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Week 28 Ezekiel

Right away in chapter one I’m into a content-management question: what do I do with Ezekiel’s vision?
Since my main task is just reading through the answer is: not much.
Not much because the vision is so spectacular that even Ezekiel didn’t really know how to describe it. And he’s the one who saw it.
Some things he put names to: faces, wings, hands, wheels, wheel-rims.
But other things he didn’t have vocabulary for so he resorted to in-the-vicinity words. A couple-of-dozen times he used like or as or resembled or appeared because he was conceptually strapped.
I can say that I saw a dog in the lane last night if I saw a dog.
If I say I saw something that looked like a dog in the lane last night it’s because I’m not sure it was an actual dog.
If I say I saw something in the lane last night that looked kind of like a dog that was gleaming like burnished bronze then I’m taking a shot at describing something I can’t describe.
What exactly did Ezekiel see? Well he didn’t exactly know.
And it’s fair to say that a guy who’s reading through can’t exactly know something that Ezekiel himself didn’t. So I don’t exactly know either.

Note: quotes from Ezekiel 1:7, 28 (NASB)
Added note: in spite of not being able to say what he saw Ezekiel did say pretty clearly what he did: when I saw it, I fell on my face.

Week 27 Lamentations

If books of the bible were colour-matched then Lamentations would be at the cool end of the spectrum where blue bleeds into indigo. A bible-reader tries not to let sentiment determine the plan but if I’m feeling kind of blue I’d be tempted to save Lamentations for another day.
Jeremiah ends his book of mostly tragic-sadness like this:
The joy of our hearts has ended
Our dancing has turned to mourning…
Disaster has fallen upon us because we have sinned
Our hearts are sick and weary
And our eyes grow dim with tears
For Jerusalem is empty and desolate
A place haunted by jackals
But Lord, you remain the same forever…
Why do you continue to forget us?
Why have you forsaken us for so long?
Restore us, O Lord, and bring us back to you again!
Give us back the joy we once had!
Or have you utterly rejected us?
Are you angry with us still?
I read somewhere that when the book of Isaiah was read publicly the last verse of the book is so dispiriting that the reader would read it and then go back and re-read the second-last verse.
I guess the last verse of Lamentations is so pessimistically uncertain that a reader would be tempted to do the same there.
Which makes for a less lamentable ending for the audience.
Which is maybe a less lamentable ending than Jeremiah intended.

Note: quote from Lamentations 5:19-22 (NLT)

Week 27 Jeremiah

I finished reading Jeremiah today.
In chapter 51 there’s a pretty interesting story I’d use if I was a fiction writer. My novel would have adventure, intrigue, danger, exotic locales, and life-threatening risk. I’d be Indiana Joe, an archaeologist searching for the Lost Babylonian Scroll of Jeremiah.
It’s kind of totally plausible. After Jeremiah finished his one-hundred-plus verses of withering oral denunciation against Babylon he had it transcribed (which is absolutely perfect since I’ve got nothing to search for unless I get Jeremiah’s spoken prophecy into writing). Better yet, he gave the scroll to a guy named Seraiah, told him to read it publicly in Babylon, and then to throw it into the Euphrates River!
So there I have it – an actual-tangible-for-real archaeologist-friendly document at the bottom of the river for me to discover.
Okay, I know the bible doesn’t say that Seraiah sealed the scroll in a watertight container that would last for twenty-five-hundred years. But not to worry – that’s why we have fiction.

Note: the story of Jeremiah getting his oral speech into text-form is in Jeremiah 51:59-64. The scroll likely contained our Jeremiah 50:1-51:58.
Added note: I calculated my end-of-month numbers. Total pages read from January – June = 1115. So I’ve read 64.45% of the bible. I feel pretty good about that. But…then I checked last year’s numbers. I’d finished the entire OT by July 12, 2019 – 77% in 6.5 months – but on December 31 I still had 50 unread psalms. Hard to believe. So anyway I won’t count my chickens yet.

Week 27 Jeremiah

The story in chapters 41-43 goes like this…
Nebuchadnezzar had sacked Jerusalem and then gone home.
He left a puppet-administrator in place – Gedaliah.
Before long Gedaliah was assassinated and a military commander named Johanan stepped into the leadership hornet’s-nest. Nebuchadnezzar would be mad, and Johanan’s plan was to escape to Egypt.
So: to run or not to run? 
The people decided to ask Jeremiah.
This part of the story is pretty interesting because the people give Jeremiah an ironclad guarantee that they’d do whatever the Lord said: whether we like it or not, we will obey.
The Lord showed Jeremiah that if the Judeans wanted to stay alive they had to stay in Jerusalem. And right away the people’s reaction was: you lie! The Lord our God hasn’t forbidden us to go to Egypt!
A lot of times prophecy is a prediction about something that hasn’t happened yet. And the general idea is that whether-I-like-it-or-not I’ll accept it.
In reality it’s more like: I’ll endorse prophecies I prefer and veto the ones I don’t.  When it comes to a prophesy’s acceptability the key thing is personal preference.
About three months ago I read the story of king Ahab. His view of Micaiah was: I hate him. He never prophesies anything but bad news for me.
So the secret of popularly successful prophecy is: find out what people want to hear and tell them that.

Notes: quotes from Jeremiah 42:6 & 43:6; and I Kings 22:8 (NLT version)

Week 27 Jeremiah 

During the long siege of Jerusalem the Lord told Jeremiah to buy some land in his home town of Anathoth. It didn’t seem like a wise investment choice because Nebuchadnezzar would soon own that land.
So after the deed was signed and sealed Jeremiah prayed: O Sovereign Lord! You have made the heavens and the earth by your great power. Nothing is too hard for you!
It’s a pretty emphatic comment. Nothing is too hard for you! Nothing takes in pretty much everything.
But then Jeremiah’s prayer ended with an and-yet. You’re the greatest and most powerful and you can do anything: and yet, O Sovereign Lord, you have told me to buy the field – paying good money for it before these witnesses – even though the city will soon belong to the Babylonians.
Jeremiah knew for sure that the Lord was way past the borders of any known limitation – he was a permanent resident of nothing-too-hard country, a spirit of hyper-potent and insuperable capacity.
And yet Jeremiah was concerned about his property.
It’s like I win the lottery and I’m distressed about my broken gate-latch.
Normally you’d think that being totally personally certain about one big thing that by definition took care of everything else would – in a natural, seamless kind of way – carry-over and guarantee total personal certainty about other small things.
But Jeremiah was concerned about his gate-latch.

Note: quotes from Jeremiah 32:17, 25 (NLT version)

Week 26 Psalm 119

I read Psalm 119 today.
I didn’t plan to because it’s pretty long. At first I figured I’d group the twenty-two sub-sections into five-paragraph chunks, read one-a-day and finish the last two on June 30. But in the end I read it all.
The 119th is a psalm about how the bible can help me in some personal ways where I need personal help. I’d forgotten about how 119 hammers away at the importance of the bible. it doesn’t let up. Things it can help me do. Things it can help me avoid. Once I got started it wasn’t so hard to keep at it.
Here’s one example: how can a young man keep his way pure? It’s a pretty good question: how can I live and speak and think and act and feel my way through the day in as decontaminated a way as possible?
119 says the answer is: by living according to your word.
So a long and likely complex process (personal pollution-control-and-management) starts with a fairly simple exercise (read the bible).
I need to start with the reading-your-word part so I can locate the track that I need to start tracking so I can actually start the living-according-to-your-word part so I can begin becoming more immaculate than I am right now.
Becoming a more pristine guy will no doubt have untidy, disconsolating, hit & miss, and complicated days, so it’s fortunate that it begins simple.
It begins with starting to read.

Note: quote from Psalm 119:9 (NLT version)

Week 26 Jeremiah

Chapter 26 is a day-in-the-life-of-a-prophet story.
That morning the Lord told Jeremiah to go to the temple and give a public speech: if you will not listen to me…then I will destroy this temple…and I will make Jerusalem an object of cursing.
Not exactly a feel-good speech, and when Jeremiah was finished the audience’s reception was very cool. In fact they wanted to kill him for being unpatriotic. Serious questions about whether the temple would, or could, or might possibly in fact be destroyed weren’t up for discussion. Jeremiah had broken a non-negotiable-topics taboo. Which couldn’t be tolerated.
Fortunately for him the crowd was divided on the death penalty. The temple priests and the prophets lined up in favour of capital punishment. But the crowd and city officials wanted to hear him out. Some of them remembered a story, a precedent from long before. The prophet Micah had spoken a darkly critical omen against Hezekiah but the king didn’t execute him. So in a better-safe-than-sorry decision Jeremiah’s life was spared.
This was probably a tenser day than usual for Jeremiah.
But based on what he’s been saying for the last 25 chapters you wonder how frequently he operated close to the cultural no-fly zone.

Note: quote from Jeremiah 26:4-6 (NLT version). The Micah-Hezekiah story might be from II Chronicles 32:24-26. (Micah comes 147-pages after Jeremiah in my bible, but he prophesied many decades before him.)

Week 26 Jeremiah

I’ve been tracking the things that Jeremiah prophesied against. Since idolatry was one of the top-ranked problems I was thinking about idolatry. So Psalm 115 surprised me because it talked about idols:
They have mouths, but cannot speak
Eyes, but they cannot see…
Ears, but cannot hear
Noses, but they cannot smell…
Hands, but cannot feel
Feet, but they cannot walk.
Idols have none of the normal sensory capacities a person does. As far as being human goes, idols are sub-human.
But 115 says something unexpected: those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.
I guess I shouldn’t have been caught off guard. A couple of weeks ago Isaiah was talking about a carpenter going into the forest, cutting down a cypress tree and carving it into a god. Then what happens? He bows down to it and worships. He prays to it.
His icon gains the carpenter’s trust. Eventually he’ll become like what he made.
What’s he becoming if he’s becoming something less than human?
This is a pretty worrisome question.
The bible contrasts an idol’s nothing with the Lord’s something.
The bible says I can devolve to a point where I prefer the nothing to the something.
I have the capacity to trade in being human, and once that’s done I can start working at becoming nothing.

Notes: quotes from Psalm 115:4-7, 8; Isaiah 44:17 (NIV & NASB versions)

Week 26 Jeremiah

When the Lord told Jeremiah to quit praying for Jerusalem because prayers were now useless Jeremiah reacted. He was a never-say-die pro-Jerusalem guy and so he argued.
He figured the Lord should consider the fact that the people in Jerusalem had been lied to by their leaders. Q: since they’ve been propagandized with false information don’t you think you should cut them some slack?
The Lord admitted: the prophets are prophesying lies in my name. I have not sent them or appointed them or spoken to them. They are prophesying to you false visions, divinations, idolatries and the delusions of their own minds. The next verse says that the propagandists would be punished.
Okay…and what about the people who’d been propagandized? Will they be absolved? Verse sixteen doesn’t reassure Jeremiah. Those gullible people will: be thrown out into the streets.
The way Jeremiah frames his argument is that there are two categories of people: guilty people who propagandize and innocent people who are propagandized.
But the Lord groups it differently. Deluders and the people they delude are both guilty. It’s people who are propaganda-resistant who are innocent.
Chapter fourteen is a good reminder. If I have a bunch of lies coming at me I need some kind of self-protective lie-detection-alert-system because I can’t blame the liar for fooling me with his lies. Just myself for believing them.

Note: quotes from Jeremiah 14:14, 16 (NIV version)

Week 25 Psalm 111 & 112

I read Psalm 111.
Before I flipped over to Jeremiah I glanced at Psalm 112.
111 & 112 both start with praise the Lord.
Both have ten verses.
Both have a paragraph break at verse-seven.
Might not mean much but there’s a kind of visual symmetry.
I walked into the other room and scanned pages 866 & 867, scissored-out the two psalms, taped 111 together at the page-break, then clipped them onto a sheet of yellow 8½ x 11. I lined them up side-by-side.
The content is different: 111 is about the Lord; 112 about a person who reveres the Lord.
But I see that 111:3b says the Lord’s righteousness endures forever, and 112:3b says the person’s righteousness endures forever.
111:4b says the Lord is gracious and compassionate. 112:4b says the person is gracious and compassionate.
I disregard the verse-numbers and count the number of phrases in 111. There’s 22. 22 in 112, too.
So I’m thinking that maybe something’s going on, something I didn’t see before. Maybe some kind of literary form. A kind of Hebrew sonnet.
How many times do I ask: couldn’t he have written this in an easier way?
Maybe he could have. And maybe he did. Maybe he wrote a soothing ancient-near-eastern sonnet that only translated into teeth-grinding contemporary English.
While I’m looking at bible content I can’t forget about content’s submerged side. Maybe culture, or language, or 22-line sonnets.
So it’s useful to remind myself: if you want low-demand reading go look at a Canadian news magazine.

Note: quotes from NASB version.