Month: August 2024

Week 33  Joel

This year I’ve been trying to be a bit more alert to see what I can find out about the Lord and so what Joel says is pretty interesting: the Lord is merciful and compassionate, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love. He is eager to relent and not punish.
It’s really easy in the bible – especially in the OT – to get the impression that the Lord is angry a lot and that he gets angry quickly. So this slow-to-get-angry phrase is helpful. I check a couple of other versions:
The Lord is merciful and compassionate, slow to anger, rich in grace, and willing to change his mind about disaster.
The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love; and he relents over disaster.
The versions agree that the Lord is Slow to Get Angry.
One reason I noticed anger was because when I was reading Isaiah & Jeremiah in July I was thinking about the Lord getting angry. I don’t know if either Isaiah or Jeremiah use that exact slow-to-anger phrase. But I got the impression with them that the Lord is Patient Patient Patient Patient Patient & Patient…(before the hammer finally falls).
The hammer has to fall. There’s no getting round it. But the falling of the hammer seems like a When-All-Else-Fails strategy. It takes a long long time and a lot of provocation before it does.

Note: quote from Joel 2:13 (NLT / Complete Jewish Bible / English Standard Version)

Week 32  Hosea & Co.

I started reading Hosea today – the first of the Short Prophets (the others are Joel Amos Obadiah Jonah Micah Nahum Habakkuk Zephaniah Haggai Zechariah & Malachi).
I usually just read through the bible in bible-order even though I know that bible-order isn’t the same as calendar-order but I sometimes get lulled into thinking the-book-before-happened-before-the-book-after. Which isn’t necessarily true.
So anyway I was reminded about that when Hosea said his messages came to him during the years when Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah were kings of Judah.
That made me think about re-ordering the books so I could read them in date sequence. But I didn’t get too far with that idea because only six of them gave me a time-stamp:
Amos said he wrote during the time of king Uzziah
Hosea was Uzziah too…as well as Jotham-Ahaz-Hezekiah
Micah prophesied to Jotham-Ahaz-Hezekiah
Zephaniah to Josiah
Haggai & Zechariah both prophesied during the second year of Darius
Jonah & Nahum – Nineveh/Assyria prophets – didn’t give dates. But Jonah had to be earlier and Nahum later
Joel was before the fall of Jerusalem & Malachi after the return from exile
Obadiah talks about Edom & Habakkuk about Babylon.
The long-and-short is that with some of them I’m playing a guessing-game. And ball-parking a date to a one or two or three decade estimate isn’t too helpful. Not too helpful to me anyway.
So reading the Short Prophets this year I’ll just take them as they come.

Note: Hosea 1:1 (NLT)

Week 32  Ezekiel 40-48

I finished Ezekiel today – nine chapters. Nine is more than I usually read but I had an uneasy feeling about my reading progress. At the end of July I’d checked and I was ahead of schedule. But the problem – a kind of X-Factor – is that I have two (non-corresponding) bible reading schedules.
Bible Reading Schedule #1 is to read through the bible by December 31.
But Bible Reading Schedule #2 – a sub-schedule of #1 – is to finish the OT by August 31.
Schedule #1 is my primary schedule. Schedule #2 is totally negotiable. But it’s my preference – I want four months to read the NT.
Anyway I checked my Schedule #2 progress today: 22 days left in August and I have 91 chapters to read. 4.14 chapters per day. That means that even though I’m ahead on Schedule #1 I’m behind on #2 (that confirmed my suspicion when I started reading today and that’s what put me in a hurry-up frame-of-mind.)

Note: one main thing I noticed today is that Ezekiel’s long last vision & prophecy begins with the Lord telling him: watch and listen…Pay close attention to everything I show you…Then you will return to the people and tell them everything you have seen (Ezekiel 40:4 NLT). I kept that in mind for nine chapters wondering what the exiles in Babylon would think about Ezekiel’s fantastic temple vision. But I got to the end of the prophecy and that was the end of the book. So I was left hanging. Wondering what people thought about Ezekiel’s unbelievable story.

Week 32  Jeremiah 40-43

Sometimes I’m reading and it’s obvious that a character is important. Abraham. Joseph. Moses. Elijah. Elisha. Key people.
Other times people are non-key. For instance Gedaliah & Ishmael & Johanan. Three guys whose lives were linked in the days after Babylon had levelled Jerusalem.
Nebuchadnezzar needed a compliant local guy to govern so he chose Gedaliah. Gedaliah didn’t last long as sheriff of Judah because he was assassinated. That’s pretty much the Gedaliah story.
Ishmael was the assassin. After killing Gedaliah he fled the country pursued by an avenger – Gedaliah’s friend Johanan. That’s pretty much the Ishmael story.
Johanan had been a guerilla/freedom-fighter during the Babylonian War and he knew Gedaliah personally. The long-&-short is that with Gedaliah gone Johanan replaced him. In what he thought was a smart move he convinced the people to follow him to the safety of Egypt (which was the exact location Jeremiah told him to avoid). So Johanan led Israel down a wrong & deadly path. That’s pretty much Johanan’s story.
The story of Gedaliah-Ishmael-Johanan is pretty interesting. Three guys whose lives crisscrossed like a French braid.
I figure that the story is in the bible so I know what’s going on. It gives me information that fills a gap. But if there’s any more to it than that I don’t know what it is.
Knowing the Gedaliah-Ishmael-Johanan story definitely helps.
But from what I can see (at this point) not knowing about these three non-key people wouldn’t be too great a loss.

Week 32  Jeremiah 38

The Babylonian army was outside the city walls and the people of Jerusalem were inside hunkering down. And under those circumstances Jeremiah told the people: everyone who stays in Jerusalem will die from war, famine, or disease, but those who surrender to the Babylonians will live. That’s the back-story.
The front-story is about the dispute between Jeremiah & the Jerusalem city officials. Jeremiah’s message was pretty simple: defend Jerusalem and die…or surrender and live. But it created a huge dilemma for the city gate-keepers. “What do we do with Jeremiah’s message?”
One possibility would have been to think about whether the message was plausible. But that was a very small concern. The Big Concern was the effect the message might have: that kind of talk will undermine the morale of the people.
Trying to figure out if something is true is a difficult exercise. It’s simpler to ask ‘what’ll be the effect on the audience?’ Thinking about it that way means I don’t have to worry about true. True is irrelevant! My only task is managing what the audience reaction.
If the accuracy of the message is most important then what the audience thinks about it doesn’t matter much.
But if audience reflex is the key issue then the message can say whatever needs to be said.
Jeremiah’s problem was that he figured the Lord’s message had to be unedited.
The officials figured they had to massage it into manageability.

Note: quoted from Jeremiah 38:2 4 (NLT)

Week 31  Jeremiah 36

The Lord told Jeremiah to record everything that he had publicly prophesied going all the way back to his king Josiah prophecies. Then the Lord gave Jeremiah a kind of summarizing comment that described the whole record in one general phrase: perhaps the people of Judah will repent if they see in writing all the terrible things I have planned for them.
So one way to think of the book of Jeremiah is that it’s a Big Book of Terrible Things.
Having the Lord describe Jeremiah’s prophecies this way is a big relief from a bible-reader’s point-of-view. It means that when I read Jeremiah’s prophecy and come away from it thinking “this was a heavy load of terrible & gruesome content” then that shouldn’t really be a big surprise. When I finish reading and feel emotionally squashed about the content and wonder if I should be seeing something heart-warming then – not-to-worry – Jeremiah’s content seems terrible because it is. He wasn’t writing comedy or romance.
When Jeremiah’s Big Book of Terrible Things was read publicly nothing is said about the reaction of the crowd (although a small sample of people – a group of officials – were badly frightened). On the other side of the coin king Jehoiakim thought the book was humdrum enough that he just burned the scroll.
But anyway…today I get my General Reader’s Alert for Jeremiah: Be Prepared for alarming dreadful & shocking content ahead.

Note: quotes from 36:3 13 (NLT)