Month: December 2020

Week 52

Last big decision for 2020: start to read through the bible tomorrow.
My plan is to go through in front-to-back order and read about one-hundred chapters per month – plus one psalm per day.
Reading through means reading through the OT. I guess some people disregard the OT since its irrelevant outlandish inapplicable and basically squandering time and energy.
I thought about that. Thought about last January-August in the OT. Thought about some of the things I’d miss if I skipped the OT.
Adam & Eve Cain & Abel Noah Job the Tower of Babel Abraham & Sarah Hagar & Ishmael Sodom & Gomorrah Isaac & Rebecca Jacob Esau Judah Joseph Egypt Pharaoh the Plagues Moses Sinai the Ten Commandments the Tabernacle the Wilderness Nadab & Abihu the Twelve Spies Korah-Dathan-Abiram Balaam Rahab Joshua Caleb Jericho Achan the Promised Land Deborah-Barak Gideon Samson Ruth Hannah Samuel Eli Saul Jonathan David Goliath Abigail & Nabal, Bathsheba Absalom Solomon the Temple Rehoboam-Jeroboam the Divided Kingdom Elijah Ahab Naboth Micaiah Elisha Naaman Joash Sennacherib the Rabshakeh Assyria & Israel Manasseh Jonah Isaiah Jeremiah Hezekiah Babylon & Judah Ezekiel Daniel Shadrach-Meshach-Abednego Persia Esther Ezra Nehemiah the Wisdom books.
It’s quite a bit to miss.
About a month ago I was reading psalm 105 and verse four said: search for the Lord…and keep on searching. I didn’t take that as a MHJ-has-to-read-the-OT directive. But keep-on-searching makes better sense to me than just-quit-searching.

Week 52

I finished reading Revelation today.
I started the year reading the Creation Story: in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Then today I saw this: and I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away.
What that sounds like is that everything – all of the OT, and all of the NT, and all of what has happened since the NT up to today, and then going forward from today on into the indefinite future – that everything so far takes place in the first earth, the old earth.
The first earth started out good and stayed good for two chapters – about fifty-six verses – but then changed into an earth that wasn’t as good any more.
The whole story of the bible this year from Genesis 3 to Revelation 20 has been the description of life on our second-class first earth, our internally busted-up world, our not-as-good-as-it-had-been earth. A temporary space that’s a kind of place-holder for a new earth to come.
It’s hard to say whether the first earth will be totally vaporized and that the Lord will create a second earth from scratch or whether the first earth will be renovated in a top-to-bottom way. But for the person who believes there will be a future in heaven it sounds like at least a part of that will include a new earth.

Note: quotes from Genesis 1:1 & Revelation 21:1 (NASB & NLT).

Week 52 Revelation

Religious Christmas cards show Mary & Joseph travelling on a cold-winter’s-night. The-stars-in-the-bright-sky are looking down at the baby Jesus. The cattle-are-lowing, the shepherds worshipful. All-is-calm. All-is-bright. A gospel’s Christmas.
Close to the end of the NT there’s a parallel Christmas narrative. It’s a bigger-than-normal Christmas story. John tells it this way:
I saw a woman clothed with sun, with moon beneath her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant, and she cried out in the pain of labour as she awaited her delivery.
Suddenly, I witnessed in heaven another significant event. I saw a large red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, with seven crowns on his heads. His tail dragged down one-third of the stars which he threw to the earth. He stood before the woman as she was about to give birth to her child, ready to devour the baby as soon as it was born.
She gave birth to a boy who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron. And the child was snatched away from the dragon and was caught up to God and to his throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness.
This is John’s Big Happenings Christmas Story.
Things might be pretty quiet in the little-town-of-Bethlehem but all hell has broken loose in the heavenlies.

Note: quote from Revelation 12:1-6 (NLT)

Week 52 Revelation

Chapters two-three are a kind of Church Quality Assessment Report that John wrote to the seven congregations of Revelation.
To clarify things for myself I drew up a table with three columns: Church – Pros – Cons. Below I had seven rows – one for each church.
I ended up with a cumulated listing of the Pros and the Cons of the seven churches.
On the Pro-side John commended churches for things like this: they worked hard for the Lord, had patience & endurance, didn’t tolerate evil, assessed what they heard to see if it was true, suffered patiently, hated immorality, experienced opposition-slander-imprisonment-persecution but stayed loyal to the Lord, loved each other, had faith, helped other people, were obedient to the Lord, and persevered in their faith. This lists pretty much all the Pros. No church had all of them; each church got at least one (except Laodicea which got none).
The Con-side was pretty sobering. John criticized churches for: not loving the Lord, not loving each other, being idolaters, practicing immorality, accepting bad teaching and believing it, doing evil things, being confident because of their money, being indifferent in their faith, and not being diligent. Smyrna and Philadelphia weren’t criticized at all. Laodicea was described as a dead church.
These lists seem like a pretty useful place to start thinking about the church I attend, its pros & cons.
And since I go to the church, I guess that means thinking about me.

Week 51 Jude

Sometimes I use exercises to help me read through.
They’re kind of Alertness Promotion Tools to try to manage my mental driftage.
I don’t think there’s any single, perfect solution for when my mind wanders but even these half-baked exercises are sometimes okay.
So for example early this year I decided to track the character traits of God. When I found a verse that said something about God – for instance, the Lord is patient – then I’d record it. I found dozens of them; there’s likely dozens in psalms alone. It was a big exercise, took me all year, and likely too big if time is critical.
A simpler one for me was plotting everything the Lord said about money in the gospels.
Anyway I was reading Jude’s warning about church members who had a) denied the Lord Jesus, and b) said the Lord’s rules-for-living were now disregard-able. Jude compared these people to three OT guys: Cain, Balaam, and Korah.
It’s been ten months since I read Moses but I remember that Cain, Balaam, and Korah were on the OT Bad Guys List. So then that got me wondering if I should make that an Alertness Promotion exercise for 2021 – list all the bad guys in the OT.
But realistically I’m thinking I won’t likely do it. It’d be a big job, and pretty complicated, and I’m not sure it’d be much benefit to me.

Note: see Cain: Genesis 4, Balaam: Numbers 22, Korah: Numbers 16.

Week 51 Jude

I read Jude today.
I didn’t come away with the feeling that Jude was an indifferent or comme-ci-comme-ca kind of guy. Of course, the problem he was talking about was a biggish one.
He said he was writing: because some godless people have wormed their way in among you saying that God’s forgiveness allows you to live immoral lives.
If those people had come to the church and taught that God’s forgiveness allowed me to live a moral life then no problem.
Or if they had come to the church and taught that satanic deceptions could bamboozle me into living an immoral life then again, no problem.
But it was more like they said it’s okay to act in exactly the way that the Lord said it’s not okay to act.
So Jude wrote his seriously fearsome letter.
By contrast, at the end of the letter Jude says what believing people in the church should be aiming for: …continue to build your lives on the foundation of your holy faith. And continue to pray as you are directed by the Holy Spirit. Live in such a way that God’s love can bless you as you wait for the eternal life that our Lord Jesus Christ in his mercy is going to give you. Show mercy to those whose faith is wavering.
I read it a couple of times, and Jude doesn’t say anything to advocate immorality.

Note: quotes from Jude 4, 20-22 (NLT)

Week 51 a psalm

Since I figured I was in pretty good shape to finish reading through by the end of the year I read psalm 119 today.
My plan was to break it up into chunks but I ended up reading it all. It’s long.
It turned out to be a pretty helpful chapter for me since I’m thinking about my reading plan for 2021. Which means I’m deciding about whether to read the OT. I guess lots of people skip the OT for the standard reasons – it’s a tough slog, boring, irrelevant, indecipherable, like that. So 119 makes you rethink those reasons because mysterious-and-incomprehensible don’t seem to be the writer’s opinion of the OT at all.
For example: oh, how I love your law! I think about it all day long.
For example: at midnight I rise to thank you for your just laws.
As an exercise to keep my brain tracking I looked for things that the writer said the Law helped him with. I found more than forty. For example: as pressure and stress bear down on me, I find joy in your commands.
I wondered how this worked. An OT guy, maybe an iron-age guy, all those centuries ago, pre-NT, but he calls the OT Law: the music of my life.
If I’m totally confident the OT has zero value for me then no need to read it.
But 119 leaves me feeling not totally confident. Like there’s more to it than meets-the-eye.

Note: quotes from Psalm 119:97, 62, 143, 54 (NLT)

Week 50 2 Peter

I start reading Peter’s second letter with my usual goals: a) cover the ground, and b) absorb what I can. But by the fifth verse I’m doing neither. Peter says:
So make every effort to apply the benefits of these promises to your life
Then your faith will produce a life of moral excellence
A life of moral excellence leads to knowing God better
Knowing God leads to self-control
Self-control leads to patient endurance
And patient endurance leads to godliness
Godliness leads to love for other Christians
And finally you will grow to have genuine love for everyone.
The paragraph slows me down, stalls me.
These sixty-eight words are part of the answer to the question: what happens when I believe in the Lord? Simple enough question…not as simple an answer.
The way Peter writes the paragraph makes it seem like a ladder. There’s the first step, then the second, then third. Faith happens, then moral excellence starts up on a tangent to faith, a step-by-step evolvement. Or I guess it could be an untidier overlapping-type development. Or maybe everything moves ahead in a roughly simultaneous way.
But one way or the other life after belief is a compound made up of several elements – in this case there’s seven or eight of them. Interconnected things. Which is very, very useful to know. But knowing is only part of it.

Note: quote taken from 2 Peter 1:5-7 (NLT)

Week 50 James

A couple of years ago I read James in fifteen minutes. I don’t remember the circumstances. I was likely in hurry-up mode, trying to finish by December 31. Fifteen minutes – nine hundred seconds – doesn’t give you too much time on any one of James’ 108 verses. Only about 8.3 seconds per verse on average.
This year I’m ahead of myself so I’ve had three days to read James.
One thing I noticed was the contrast James made in chapter three between two kinds of wisdom. James described one kind of wisdom as being: earthly, unspiritual, and motivated by the Devil. The other kind of wisdom is a kind that: comes down from heaven.
So the question about where I’m sourcing my wisdom is pretty important.
Then James goes on to point out that different wisdoms from different sources also produce different outcomes. Three times in verses fourteen, fifteen and sixteen James says that the this-worldly type of wisdom is jealous and selfishly ambitious. By contrast the wisdom that comes from above: is first of all pure. It is also peace-loving, gentle at all times, and willing to yield to others. It is full of mercy and good deeds. It shows no partiality and is always sincere.
So according to James wisdom isn’t just a free-floating mental capacity, a big bag of intellectual smartnesses. It’s quite a bit more comprehensive than what I know. It includes who I am.

Note: quotes from James 3:15 & 17-18 (NLT).

Week 50 Hebrews

I think Hebrews 11 is a good argument for reading the OT because it names a bunch of OT people. If I haven’t read the OT at all then reading Hebrews 11 is a bit like reading, for example, Ezra chapter two. It’s just another long list of unknown names.
But if I have read the OT then I’m thinking, yeah, I recognize him, or, I remember her story.
Of course chapter eleven isn’t really meant to be an OT Highlight Reel. It misses too many important people. It’s really a selective list of OT people who exercised faith.
Which is pretty interesting because when I think about the OT there are obvious big-ticket practices like civil regulations, sacrifices, religious ceremonies and like that. But the writer of Hebrews is saying that faith was part of that OT mix too. I notice that it’s thirty-one verses before the writer even gets to Mount Sinai and the Law. Which means that in all the time before-the-Law some people had faith. And even in the after-the-Law time of verses 32-39 people were still acting by faith. In fact they all: gained approval through their faith.
So I’ve got to be careful to not breakdown the bible like this: the OT = law, and the NT = faith. According to chapter eleven there was faith all the way back to Abel. So it’s more like this: the OT = faith, and the NT = faith. Faith in all of it.

Note: quote from Hebrews 11:39 (NASB)