
Ezekiel’s point is that every single person is singly and personally responsible for his own personal and singular decisions and actions.
I have no doubt that I’m floating in a simmering symbiotic soup of all the things that affect and influence me. I guess everything that’s non-me in the world affects me one-way-or-another.
But none of them exonerate me from my own self-serving stupidities. My blundering evils are all mine.

Note: quotes from Ezekiel 18:2, 5, 13, 17 (NLT). On the other side I’d be pretty surprised if Ezekiel is saying that environmental things like my mom, my siblings, my social & economic circumstances are 100% irrelevant. It’s just that his focus in this chapter is on the person who unilaterally shifts personal blame onto someone else. 

Week 28 Ezekiel

Right away in chapter one I’m into a content-management question: what do I do with Ezekiel’s vision?
Since my main task is just reading through the answer is: not much.
Not much because the vision is so spectacular that even Ezekiel didn’t really know how to describe it. And he’s the one who saw it.
Some things he put names to: faces, wings, hands, wheels, wheel-rims.
But other things he didn’t have vocabulary for so he resorted to in-the-vicinity words. A couple-of-dozen times he used like or as or resembled or appeared because he was conceptually strapped.
I can say that I saw a dog in the lane last night if I saw a dog.
If I say I saw something that looked like a dog in the lane last night it’s because I’m not sure it was an actual dog.
If I say I saw something in the lane last night that looked kind of like a dog that was gleaming like burnished bronze then I’m taking a shot at describing something I can’t describe.
What exactly did Ezekiel see? Well he didn’t exactly know.
And it’s fair to say that a guy who’s reading through can’t exactly know something that Ezekiel himself didn’t. So I don’t exactly know either.

Note: quotes from Ezekiel 1:7, 28 (NASB)
Added note: in spite of not being able to say what he saw Ezekiel did say pretty clearly what he did: when I saw it, I fell on my face.

Week 27 Lamentations

If books of the bible were colour-matched then Lamentations would be at the cool end of the spectrum where blue bleeds into indigo. A bible-reader tries not to let sentiment determine the plan but if I’m feeling kind of blue I’d be tempted to save Lamentations for another day.
Jeremiah ends his book of mostly tragic-sadness like this:
The joy of our hearts has ended
Our dancing has turned to mourning…
Disaster has fallen upon us because we have sinned
Our hearts are sick and weary
And our eyes grow dim with tears
For Jerusalem is empty and desolate
A place haunted by jackals
But Lord, you remain the same forever…
Why do you continue to forget us?
Why have you forsaken us for so long?
Restore us, O Lord, and bring us back to you again!
Give us back the joy we once had!
Or have you utterly rejected us?
Are you angry with us still?
I read somewhere that when the book of Isaiah was read publicly the last verse of the book is so dispiriting that the reader would read it and then go back and re-read the second-last verse.
I guess the last verse of Lamentations is so pessimistically uncertain that a reader would be tempted to do the same there.
Which makes for a less lamentable ending for the audience.
Which is maybe a less lamentable ending than Jeremiah intended.

Note: quote from Lamentations 5:19-22 (NLT)