Month: December 2022

Week 52  New Year’s Eve

Tomorrow is Sunday, January 1, 2023.
In one way December 31 can be an optimistically-forecastive day. But it can also be an annoyingly subversive day because even if I feel pretty good about accomplishing my reading goal for 2022 (and I do) I’m also staring into the not-necessarily-friendly face of 2023. Tomorrow I start all over again. Right back at square one.
I try reminding myself that the 365 days of 2023 don’t all happen tomorrow. Tell myself that things work on the One-Day-at-a-Time Model.
My plan is to read 100 chapters per month – about three-a-day. Just like last year I’ll add one psalm per-day to the schedule. The psalms are a nice change-up. The other good thing about tacking-on a psalm is that I’m  consistently reading four chapters a day (which means that bit-by-bit I’m getting ahead of schedule. At that rate I could be close to 150 chapters ahead of schedule by the end of June).
I know things won’t work out exactly according to plan. There’ll be a lot of shuffling adjusting adapting & modifying going on. There’ll be a lot of situations accidents unexpecteds predicaments circumstances emergencies and like that. 2023 will randomly mutate on me. No question that some days will be better than others.
So anyway I decided to read Psalm 1 today as a way to get a small jump-start on tomorrow. It’s a good psalm…one of the bible’s reminders of a stark & basic & simple contrast between everyone who’s ever been.

Week 52  Revelation 17

After John had had his baffling vision an angel came to him and said: why are you so amazed? I will tell you the mystery.
At first that sounded like good news for John…and good news for me. But by the end of the chapter I realized that the angel’s idea of an explanation wasn’t the same as mine (a partial explanation doesn’t do-the-trick when I’m wanting comprehensive disclosure).
The angel did (of course) clarify several things:
The seven heads are actually seven kings…
Five kings have already come-and-gone…
The “beast” is one of the kings…
The ten horns are ten other kings…
The “beast” & the kings will destroy Babylon…
They’ll all wage war against the Lamb.
This is all useful to know and I have to admit that I am farther ahead by the end of the chapter. But not as far as I’d like to be. The angel’s explanation left things unexplained. No one is identified. No dates are given.
In quantitative terms I wonder how much of an explanation this really was? Maybe 25%. Hard to say. But in my view a low explanation-number.
Anyway this is an interesting dilemma for a bible-reader. Do I just accept that being in-the-partial-dark is the best I can expect? Or am I free to start guessing…filling in some blanks?
For now I figure it’s better to function in dimly-lit certainty than operate in the full light of guesswork. See what develops over time.

Note: quote & paraphrases in Revelation 17:7 9 10 13 14 16

Week 52  Genesis

Yesterday I decided to try creating a Top 25 Most Important People in Genesis list.
On my first pass-through I selected these people:
Adam Eve Cain Abel Seth Noah Shem Ham Japheth Abraham Sarah Lot Melchizedek Hagar Ishmael Isaac Rebekah Laban Jacob Esau Rachel Leah Zilpah Bilhah Reuben Simeon Levi Judah Dan Naphtali Gad Asher Issachar Zebulun Dinah Joseph. There’s 36 so…too many.
Unfortunately I’d thought all 36 were important so I wondered who to take off the list. There’s a couple of nasty guys and some bit players. Cain is a murderer. Esau’s a thug. I scratch both of them. I hesitate before subtracting Ham Japheth Lot Melchizedek Hagar Ishmael & Laban (I had to remove a couple of heavies). That leaves me with:
Adam Eve Abel Seth Noah Shem Abraham Sarah Isaac Rebekah Jacob Rachel Leah Zilpah Bilhah Reuben Simeon Levi Judah Dan Naphtali Gad Asher Issachar Zebulun Dinah Joseph. 36 – 9 = 27.
I’m in a jam now. I go through the list a couple more times and finally take out Dinah – she’s important but in Genesis not as much as her 12 brothers. I’m down to 26. Alternatively I could bounce Zilpah & Bilhah and keep Dinah. Then I’m at exactly 25 but – let’s face it – by now it’s just a flip-a-coin decision where I’m scrambling to reach the Magic Number.
In the end I decide I’ll change the exercise. My new assignment: pick the Top 27 Most Important People in Genesis.
Those 27 people are my core group.

Week 52  Genesis

I finished reading Revelation on Monday the day after Christmas. That left me with five days before I start all-over again in Genesis.
Since I had a bit of spare time I was thinking about all the names in Genesis.
If someone asked me: ‘how many names do you think are in Genesis’ I’d say: ‘about 1000’.
But that’s a guess so I decided to test my guess experimentally.
On Tuesday & Wednesday I scan-read the book of Genesis and counted names. I was looking for names only and I tried to not let the stories slow me down. I counted names chapter-by-chapter and recorded them on a sheet of green construction paper. I tried to count names only once (I might have registered a couple of unknown names twice). I was surprised to see that about a dozen chapters had no new names (no names not already mentioned before).
In the end I counted 377 names (so my estimate of 1000 was crazily inflated and might be an example of the feeling I have that things that I don’t like are bigger in my head than they are in testable actuality).
I wondered if I could create a list of Most Important to Least Important People in Genesis that included all 377 people (but I didn’t seriously wonder about it for long). I wondered if I could pick the Top 25 Most Important People in Genesis.
Hmmm. I think that’s do-able. I might try it tomorrow.

Week 52  Revelation 21

Right near the end of his vision John saw: a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared…And (he) saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem , coming down from God out of heaven.
John gave quite a few details about the holy city but I stopped where he said: its walls were broad and high, with twelve gates guarded by twelve angels. And the names of the twelve tribes of Israel were written on the gates. There were three gates on each side – east, north, south, and west.
I stopped there because I was thinking back to the similarities I remember from Ezekiel’s Temple-vision. It had twelve gates too. Three on each of the cardinal points of the compass. Each gate named for a tribe:
North: Reuben Judah Levi
East: Joseph Benjamin Dan
South: Simeon Issachar Zebulun
West: Gad Asher Naphtali
In Revelation John didn’t name who was on which side of the city. So I wonder if I could get away with plugging-in Ezekiel’s names of the twelve gates of the temple. But I don’t think I can. It’s apples & oranges. The New Jerusalem vs. Ezekiel’s Temple. I just don’t know. It’s better not to guess.

Note: quotes from Revelation 21:1-2 21:12-13 14 Ezekiel 48:30-34 (NLT). I also thought back to Numbers 2 and the way the tribes were positioned by threes around the tabernacle to north-south-east-and-west. I compared those names. The groupings weren’t the same at all.

Week 51  Revelation 18

“The Fall of Babylon” is what my bible calls chapter 18 . In his vision John saw an angel appear and shout: Babylon is fallen. The margin in my bible says to check Isaiah (I do. Isaiah also says: Babylon is fallen).
The impression I have is that Isaiah was talking specifically about the actual city of Babylon in the ancient world. I check and see that the ancient ruins of the historical city of Babylon are in Iraq. Before the old Iraq-Babylon fell it was a flourishing center-of-the-world city. But Isaiah predicted that before too long: wild animals of the desert will move into the ruined city. Houses will be haunted by howling creatures. Ostriches will live among the ruins, and wild goats will come there to dance. Hyenas will howl in its fortresses, and jackals will make their dens in its palaces.
Reading Revelation I don’t get the impression that John is talking about the same Babylon that Isaiah was. I think he’s talking about another Babylon. A similar but different city or empire still in John’s future (and I’m guessing my future too). John describes this “New Babylon” in pretty graphic and uncomplimentary terms. And the outcome for Babylon #2? It has become the hideout of demons and evil spirits, a nest for filthy buzzards, and a den for dreadful beasts.
So it looks like equally dismal prospects for both Babylon Past & Babylon Future.

Note: quotes from Revelation 18:2 Isaiah 21:9 & Isaiah 13:21-22 (NLT). See Wikipedia “Babylon”

Week 51  Revelation 12

It’s pretty obvious that some bible passages are more interesting than others. I thought once about doing an exercise where I’d organize the 1189 chapters of the bible into an ordered list that went from Most Interesting Chapter to Least Interesting Chapter. It’d be very time-consuming. I doubt I’ll ever do it. But the basic idea came back to me while I was reading chapter 12 today.
Chapter 12 seems pretty important – really important actually – and I wondered if it was the Most Interesting Chapter in Revelation. (I can’t say for sure since I like the letters to the seven churches. But twelve is right up there.)
A couple of years ago I was thinking about the pregnant woman and the dragon. The dragon is furious with the woman and plans to kill her boy the minute he’s born. But he’s unsuccessful. The boy is born: a boy who was to rule all nations with an iron rod. An important boy. An important man.
So then the dragon can’t kill the mother either. Now he’s even more enraged because he failed twice. He starts looking around for substitute victims: the dragon…declared war against the rest of (the woman’s) children.
John spells out who these other ‘children’ are. They are a) people who keep God’s commandments and b) people who confess that they belong to Jesus.
Meaning that anyone who loves and obeys the Lord is in the dragon’s crosshairs.

Note: quotes from Revelation 12:5 17 (NLT)

Week 51  Revelation 7

Yesterday I was looking at the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The four horsemen appear one-after-the-other when the Lord opens the first four seals that were locking the Unopenable Book.
There were seven seals in total and six of them get opened in chapter six. The last one doesn’t get opened until chapter eight. The reason for that is because there’s a short time-out in chapter seven while people who are servants of the Lord are given a protective seal on their foreheads.
I think the main point of chapter seven is that the Lord cares about his people. That he is looking out for them. Protecting them.
But even though that’s what I think I get tied up a bit over the twelve tribes of 12,000 people who get the protective seal. There’s only 144,000 of them. Which is a very small number of servants-of-the-Lord.
A bigger concern is the twelve names John lists: Judah Reuben Gad Asher Naphtali Manasseh Simeon Levi Issachar Zebulun Joseph Benjamin.
Something’s wrong with the list. I flip back to Genesis 49: Reuben Simeon Levi Judah Zebulun Issachar Dan Gad Asher Naphtali Joseph Benjamin.
So Dan is completely omitted in Revelation.
The other inconsistency I don’t need to look up. After Genesis Joseph is replaced by his sons Ephraim & Manasseh. There is no tribe of Joseph. But in Revelation there is Joseph & Manasseh…but no Ephraim.
It’s not a big deal but I wonder what’s going on.

Note: lists from Revelation 7:5-8 & Genesis 49

Week 51  Revelation 6

Today I read about the four horsemen that John saw in Revelation six. And I thought back to Zechariah’s vision. A similar vision. There were four horses back there too: two red horses & a sorrel & a white. Zechariah wondered who the riders were and he was told: they are the ones the Lord has sent out to patrol the earth (Zechariah learned the earth was peaceful and quiet).
Things shape up a little differently in John’s vision. The focus there is on a sealed scroll – an Unopenable Book – that no one but the Lamb could access (chapter five implies that the Lamb is the Lord). When the Lamb began to break the seals the Unopenable Book seems less like a book and more like a huge vault with doors that start swinging open and from behind the first four doors ride John’s four horsemen. But John’s horsemen were different. For one thing the horses were different colors: white & red & black & off-white. And the horsemen hadn’t been patrolling. They’d been confined and inactive but now they’d been released to subject the earth to international-warfare famine disease & death. The four horsemen of the Revelation are about to inflict serious damage.
So I don’t know if there’s a connection between Zechariah’s four horsemen and John’s. Four horse-riders is a tempting similarity. But there’s differences too. So for now I’ll not complicate Revelation by trying to connect it to Zechariah.

Note: see Zechariah 1:8. Quote from Zechariah 1:10 (NLT)

Week 50  1 John 4

John says do not believe everyone who claims to speak by the Spirit. You must test them to see if the spirit they have comes from God.
Two things: a) don’t believe everyone/everything you hear and b) assess what you hear.
I don’t know how much of what I hear from day-to-day isn’t true…how much is lies half-truths deceptions misrepresentations falsities and like that. Maybe 50%. Who really knows? But sifting truth from lies is a pretty big task. In this case John is thinking about a subset of All Lies in Total and talks specifically about Religious Lies. A guy might seem to be a religious guy (says John) but don’t buy everything he’s selling.
That means there’s a second pretty practical question: how do I test what’s true & what isn’t? John gives what looks like a basic litmus-test for Religious Truths & Religious Non-Truths. The test for knowing what’s true and what’s false is to consider-the-source: if a prophet acknowledges that Jesus Christ became a human being (then) that person has the Spirit of God.
There’s a guy who’s ‘from God’ and a guy who isn’t. The acid-test I can use to distinguish between them is the question: what do you think about Jesus?
The gospels say lots of things about the Lord but the one about Jesus Christ being God and coming to earth in a material-human form moves to the very top of the list of Key Things to Believe.

Note: quotes from 1 John 4:1 2 (NLT)