Month: April 2023

Week 17  Psalm 118

Near the end of the psalm it says: the stone rejected by the builders has now become the cornerstone. This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous to see.
If I’m reading psalm 118 for the very first time this is one of those “what’s-this-all-about?” verses. But I’ve read psalm 118 before. I decide to check a couple of the cross references to the NT.
In Matthew the Lord’s talking to some (unfriendly) people and he asks them about this exact verse. Asks them if they’d read it. Quoted it: the stone rejected by the builders has now become the cornerstone.
The same story’s in Mark: the stone rejected by the builders has now become the cornerstone.
And Luke: the stone rejected by the builders has now become the cornerstone.
Peter quotes it this way: the stone that you builders rejected has now become the cornerstone.
So the NT expands on the OT. Fills-in a blank.
But even if the only thing I’ve got is psalm 118 I can still catch the drift. Some stone masons went to a quarryman. They combed through the quarry searching for a cornerstone. Which one? Block A or Block B? They decided to reject Block A. Chose Block B to build on.
From psalm 118 I can dope-out that they made a bad choice in taking Block B and discarding Block A. But it’s from the NT that I see how huge their gaff was.

Note: quotes from Psalm 118:22 Matthew 21:42 Mark 12:10 Luke 20:17 Acts 4:11 (NLT)

Week 17  2 Samuel 21-24

While I’m finishing up 2 Samuel it registers with me that the last four chapters seem like a set of miscellaneous add-ons.
It’s like this… The story of the life of David seems to basically progress through the first eight or nine chapters of the book. Things are on the upswing to that point. Then they stall and start regressing in chapter ten (and especially eleven) and keep right on getting worse through to chapter twenty. But then the last four chapters seem more like a random collection of odds-and-ends. Well…maybe not odds-and-ends exactly. There could be more to it than a jumbled muddle – more than what I’m seeing. But that’s what it looks like.
I found six main items:
A three-year famine & the Gibeonite Story
Philistine Battles & Four Brave Soldiers
A 51-verse Psalm
David’s Last Words
A list of David’s Top-Rated Soldiers
An illegal census & the Plague Story
Unrelated add-ons.
I figure I could diagram chapters 1-20 pretty easily. On a blank page – starting on the lower left corner – I’d draw a line that angled up at about 45-degrees (that’d be the first nine chapters). Then I’d start angling down (chapter ten to chapter twenty). So far so good. A neat tipi: The Life-and-Times of David.
But then I get to 21-24 and stop diagramming. I’ve got my up-line…then my down-line…and then a garb-bag of un-diagrammable variables.
So I leave my sketch unfinished. A neat – but incomplete – inverted-V.

Week 16  2 Samuel 13

The story of Amnon & Tamar is one of those stories where I wonder: why-in-the-world is it even in the bible? It’s the story of how Amnon wanted to have sexual intercourse with his half-sister Tamar and so he & a friend cooked-up a seduction-scheme to make that happen but when the romantic-enticement element didn’t pan-out Amnon raped Tamar. It’s a repellant story.
But I think the Amnon-Tamar story is a bit like the Lot-&-his-daughters scandal and the Judah-Tamar boondoggle. All three are a) stories about illicit sexual intercourse and b) told not just for their story but to explain about something else. So Lot’s incest story explains where Ammon & Moab came from. Judah & his daughter-in-law account for Perez. And Amnon-Tamar is the backstory to Absalom the Usurper.
It was like this. David had several sons: the oldest was Amnon…the second was Kileab…the third was Absalom.
Tamar happened to be Son #3’s sister and when Amnon – Son #1 – raped Tamar Absalom was infuriated and (eventually) assassinated Amnon.
But as it turned out Absalom was not only avenging his sister…he was also eliminating the First Heir. Meaning Absalom was just one-step-removed from the crown.
The Amnon-Tamar story is nasty but it accounts for Absalom’s ascent. It’s its own small story…and explains what was behind the bigger story of Absalom’s treason.

Note: quote from 2 Samuel 3:2-3 (NLT). The Lot account is in Genesis 19:30-38 & Judah-Tamar in Genesis 38. Question: what happened to Kileab (Son #2)? Good question!

Week 16  Psalm 105

105 is a summary of Israel’s history.
Having a condensed history is a pretty nice benefit for a bible reader. How nice? I flipped back about eight-hundred pages to find out how nice:
Psalm 105:7-23 is a summary of (roughly) Genesis 12-50
Psalm 105:24-41 is a summary of (roughly) Exodus 1-17
And psalm 105:44 is a summary of (roughly) Joshua 1-24.
That means that 105 collapses roughly 79 chapters into about 36 verses. So that’s nice. I spent weeks reading those chapters in January & March. For a couple of seconds I think about whether I could get away with skipping those 79 chapters next time and just reading psalm 105 instead (but I figure that would be a bible-reader’s cheat).
Another thing I see is that 105 is more than just a synopsis. It’s also an explanation of what was going on behind the Israel story. A lot of things happened – says 105 – and this is why they happened.
I don’t know how many modern-day Albertans think there aren’t any explanations. Probably lots. Events seem to just happen in fairly random directionless explanationless & arbitrary ways. But 105 makes the point that quite a bit of Complex Coordination was going on behind-the-scenes. How to decipher Complex Coordination isn’t simple. But deciphering’s starting-point is developing a sense of the Lord’s planning designing operating organizing intervening drafting modifying promoting. Things like that.
105’s explanation of history does two main things. It a) extracts the chancy-aimlessness from the story and b) adds a shot of the Lord’s focused-direction to the mix.

Week 16  Psalm 104

Psalm 104 is a kind of supplement to Genesis 1.
Here’s an example of that:
Genesis 1: then God said, “Let the land burst forth with every sort of grass and seed-bearing plant. And let there be trees that grow seed-bearing fruit…” And so it was. The land was filled with seed-bearing plants and trees, and their seeds produced plants and trees of like kind.
Then I see how Psalm 104 complements that when David says to the Lord: you cause grass to grow for the cattle. You cause plants to grow for people to use. You allow them to produce food from the earth – wine to make them glad, olive oil as a lotion for their skin, and bread to give them strength. The trees of the Lord are well cared for…the birds make their nests, and storks make their homes in the firs.
Psalm 104 is a nice elaboration on the creation story and I wonder if the Genesis version could be beefed-up by adding the psalm. I think about recomposing-paraphrasing-&-amalgamating the two. But quick enough I know that this Grass & Tree Segment alone would take more time than I’ve got (I don’t think time is my enemy…but it isn’t my friend either).
But that’s not the only thing. I think I’d be trying to stitch together two completely different kinds of literature. Genesis 1 is descriptive. Psalm 104 is more like a hymn…more like poetry. They help each other. But are maybe better kept separate.

Note: quotes from Genesis 1:11-12 Psalm 104:14-17 (NLT)

Week 15  Psalm 103

For a few seconds I look at the verse thinking how useful it would’ve been if I’d seen it in the third week of January: (the Lord) revealed his character to Moses and his deeds to the people of Israel. Starting in Exodus 3 and going through all those episodes to the end of Deuteronomy the Lord was revealing his character to Moses. It’s a nice executive-style summary of those books.
I get a small sticky-note and write: “the next ~135 chapters are about the Lord revealing his character to Moses (& Israel). See Psalm 103:7”. I stick it by the chapter heading of Exodus 3. Next year – on about January 20, 2024 – I’ll see it and ask myself: what’s this section about? And I’ll say: it’s about the Lord showing Moses what he’s like.
Anyway David doesn’t leave it at that. He lists a few things Moses would have learned about the Lord:
The Lord is merciful
He’s gracious
He’s slow to get angry
He’s full of unfailing love
He won’t constantly accuse us
He won’t remain angry
He hasn’t punished us for all our sins
He doesn’t deal with us as we deserve.
It’s a short list – there’ll be more in Exodus-Leviticus-Numbers-Deuteronomy. But it looks like David is saying “you’ll find these for starters”.
It’s a helpful tip. It’s like an answer key at the back of the textbook. If I’m not finding things like these about the Lord then I’m missing something.

Note: quotes from Psalm 103:7 8-10 (NLT)

Week 15  Psalm 100

There’s a kind of ‘ownership by production’ rule in verse three: (the Lord) made us and we are his. So it looks like I’m the product of a producer.
Of course the other side of it is that I’m my-own-man. I’m free. More-or-less self-determining. Independent. I’ve got a lot of personal elbow-room to do what I decide to do. I can do pretty much whatever I have the mental & physical & emotional & genetic & skills-training to do.
There’s some things I definitely can’t do. But natural limiters aside I have the capacity and initiative and freedom to act on what I do have.
But then at the same time I bump into this Psalm 100 Statement of Constraint about being made by someone else who has a kind of a soft-claim on me.
It’s not an autocratic claim. Not dictatorial. I have quite a bit of liberty to do what I want. The claim’s a partial claim. An outsider’s quiet-claim. It’s a resistible claim – if I don’t like the outsider or his soft-claim I can disregard it.
The psalm ends with a short description of the outsider: he is good. His unfailing love continues forever, and his faithfulness continues to each generation.
I prefer the idea of being free of outside-claims. At the same time if someone had a claim on me I could do a lot worse than this claim-maker.

Note: quotes from Psalm 100:3 5 (NLT)

Week 15  1 Samuel 23

By chapter 20 David is definitely on-the-run (king Saul still visits Normal World occasionally but he’s mostly nursing his homicidal rages against David).
So Outlaw David was holed-up in the town of Keilah and he heard that Saul was coming. What to do?
David asked Abiathar the priest to bring “the ephod” (an elaborate piece of clothing the priest wore). When Abiathar and the ephod arrived David asked the Lord if Saul was actually coming. Yes! Then he asked if the people of Keilah would turn him over to Saul. Yes! So David took-off.
I’m left with the question: how did the ephod actually work? The story just says that Abiathar & the ephod arrived…David asked the Lord…the Lord replied.
Earlier in this same chapter David asked the Lord a question and got his answer without the ephod so I wonder how necessary it was.
I wonder if the ephod functioned as an added insurance measure – a back-up.
Did it work like a crystal-ball? (I don’t get that impression.)
Did it have an instrumental role in the forecast? (Bible doesn’t spell that out.)
Did it only work if a person was in close proximity to the device? (Bible doesn’t say that but I’d think so.)
My three main questions (and answers) are:
Q: Was the ephod helpful? A: Most likely.
Q: Was it necessary? A: I don’t think so.
Q: How did it work? A: Your guess is as good as mine.

Note: the story is in 1 Samuel 23:6-14

Week 15  1 Samuel 15-16

The three main players in 1 Samuel are Samuel Saul & David.
Up until chapter 15 Saul doesn’t know David but in chapter 16 Saul slid into a depressive funk (the Lord had sent a tormenting spirit that filled him with depression and fear). So Saul got some advice: try music-therapy. And since David was a musician David ended up coming to Saul’s court to play his harp on a regular basis.
Anyway in the next chapter (the David-and-Goliath story) David saved the nation by killing the giant. This is where the story gets a bit weird because it says that: as Saul watched David go out to fight Goliath, he asked Abner…”whose son is this?” It makes it seem as though Saul didn’t know who David was.
At first I wondered if the story was a slapdash jumble that needed editing.
Then I wondered if it could be a common biographical style used in the ancient world.
And it was a bit of a stretch but I wondered: were the two stories intentionally put out of  chronological order for some reason I couldn’t figure?
But now I think that Saul knew perfectly well who David was. The difference was he’d only known him as a court entertainer. Now he’s seeing David become a public hero. And it’s got Saul asking himself: who-is-this-guy? And along with that a bigger question: is David a potential competitor? And then the biggest: is he a threat?

Note: quotes from 1 Samuel 16:14 17:55 (NLT)

Week 15  1 Samuel 16

Sixteen is a transitional chapter with two things happening: a) Saul is on a down-and-out trajectory while b) David is inching up-and-in.
One pretty definite clue about Saul’s decline is this: now the Spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord tormented him.
The idea that an evil spirit came from the Lord raises questions about “How-all Does the Lord Operate?” It’s one of my big bible-reader’s questions.
One possible way to think about it is this: the Lord is a good god who does good things but he’s also a bad god who also does evil things. Both-And. Personally I don’t think this idea fits with quite a few other things the bible says about the Lord. But sending-an-evil-spirit is a perplexing way for the Lord to operate.
A couple of weeks ago I was reading the story about Abimelech – a pretty abominable guy. It said: God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the citizens of Shechem. So Saul wasn’t the only case where the Lord decided to utilize an evil spirit to ensure a specific outcome.
I sit for a bit wondering why the Lord used an evil spirit. Wondering if he could have done something else. But the main thing I keep in mind is that it looks like the Lord can and does have unorthodox operational options that make up his discretionary tool-kit.

Note: quotes from 1 Samuel 16:14 & Judges 9:23 (NLT)