Author: admin

Week 19  2 Kings 1-3

Bam…Bam…Bam. Three chapters and three head-scratcher stories as the book begins.
Story #1: three military units go to arrest Elisha. The first two are destroyed by an explosion of fire-from-heaven.
Story #2: a yowling pack of boys mock Elisha. Elisha curses them and a couple of bears attack and maul the boys.
Story #3: a battle between Israel & Edom. Israel has the upper-hand but the king of Edom sacrifices his son…and so Israel leaves the country.
Story #1 and Story #2 are similar because with both of them I’m wondering whether the punishment was warranted. Did the soldiers have to be incinerated? Did the boys have to be mauled? Why does it seem so excessive?
Story #3 is different from #1 & #2. Israel was winning the war but when they hear about the human sacrifice they turn-tail-and-run. What spooked them? Why did they run?
What it comes down to is that these stories just don’t have enough detail to make sense. And the problem with a story without enough detail is that I’m tempted to fill-in some of those blanks by myself.
But I hold back. I definitely want to fill the information-vacuum – but don’t want to fill it with crazy & nonsensical mumbo-jumbo. Don’t even want to fill it with reasonable-sounding mumbo-jumbo.
So while I’d rather not be perplexed I’ll leave them blank for now. On balance living with some perplexity is better than guessing wrong.

Note: Story #1 2 Kings 1:9-16. Story #2 2 Kings 2:23-25. Story #3 2 Kings 3:26-27

Week 18  1 Kings 18

Obadiah’s story is short. About fourteen verses – maybe a little over 300-words. But tucked away in that already short story is an even shorter story – bracketed off to show it isn’t the main story: (Obadiah was a devoted follower of the Lord. Once when Jezebel had tried to kill all the Lord’s prophets, Obadiah had hidden one hundred of them in two caves. He had put fifty prophets in each cave and had supplied them with food and water).
In the main story Elijah comes to Obadiah and tells him he wants to meet king Ahab. Obadiah is reluctant to do that and tries to convince Elijah that he’s already done his share. He tells him his story-in-a-story: has no one told you, my lord, about the time when Jezebel was trying to kill the Lord’s prophets? I hid a hundred of them in two caves and supplied them with food and water.
But Elijah tells Obadiah that saving those people then doesn’t exempt him now.
Both stories are good. The one where Obadiah is liaison between Elijah and Ahab. And the other one about Obadiah – the covert operator – who rescued people from execution.
It’s a toss-up for me to decide which story I like better.
Anyway it’s obvious that the Elijah-Ahab story is the main event. Obadiah only has a small part to play. (But if I was one of the hundred prophets I’d figure Obadiah’s small part was still pretty big.)

Note: quotes from 1 Kings 18:3-4 13 (NLT)

Week 18  1 Kings 11

The Lord promised Jeroboam: I will place you on the throne of Israel, and you will rule over all your heart desires. If you listen to what I tell you and follow my ways and do whatever I consider to be right, and if you obey my laws and commands…then I will always be with you. I will establish an enduring dynasty for you… So in simple terms: if you do X then the result will be Y.
(Jeroboam didn’t get any flip-side instruction. He wasn’t also told: if you don’t do X then the result will be Z. But he seems to have been a smart enough guy to realize that if doing X would result in Y then not doing X wouldn’t also result in Y.)
Anyway Jeroboam decided not to do X. His decision was complicated by his busy life. Building a new capital city. Thinking-up a brand new religious system. Constructing idols. Planning for new sacrifices with new priests & new festivals.
The Lord’s final evaluation on Jeroboam was: you have done more evil than all who lived before you.
And the outcome would be: I will burn up your royal dynasty as one burns up trash.
The upside for Jeroboam was that he was free to decide what to do. He could either do X or not do X. It was up to him.
What wasn’t up to him was the outcome. It was pretty much non-negotiable.

Note: quotes from 1 Kings 11:37-38 14:9 10 (NLT)

Week 18  Psalm 119

The psalm starts out: happy are people of integrity, who follow the law of the Lord. Happy are those who obey his decrees and search for him with all their hearts.
I recall from other places this idea of being all-in with the Lord…this searching with-my-whole-heart. But the thing that jumps out at me today is the happiness part.
Not all bibles use the word happy. But there’s other words and phrases that back-up the idea. I should feel delight pleasure desire eagerness joy when I come to my reading. It’s the music of my life. Joy & sweetness & hope are all part of the mix. Love: how I love your law! I think about it all day long. And longing: I long to obey your commandments.
I feel a bit apprehensive about some of the language. It seems excessive and it worries me that the Emotional Response Standards are out-of-reach.
I also notice many references in 119 to people who hate the law of the Lord – they’re oppositional arrogant adversarial contemptuous. The Lord’s law is abhorrent. So this reminds me that there’s a kind of continuum. A pole to the extreme left – The Haters. And on the extreme right – The Lovers. I’m somewhere along that line. Not at the far-right location 119 talks about. But not an adversary either.
My orientation is to the right.
I’ll have to be satisfied today knowing I’m moving in my preferred direction. Even if I’m in the slow-lane.

Note: quotes from Psalm 119:1-2 54 97 40 (NLT)

Week 18  1 Kings 3-4

This is the famous story about the time the Lord offered Solomon his pick of any gift: what do you want? Ask, and I will give it to you (it was a kind of Aladdin’s Lamp but in real life).
Solomon’s answer was: give me an understanding mind so that I can govern your people well and know the difference between right and wrong.
The rest of chapter three and all of chapter four describe what happened. There are Four Big Domains where Solomon’s Understanding Mind showed up. Solomon set up:
A fair justice system
An organized state bureaucracy
A rational & profitable economic system
Plus…Solomon personally had outrageous intellectual capacity & encyclopedic knowledge.
So Wisdom – a pretty intangible quality – affected Solomon’s real world of hard concrete tangible visible things and benefitted the whole state of Israel.
Every king makes Big Decisions. The key question he needs to ask is: Are My Big Decisions Stupid or Wise?
Solomon’s reign proved the rule that Wise Leaders Guarantee National Success. Unfortunately I know that soon enough I’m going to find examples of the other rule: Unwise Leaders Guarantee Failed States.

Note: quotes from 1 Kings 3:5 & 9 (NLT). The four domains are in 1 Kings 3:16-28 4:1-19 4:20-28 & 4:29-34 (I think it would be a good idea to collect the four into one chapter). End of April reading report: 35% of the bible read in 33% of the year (so my head is still above-water).

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)