Author: admin

Week 4 Exodus 13-32

Exodus 25-31 is a seven-chapter block, a topical unit: Instructions for Building the Tabernacle. I decide to read it in one sitting. I’ve travelled this road before and have a sense of what to expect – seven pretty lonely and demanding chapters. 
I’m sitting in my room when I start but by the middle of chapter 26 I go into the kitchen and stand at the island. I catch my mind drifting in mid-28 and refocus, re-converge. Chapter 29 starts at the bottom of 123 and when I turn the page I see two columns of unbroken text – the longest chapter of the set. Before long I quit using my plastic ruler and lean on my elbows scanning the columns, lots of content passing through the sieve in my head. I finish in about thirty-three minutes (a long reading day); I’ve covered some ground.
Low sun is flooding the kitchen now; I turn off the lights, check the weather station – it’s cold. I look back at pencil marks in the margins of my bible – 18 small checks and 2 question marks that weren’t there 33 minutes ago. Twenty things that got my attention. No matter where I read there’s almost never nothing.

Note: tomorrow I’ll jump ahead to Exodus 35-40.

Week 4 Exodus 13-32

When I got to Exodus 20 I read it and the next four chapters all at once.
Exodus 20 is titanically and stupendously important so I slow down a bit. But I don’t stop and stare. It’s an important 20% chunk of the day’s reading, but I’m conscious of the 80% still coming.
In spite of my urgency, when I get past the ten commandments I bog down. There’s a three-chapter collection of what the author called ordinances: specific case laws, real life situations, legal decisions, ifs & thens. For example the fifth-commandment in chapter 20 says honor your father and mother. But 21 moves right on and develops that vanilla-flavoured guideline, adding a shot of legislative Tabasco by saying that he who strikes his father or his mother shall surely be put to death.
I read chapters 21, 22, 23. I notice myself edging toward a couple of conclusions, and also jumping to one pretty solid and definite one: this section doesn’t make much sense to me.
Jumping to conclusions might be one of my most common reading responses to the bible. I try to be alert to my jumpiness; try to remind myself to look before I leap; dial back on my confident this-doesn’t-make-sense; be a little less affirmative, more interrogative; ask myself: why isn’t this section making sense to me?

Notes: quotes from Exodus 20:12 and 21:15

Week 4 Exodus 13-32

I saw a quote in Good to Great that was pretty helpful, and so I decided to rewrite it and apply it to bible reading. I know…it’s specific advice for CEOs. But I think it’s also general advice for anyone who just wants to get something done.
MHJ’s re-phrase of Jim Collins: I want to read the bible. But how do I get going? How do I keep going? The starting point and the key is not to add bible reading onto all the other things I’m doing. A better start-point for me is to admit that a lot of what I’m doing right now is a waste of time and energy. So I need to identify my time-wasters. Then I need to ignore and stop wasting time on them. Now I can organize my spare time to get done what I want to get done (but didn’t have time or energy for before).

Note: credit to Jim Collins Good to Great (NY: Harper, 2001).
The actual quote says: the point of this entire book is not that we should “add” these findings to what we are already doing and make ourselves even more overworked. No, the point is to realize that much of what we’re doing is a waste of energy. If we organized the majority of our work time around applying these principles, and pretty much ignored or stopped doing everything else, our lives would be simpler and our results vastly improved (205)

Week 4 Exodus 13-32

What would I do if a guy told me God wanted me to sell my house and give the money to the poor? And that to prove that God had sent him, he would predict several things:
Monday your house will be vandalized;
Tuesday your website will be hacked;
Wednesday your fiancée will marry a real estate agent;
Thursday your neighbour’s tree will fall and crush his garage;
Friday the prime minister of Burkina Faso will be hit by a silver Mercedes Benz driven by a guy named Rufus;
Saturday an asteroid will hit the Sunridge Observatory at 3:36 a.m.
Sunday Niagara Falls will stop flowing.
If each of those things did happen what would I do? Well…I guess I’d do some serious thinking about selling my house.
That’s what makes the Exodus story of the hardhearted pharaoh so surprising. He was able to completely disregard the ten plagues, to dismiss the power behind them.
Pharaoh’s heart was strong and heavy against Moses, against God. Hard as rock. The text goes on to say that the Lord began collaborating with the pharaoh, co-acting with him, supplementing his diamond-hard hardness of heart, making it unbreakably durable.
Pharaoh is like a man who finds his perfect ocean wave and then realizes he’s surfing an irresistible dangerous lethal force. But not to worry, he’s thinking. I’m okay. I’m heading exactly toward where I want to go.

Note: the full story is in Exodus 7-14

Week 3 Genesis 43-Exodus 12 

Two things are going on while I read: (a) I’m reading, and (b) I’m trying to figure out what my take-away is from that reading. Luckily for me, sometimes the bible tells me what it is.
An example is the story of the ten plagues. Egypt had killed and enslaved the Hebrews, and so a series of plagues from the Lord ruined the country. Egypt released the slaves. The obvious thing I see is that the Lord was powerful and took action to free an oppressed people.
But the Lord also spells out to Moses the bigger point of the miracles. I’ve freed you from bondage, he says, in order that you may know that I am the Lord.
So on one hand there’s the story itself, and on the other there’s what I’m supposed to get from the story.
I think it’s totally possible that someone reading the plagues story today might feel sorry for Egypt, sorry for the pharaoh. It seems unfair, seems pretty drastic. Why would God do something like that? God must be pretty angry. I don’t like that story; it offends me.
So the bible sometimes anticipates response. Joe is reading the event but he might misread it, so he needs a key. Key for Joe: the point of this story is that you can know that I am the Lord.
If I was smart enough I guess I wouldn’t need the prompt. But there it is.

Note: quote is from Exodus 10:2

Week 3 Genesis 43-Exodus 12

Exodus 3: the angel of the Lord appears to Moses and says he wants Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt. Moses says he doesn’t want that job.
That much is pretty clear. I look at the last 12 verses of Exodus 3 and the first 13 verses of chapter 4 and I see Moses’ explanation: Reasons Why I’m Not the Right Man For the Job. I understand the story to that point. The Lord wants Moses to do something that he doesn’t want to do it. I find out something about Moses.
The story also says something about God. I already know from reading Genesis that God has incontestably dynamic force available to him. He has the titanesque power to vaporize galaxies with a glance; he has coercive powers to make Genghis Khan weep with envy. And then this story. The narrator portrays the Lord in human strokes, sketches him out to look kind of like, well, a guy. The angel of the Lord as a negotiator: I can discuss, I can listen, I’m reasonable, I can make concessions.
I’ve already seen, already know that the Lord is not just a regular guy. This story muddies the water, complicates the picture.
A one-dimensional god is a way more manageable god; multi-dimensionality is a tougher mental fit for me.
Things cloud over in my head. I feel I have to manoeuvre with care; a cat on a crowded counter.
I’ll file it away for now; wait and see if it’ll clarify for me.

Week 3 Genesis 43-Exodus 12

A lot of water has passed over the dam between Genesis 50:26 and Exodus 1:7. Hundreds of years of water in thirty seconds of reading.
Jacob’s family is a lot bigger now, big enough that Egypt’s ruler thinks the country’s foreign minority along the northern border could become a security risk. So by law the families of Israel lose whatever legal rights they have and are re-classified as unpaid mandatory labourers of the state – slaves. And another decision is made to help control the Hebrew population: universal male infanticide. The program of killing Hebrew newborns is assigned to two Hebrew midwives.
The bible doesn’t say anything else about Shiphrah and Puah. Just this story. Just that they were supposed to kill children, and that they decided not to. And just that the thing that motivated them to not kill children was that they revered God – Exodus 1 says that twice. And so even though revering God seems like shaky grounds on which to disobey the state, they disobeyed the state.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t know what the outcome would be. I don’t imagine they figured they would be rewarded for their disobedience. Don’t imagine they thought the pharaoh would come onside if they explained their reverence-for-God argument. Don’t imagine, even after they surveyed their mostly downside outlook, it would have made too much difference.

Week 3 Genesis 43-Exodus 12

If I rewrote the book of Genesis I would plot the story of Joseph like this: a brutalized Jewish teen rises from abject slavery to great power, then takes revenge on his evil brothers (like a Hebrew-style Count of Monte Cristo).
But the real story is that Joseph has learned the nature of his being sold into slavery all those years ago (all that his brothers know is: we sold Joseph as a slave, he is now the prime minister of Egypt, our days are numbered).
But Joseph tries to draw a more subtle distinction for them. He tells them (these are his words): God sent me here. And he develops that idea even further and says (these are his words, too): it was not you who sent me here, but God.
His brothers maybe just stare at him – what’s that supposed to mean?
Joseph’s first-hand experience is that there are concurrent operations taking place – the bad operations of the bad operators, and also the good operations of a good operator. Bad operations result in bad outcomes, and good operations result in good ones. But not independently. The good ones kind of absorb and disarm the bad, but without eliminating them.
One of the last things Joseph tells his brothers is: you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. And both of those intentions come true.

Notes: quotations are from Genesis 45:5, 45:8, 50:20 (NASB)

Week 3 Genesis 43-Exodus 12

I always have a good feeling about Genesis 37 because now I’m reading the story of Joseph.
Rating the best stories in the OT is a dumb-but-fun exercise that I’ve done more than once. I think my top five best stories would pretty much have to include Joseph, Ruth, Esther, Daniel, and Jonah. I know, I know…what about Noah, or Abraham, or Jacob, or Moses & Pharaoh, Samuel, David, Elijah, Nehemiah, Job? All I’m saying here is that in this little game of making up a numbered list Joseph is in my top five (probably top three; my top spot is reserved for Esther).
Anyway the Joseph story is one of the very best. His brothers hated him and sold him into slavery. Joseph the slave landed on his feet – he was soon identified as a capable manager by a man who was a capable manger himself. So, the best of a bad situation.
The capable manager had a capable wife who capably managed her own interests. She was powerful, influential, beautiful, feral. She told Joseph she wanted to have sexual intercourse with him and he gave her a principled answer – it’s kind of funny when you read the conversation, the exchange is ludicrous. It’s like the guy standing alone in the public square looking down the barrel of the tank.
It’s a great chapter in Joseph’s story. Maybe not the very best part of the story. But a great story.

Week 2 Genesis 25-42

There’s a weird story in Genesis 38.
Not weird because of the strange cultural practices.
For me it’s weird because I read the story and ask why is it in the bible at all?
Judah was one of Jacob’s sons and one day during sheep-shearing season he happened to pass a sex-worker who was sitting by the Enaim gateway on the road to Timnah. Turned out she was not a temple girl-for-hire but Judah’s own daughter-in-law, who had veiled herself and was working a scam to trick Judah into a sexual transaction because he had backed out of a bargain to let her marry his last living son. It was a dangerous con and Tamar barely escaped with her life. But things panned out. Judah would have been a bit embarrassed I guess, but admitted he was in the wrong. Tamar had Judah’s twins – Perez and Zerah. 
When I see a spicy story like this in the bible I have a gut response: this is stupid. If I’m lucky I pass on through my gut on the way to my head and ask why is this story here?
I don’t find out right now why this story is here because the writer doesn’t tell me. So I put the story on hold. I try to resist saying this is stupid, and I wait for further developments (even though it’s a lot easier to throw it in the Stupid Bin and just move on).