Month: May 2021

Week 20 2 Chronicles

The chronicler says that when Uzziah became king: he did what was pleasing in the Lord’s sight…(He) sought God during the days of Zechariah, who instructed him in the fear of the Lord. So the young king had a mentor who helped him along in revering the Lord. Uzziah learned that being top dog in Jerusalem didn’t mean he was top dog.
Over time he gained reputation as a capable domestic & international ruler: his fame spread far and wide, for the Lord helped him wonderfully until he became very powerful.
So that was good. Nothing wrong with a little fame. Nothing wrong with a little power. Nothing wrong with a couple of social-status assets in your back pocket.
But then the chronicler says: when (Uzziah) became powerful, he also became proud, which led to his downfall.
Power that’s sitting there as an independent and neutral factor is okay.
Power gets less okay when it hooks up with pride.
I don’t get the feeling at all that power necessarily connects to pride – it’s like when I buy a hamburger I’m not legally obligated to buy fries.
And you gotta think Uzziah had other options. He could have been powerful-humble. Powerful-selfless. Powerful-compassionate. Powerful-kind & helpful.
But for Uzziah pride seemed like such a perfect natural desirable irresistible companion for his power. An unfortunately whatever it seemed to be it turned into a marriage made in hell.

Note: quotes from 2 Chronicles 26:4-5, 15, 16 (NLT)

Week 20 2 Chronicles

So far I’ve read the stories of eight rulers of Judah-South – Rehoboam Abijah Asa Jehoshaphat Jehoram Ahaziah Athaliah (a queen) Joash.
A couple of days ago I’d decided to group kings under three categories: Goods-Bads-Middlers. My simple rule-of-thumb was that if the chronicler only said good things about the king then he’d get a thumbs-up.
Things got complicated when I read the Abijah story. In Chronicles I didn’t find anything bad about Abijah. Only three pretty good things:
His long historical speech seemed pretty good
In his battle with Jeroboam (Israel-North) he got help from the Lord
And the chronicler said: Judah defeated Israel because they trusted in the Lord.
So on my checklist Abijah landed in the Good King column.
Anyway then I saw that Abijah’s story was cross-referenced to 1 Kings and when I flipped over there it said: (Abijah) committed the same sins as his father before him, and his heart was not right with the Lord his God.
And just like that Abijah got X-ed out of the Good King column.
And also just like that my simple & straightforward exercise got more time-consuming because now even if a king scores 100% in Chronicles I’ll have to double-check the story in Kings.
Which – I admit – might not end up being a whole lot of extra work because so far even though my sample size is small good kings are looking to be about as common as mountain gorillas.

Note: quotes from 2 Chronicles 13:18 & 1 Kings 15:3 (NLT)

Week 19 2 Chronicles

Once you’re past the chronicler’s stories of David & Solomon things get a bit more tangled. Fortunately for readers Chronicles is only interested in the Judah-David line of kings – by contrast Kings ricochets back-and-forth between Judah & Israel.
To help focus my reading I decide to track each of the kings. My plan is to rate them under three categories. Good Kings – Bad Kings – Middler Kings. How will I decide? I’ll use a pretty simple mechanism…
If the bible says nothing but good about a king he’s Good.
If the bible says nothing but bad about a king he’s Bad.
If the bible says both good and bad about a king he’s a Middler.
I read about Asa today.
At the start of Asa’s reign a prophet told him: the Lord will stay with you as long as you stay with him. And for a while Asa did stay with the Lord. Which is good.
Then in chapter sixteen he hired foreign mercenaries. Completely disregarded the Lord.
Another prophet came to tell Asa he’d missed-the-boat: the eyes of the Lord search the whole earth in order to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him. What a fool you have been! Which is bad.
Asa stared out pretty well but declined as time passed.
It’s unfortunate. Sobering. You wonder what happened.
I feel let down, and I have to check Asa off as a Middler.

Note: quotes from 2 Chronicles 15:2 & 16:9 (NLT)

Week 19 2 Chronicles

I think that a frequent bible-reader’s complaint is: There’s Just Too Much Data.
But today my problem was: There Isn’t Enough…because I was at the story of the clash between the Northern & Southern Tribes. I knew that Rehoboam being a hard-nose was the tip of the iceberg reason. But not why they split along N & S lines.
For example I wonder why Ephraim-Manasseh didn’t join the South? They were geographically close to Judah and had close family ties – Benjamin & Joseph were the favoured sons.
And if you were forecasting a split the tribes east of Jordan would seem more likely candidates.
I also doubt that all twelve tribes were equally good-buddies before Rehoboam. There must have been other rivalries and vendettas. Or had Solomon absolutely & maximally alienated everyone else?
I went back to the story in Kings. It said that All-Israel had come to make Rehoboam king. But then they called in Jeroboam to see what he thought. If Rehoboam was the legitimate hereditary heir why-in-the-world bother consulting Jeroboam at all? He was an outlaw.
In the end the anti-Rehoboam group said: down with David and his dynasty! We have no share in Jesse’s son! Let’s go home Israel!
And just like that everyone – except Benjamin – ganged-up on Judah.
I guess it’s not critically important to know what all was behind the civil war divide.
But today was one of those days when I wished there was more to read, not less.

Note: quote from 1 Kings 12:16 (NLT)

Week 19 1 Chronicles

About forty days ago – April 3/21 – I posted on Solomon. At the time I was thinking about how Solomon’s Temple-building project seemed quite a bit different from when Israel built the Tabernacle in the wilderness. One point of difference was that the Lord gave Moses very specific directions about constructing the Tabernacle. I said that in contrast: Solomon didn’t go to Sinai and the bible doesn’t say anything about him getting blueprints from the Lord.
So…now I have to revise that idea because of what I read a couple of days ago. David was handing over the reins of power to Solomon: then David gave Solomon the plans for the Temple and its surroundings, including the treasuries, the upstairs rooms, the inner rooms… and et cetera for eight more verses of specifications. Then David ended by saying: every part of this plan…was given to me in writing from the hand of the Lord.
In April I said that the bible didn’t say anything about Solomon getting blueprints from the Lord. And I guess I could argue that that was technically true (he didn’t get them directly from the Lord). But non-technically I was wrong. Solomon got them from the Lord via his dad.
So a good bible-reading reminder for me is this: if I don’t keep reading I might miss a chance to discover that I’m wrong.

Note: quotes from 1 Chronicles 2:11 & 19 (NLT)

Week 19 2 Chronicles

When Solomon became king one of the first things he did was to call together his leaders of state. The chronicler says: then Solomon led the entire assembly to the hill at Gibeon where God’s Tabernacle was located. This was the Tabernacle that Moses…had constructed in the wilderness. David had already moved the Ark of God…to the special tent he had prepared for it in Jerusalem. But the bronze altar…was still at Gibeon in front of the Tabernacle of the Lord.
Reading today I realized I’d missed out on this completely. I had no idea that the Tabernacle and the altar were currently in Gibeon – as far as that goes I didn’t know where Gibeon was. But the old Exodus Tabernacle along with Bezalel’s bronze altar were in the town of Gibeon (I checked a map – it’s about ten kilometres northwest of Jerusalem).
So even though the ark of the covenant was in Jerusalem Solomon went to Gibeon to offer sacrifices at the Tabernacle. And that’s where the Lord met Solomon.
I flipped back to the Kings’ story of Solomon – years later – when he was dedicating his brand new temple: then the priests and Levites took the Ark of the Lord, along with the Tabernacle and all its sacred utensils, and carried them up to the Temple.
So the Tabernacle ended up in the Temple even though by then the Temple had replaced it.

Note: quotes from 2 Chronicles 1:3-5 & 1 Kings 8:4 (NLT)

Week 19 1 Chronicles

Way more than half of 1 Chronicles is the story of David – chapters eleven to twenty-nine. About two-thirds of the book.
I remember back in March when I was reading the two books of Samuel. The writer spent a lot of time on David too. But a big difference between Samuel’s David and the chronicler’s David is that the Samuels tell the interesting stories: David & Goliath, David the Fugitive, Abigail, some of the David-the-king stories. The Samuels also tell some unsavoury stories: Bathsheba & Uriah, Tamar, Absalom’s revolt, the civil war, Sheba, the Gibeonites, the national census. The chronicler skips them.
A couple of days ago I decided to track the David story in Chronicles. I was wondering: if the chronicler overlooked all the good stories then what did he use in their place? I finished 1 Chronicles today and here’s what I’ve got. I calculate that there’s 521 verses in the chronicler’s David story. Out of those 521 I figure that 301 have to do with the topic of David & Israel’s religion – ark temple Levites religious music and like that. So 58% of the David story is about the king who loved & was devoted to & promoted faith in the Lord. [The next biggest topic is David and the armed forces & international conflict & military combat. I counted 148 verses there – about 28% of the story.]
So it looks like the chronicler wants to convey one main thing to his readers – that David is the Faithful-Believer-King.

Note: the numbers are approximate – don’t bet the farm on them.

Week 19 Psalm 119

I read the first 8 verses of 119 yesterday…and the other 168 verses today.
I wouldn’t normally use a day-to-day reading-ratio of 1:22 because I like to keep readings roughly equal. But today I noticed in verse thirteen the writer used the phrase: recite out loud – which sounded like Advice for a Reader. I wanted to see if there were other usable bible-reading tips so I kept reading from 9 to 176.
What I ended up with was a list of Down-to-Earth Bible Reading Practices…
Recite out loud
Study the words
Try to understand the meaning
Be honest
Concentrate
Keep your mind on the reading
Think about what you’re reading
Don’t forget what you read.
I checked another version. It used the word meditate in place of study and concentrate. It also liked the phrase diligently consider more than mental focus or think about the content.
So then out of those eight I boiled down a short-list of four good reminders for myself:
Study what I’m reading. Try to understand what I read. Concentrate-meditate-focus. Don’t forget about what I just read.

Note: the tips are from Psalm 119:13, 15, 27, 29, 78, 95, 97 & 99, 141 & 153 (NLT; the other version was NASB). Added: I thought about adding a fifth reminder – be honest (NLT says: keep me from lying to myself (29)). In the end I didn’t. Figured it’d be difficult since dishonesty is one of my strengths. Honest bible-reading is a Big Snag.

Week 18 Psalm 119

I started 119 today.
There was a note at the bottom of the page: this psalm is a Hebrew acrostic poem; there are 22 stanzas, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The eight verses within each stanza begin with the Hebrew letter of its section. The editors of another bible I use pasted in Hebrew alphabet headers between each 8-verse stanza – aleph beth gimel and like that.
None of that helps a non-Hebrew-reading guy. But what I did notice right away is that the writer starts talking about something that’s super-easy for a reader to forget. The thing is this: lots of times bible-reading is just a simple information-gathering exercise – for example I read that the Lord created the world and now I know. But 119 talks about an additional feature – an extra that goes beyond reading-the-words. The basic idea when I read is reading but the next-step idea is to try to amalgamate or internalize or metamorphize or transmute that information content.
For example the writer is talking about blessed – or happy – people and says they:
Follow the law of the Lord
Obey his decrees
Search for him with all their hearts
Don’t compromise with evil
Walk only in (the Lord’s) paths.
These are pretty big not-just-reading steps.
I think a lot of the time I’m reading just to read-through. So this thing about doing what I’m reading is a good heads-up (but one that’s very hard).

Note: quote from Psalm 119:1-3 (NLT). The footnote is from NLT.

Week 18 1 Chronicles

One of the reasons I read-through is because I figure the whole bible is worth reading. Which means I’m starting with a kind of Uniform Equivalency Rule that says it’s-all-valuable.
That rule is balanced off with another one: the Uniform Non-Equivalency Rule that says some parts are more valuable.
I use both rules. Everything is valuable and there’s also comparative value among all of them.
Anyway I was thinking about that while I was reading the Lord’s promise to David in seventeen because that chapter breaks the Uniform Equivalency Rule for me. It seems really important. Maybe more important than any other chapter in the book.
The Lord promised David a number of things – I counted about a dozen. I can’t guarantee that number but however many there are they break down into three categories – promises about David’s own near-future, promises about Solomon in the middle-future, and promises about David’s dynasty in the distant-future. The forecast for David’s distant-future has no expiry date: your dynasty and your kingdom will continue for all time before me, and your throne will be secure forever.
To be true a prophecy has to come true. So a bible-reader is going to be looking for a line of Davidic DNA travelling down through the years to see whether an ancestor of David continued a kingdom of some kind that has lasted right down to 2021.

Note: quote from 2 Samuel 7:16 (NLT). The two versions of the promise are in 1 Chronicles 17:3-14 and 2 Samuel 7:8-17.