Month: January 2021

Week 2 Genesis

If I was a bible-reading business man and wanted to write a book called Bible Principles for Wealth Acquisition and Management I wouldn’t include Abraham.
It’s odd because Abraham was obviously a very wealthy guy. Before he left his home in Ur he had personal wealth. Later he’s described as being: very wealthy in livestock and in silver and gold. He had his own army of 318 men to protect him. He refused a bounty offered by the king of Sodom – he didn’t need it. His Hittite neighbours called him: a mighty prince.
The fourteen chapters of Abraham’s life tell me that he was rich. But not how he got rich. The only explanations I found were thing like: the Lord had blessed him in every way. Which is a whole lot different than practical things like working hard, investing, saving, controlling debt, budgeting, avoiding luxury purchases, etc.
When it comes to info on building and preserving wealth Abraham is a dry well.
But…while I was discovering that Genesis 12-25 had no real information on wealth building those chapters talked almost non-stop about Abraham’s family. Family issues are in every chapter: Lot, night visions and promises of a son, Hagar, Ishmael, Lot’s girls, Isaac, the Abraham-Isaac sacrifice, a wife for Isaac, Sarah’s death, Abraham’s remarriage. In fact I’d be tempted to say that the whole point of 12-25 is to show the progress of the Abraham family (which is maybe a slight exaggeration).

Note: quotes and references from Genesis 13:2, 14:14, 22-24, 23:6, 24:1 & 35 (NIV)

Week 1 Genesis

Genesis twenty is a stand-alone story, the story of Abimelech king of Gerar.
When Abraham’s company arrived in his territory Abimelech: went and took Sarah.
Just like that.
I’m not sure how Bronze-Age guys negotiated these kinds of arrangements but you get the feeling that Abimelech had the power to get whatever he wanted.
So the Lord used the medium of a dream and told Abimelech: you are a dead man because of the woman you have taken.
Abimelech must have sensed what he was up against because he started back-tracking immediately – I’m innocent! I’m blameless! I didn’t have sexual intercourse yet!
And the Lord tells him: I know that in the integrity of your heart you have done this, and I also kept you from sinning against Me; therefore I did not let you touch her.
Which meant two things were happening at once. One, for some reason Abimelech had decided not to have sexual intercourse with Sarah, and two, the Lord had intervened to prevent the king from having sexual intercourse with Sarah.
So who decided? It’s a bit of a mystery how that works. Doesn’t seem compatible with regular decision-making.
In this story Abimelech made – as far as he was concerned – a personal sexual decision, but as free as it seemed it wasn’t independent of the Lord, who acted as a kind of prevention-ensuring intervener.

Note: quotes from Genesis 20:2, 3, 6 (NASB)

Week 1 Genesis

A couple of days ago I read the short bio of Enoch.
Today I read the short bio of Melchizedek.
Enoch is four verses, Melchizedek three.
Halfway through Genesis fourteen Melchizedek suddenly materializes and meets Abraham as he headed home.
Melchizedek wasn’t a phantom. He was the king of Salem. I checked a word book to see if Salem had even been mentioned before chapter fourteen. It hadn’t. I looked at my bible map and it showed the city of Salem about 25 kilometres west of the north-end of the Dead Sea. In brackets below Salem it said Jerusalem. I wasn’t sure if that was some cartographic guessing. Maybe, maybe not. Either way Melchizedek is still a middle-eastern man of mystery.
In my word book I see his name is only mentioned twice in the OT. Genesis says that: he was priest of God Most High. This is the first time the word priest appears in the bible. I guess there were probably all kinds of religious agents doing what they did. I don’t know how many were acting for God Most High the Creator of heaven and earth but that’s whose camp Melchizedek was in.
Melchizedek ghosts in and just as fast ghosts out of Genesis. And even though I think the bible sometimes goes on too long in some stories his isn’t one of them.

Note: quotes from Genesis 14:18, 19 (NIV). Melchizedek is mentioned eight other times in the NT – all in book of Hebrews.

Week 1 Genesis

The Noah story takes up a big chunk of the first section in Genesis. I wondered how big so I tallied Genesis 1-11 and came up with an estimate of 289-verses. Of the 289 129 were about Noah. Meaning Noah got the lion’s share of those chapters – almost 45% . That’s way more than any other story; twice as much as the creation of the whole world story.
So Noah & the Flood is long. It’s also kind of bleak; sobering; frightening.
One thing I saw right at the beginning – almost like an explanatory intro – was this: the Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.
I guess lots of people read the Flood as a story of a god who’s ruthless tyrannical unfeeling destructive hateful murderous genocidal – like that. So the God-with-the-pain-filled-heart bumps up against that idea. The God-with-the-pain-filled-heart is a part of the mix. Which reminds me that while I’m reading through I need to keep all my pieces in play. I don’t know how many rules there are for reading through but that’s gotta be one of them: you don’t get to keep or discard what you want.
Which is one thing that makes reading through a bit more demanding than it already is.

Note: quote from Genesis 6:5-6 (NIV)

Week 1 Genesis

One plan for reading through the bible is called the Reading Through Except-For Plan. The RTE-F Plan allows me to make the content-exclusions of my choice. For example I might decide to skip long prophetic passages, histories of terrible people, pointless legal-ceremonial detail, tedious or demanding chapters. I might decide to skip name lists.
All of Genesis five is a name list and if I was excluding name lists I would leap-frog five and go right into chapter six.
Chapter five lists people in Adam’s family (the Nutshell Version: Adam Seth Enosh Kenan Mahalalel Jared Enoch Methuselah Lamech Noah).
The first and last names are familiar. But it’s Enoch who really stands out in this list: after he became the father of Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years…Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him away.
No other man in the list is said to have walked with God. The text doesn’t say the others didn’t, but it doesn’t say they did either. But Enoch walked with God.
When you start reading through it’s easy to have the sense of being in for a 1334-page grind – like observing evolution in real time – before landing on NT shores. But here I’m just over a hundred verses in, long before the Lord or prophets or kings or Moses or Abraham or the flood and I find an antiquity-guy who had what he needed to walk with God.

Note: quote from Genesis 5:22-24 (NIV)

Week 1 Genesis

One of the bible-reader’s dilemmas is that the bible is both too-long and not-long-enough.
Genesis four is an example of not-long-enough.
In chapter two Adam and Eve have a pretty good relationship with the Lord. Then in three the serpent appears, forms a short deceptive and killing friendship with A&E and then disappears, leaving A&E not having a pretty good relationship with the Lord anymore. That story ends with the couple heading east out of Eden.
Then between Genesis 3:24 and Genesis 4:1 there’s a half-inch of white space that could have very helpfully been filled with extra content.
But instead chapter four just picks up the story of Cain and Abel as young men.
Even though nothing is said it’s pretty clear the boys had learned something from A&E.
They obviously knew about giving an offering to the Lord.
And they likely also had some sense that some certain offerings were basically useless.
You definitely get the feeling that Cain wasn’t learning something brand new when the Lord spoke to him: why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.
But the bible doesn’t spell everything out exactly and totally.
If I’m a bible reader I have to dope some things out for myself.

Note: quote from Genesis 4:7 (NIV)

Week 1 Genesis

Somewhere out in the eastern regions of the aboriginal world the Lord set up a special place for Adam & Eve. It was a comprehensive self-contained environment that had everything a physically, mentally and emotionally perfect couple needed. A perfect place for A&E. Until one day evil glided into the garden.
Eden wasn’t set up like an old Russian-style gulag where no one could come or go. A&E were free people, accessible, available people, and they were confronted one day by a smooth assassin who was already a credentialed evil-doer and who wanted to turn the perfect couple.
Could the Lord have serpent-proofed the garden? For sure. And the fact that he didn’t put the burden of serpent-proofing on A&E. They had the chance to serpent-proof themselves.
Right at the very beginning of the bible there’s this simple story of two contending sides that are shaping up.
The Lord says don’t do x; and Satan says go ahead and do x.
Or the Lord says do y; and Satan says don’t do y.
It’s one of the basic up-front questions the bible faces me-the-bible-reader with: is the Lord telling me the truth or is the Lord lying?
However much more complicated it gets it starts there.
The Lord tells the truth…
The Lord’s a liar…
The reader gets to choose.