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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. That’s 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 will the exiles in Babylon think about Ezekiel’s fantastic temple vision? But the end of the prophecy 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). Meaning 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 can know what’s going on. It gives me information that fills gaps. 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 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 wish I could see 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.
So 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)

Week 31  Jeremiah 30

I must punish you; I cannot let you go unpunished. That’s Jeremiah quoting the Lord.
For a reader who’s reading through the bible it’s impossible to miss this basic idea. There’s two types of actions: a) punishable actions and b) non-punishable actions. The two are treated differently.
A non-punishable action doesn’t require any punishment. It’s a ‘non’ and so by definition no punitive action is taken against it.
On the other hand a punishable action doesn’t get to go unpunished. Punishable acts have to be punished. It’s the way things are set up. It’s how things work.
In the regular world there are work-arounds for this where my punishable actions might not get punished. For instance here in the regular world my punishable can get reassigned – shifted over from the Penalty Column into the Non-Penalty Column just because we decide to. Penalty metamorphizes into Non-Penalty. Punishment is unnecessary. Jeremiah verse can now say: “I can let you go unpunished”.
In the regular world the system seems to be able to handle this kind of (devious) adjustment in the short-run. But over time there’s going to be degradation. One of the bibles’ repeater ideas is that punishables & non-punishables are incompatible. Confusing them & mixing them fouls the system.
So I can do something wrong and temporarily get-away with it. But eventually the Guilt Cannot Go Unpunished Rule will apply. It’s inevitable.

Note: quote from Jeremiah 30:11 (NLT). End-of-month reading report: 801 chapters. 67% of the bible read in 58% of the year.

Week 31  Jeremiah 29

A big chunk of chapter 29 is Jeremiah’s letter to the (formerly) proud citizens of Jerusalem who had been conquered & captured & exiled to Babylon. They were now suppressed and second-class strangers in a strange hostile foreign oppressor state.
The whole letter is pretty interesting but one thing I noticed was Jeremiah’s recommendation to the captives: work for the peace and prosperity of the city where I (the Lord) sent you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, for its welfare will determine your welfare.
It’s a piece of advice with two-parts:
1) work for the peace & prosperity of your antagonists
2) pray for your antagonists.
There’s nothing about labour strikes. Or passive resistance. Or insurrection. Or revolution.
The basic recommendation was: in your day-to-day life you should be acting and working and praying for the peace & prosperity of the state. National peace and civic stability give you the best chance for being safe & secure & getting along and just living your life. Be satisfied with that. It’s the best you can hope for. You’re exiles.
There’s a cross reference in my bible from Jeremiah to the NT: pray for kings and all others who are in authority, so that we can live in peace and quietness, in godliness and dignity. It’s a completely different set of circumstances but it sounds a lot like Jeremiah. Pray for your controllers. Pray for the peace & security & prosperity of the state. Live your life.

Note: quote from Jeremiah 29:7 & 1 Timothy 2:1-2 (NLT)

Week 31  Jeremiah 16

At the end of the chapter Jeremiah prays a short prayer with a question (and an answer):
Q: can people make their own gods?
A: the gods they make are not real gods at all.
If Jeremiah had been talking to actual people (not the Lord) it’s possible he might have asked ‘can you people make your own gods?’ and then he might have waited for an answer. (There were two possible answers. Either a) Yes we can make our own gods or b) No we can’t make our own gods.)
It’s also possible Jeremiah wouldn’t have waited for an answer because he knew most people would choose Answer A.
But either way I think the actual question Jeremiah was asking was: can a guy make a real god? (that explains his comment: the gods they make are not real gods at all).
The gods that people were making were real-enough. But in the end they were still real-enough artificial gods. Genuine authentic honest-to-god fake gods. Fakely realistic substitutes.
Anyway the Lord told Jeremiah: now I’ll show them my power and might. This tips me off that Power and Might are a couple of key differences between a real-fake god and a real-real god.
The Lord has vast strength & Niagara’s of power and he’s not creatable or controllable by people.
By contrast the maker of a real-fake god gets to create & control whatever god he wants. Which seems like a nice advantage.

Note: quotes from Jeremiah 16:19-20 (NLT)

Week 30  Jeremiah 14

Jeremiah records a prayer that the people of Israel prayed:
Our wickedness has caught up with us, Lord, but help us for the sake of your own reputation. We have turned away from you and sinned against you again and again.
O Hope of Israel, our Savior in times of trouble, why are you like a stranger to us? Why are you like a traveler passing through the land, stopping only for the night?
Are you also confused? Is our champion helpless to save us? You are right here among us, Lord. We are known as your people. Please don’t abandon us now!
I don’t know if anyone has developed a Quality of Prayer Measurement Scale – a test instrument to help me rate prayers on a scale of – let’s say: Poor or Medium or Good.
I’ve never seen one so all I can do is look at a prayer and try to judge it on its merits. And this prayer looks like a pretty good one to me:
It’s a looking-for-help prayer (“we’re in trouble and need a bail-out”)
It’s an admission-of-wrongdoing prayer. Abject. Repentive. Down-in-the-dumps. Pleading.
What’s really surprising is the Lord’s reply: I will no longer accept you as my people. I will remember all your wickedness and will punish you for your sins.
I would have given Israel maybe an 8.5 out of 10 for this good-sounding prayer.
But it looks like the Lord gave them 0.

Note: quotes from Jeremiah 14:7-10 (NLT)

Week 30  Jeremiah-Acts

When I’m reading through the bible I have one thing I hope and one thing I know.
I’m hoping that I’ll learn something useful. Gain some insight.
But one thing I know is that lots of times I’ll be left with questions.
So yesterday I had that question about the nations of the world having chunks of land that they say is their country. A country has geographic territory and it’s theirs to control & use & exploit & manage & protect & defend. National-interest things.
Jeremiah knows that countries / jurisdictions / territorial-states / empires are gained on the one hand when settlers move in and stay or maybe when land is taken over militarily. But he’s more interested in the other reason that countries get their land assignment – it comes to them as a grant/gift from the Lord. That’s why a state has territory.
Anyway one of the questions I had yesterday was that if that was going on in the OT then what about today? Do modern countries have assigned geographies too?
I didn’t find the answer to the question but I did find a cross-reference where Paul said something interesting. He said the Lord: created all the nations throughout the whole earth. He decided beforehand when they should rise and fall, and he determined their boundaries.
So Paul agrees with Jeremiah. The Lord determines national boundaries.
Which didn’t answer yesterday’s question. But it added some useful information that’s worth keeping in mind.

Note: quote from Acts 17:26 (NLT)