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Week 33  Daniel 9 & 10

Prayer #1:
In chapter 9 Daniel prays a serious prayer: I turned to the Lord God and pleaded with him in prayer and fasting. I wore rough sackcloth and sprinkled myself with ashes.
The chapter records that sixteen-verse prayer…and then this happens: as I was praying, Gabriel…came swiftly to me…He explained to me, “Daniel, I have come here to give you insight and understanding. The moment you began praying, a command was given. I am here to tell you what it was”.
Prayer #2:
Daniel had a slightly different experience in the next chapter. Just like before it was a serious prayer: I, Daniel, had been mourning for three weeks. All that time I had eaten no rich food or meat, had drunk no wine, and had used no fragrant oils.
Eventually a man (who was in reality more-than-a-man) appeared: don’t be afraid, Daniel. Since the first day you began to pray for understanding and to humble yourself…your request has been heard in heaven. I have come in answer to your prayer.
Prayer #1 Response Time: swiftly.
Prayer #2 Response Time: twenty-one days.
In both cases Daniel prayed and the prayer was registered/received – from the look of it – right away. But the response times were different.
Even though Daniel’s prayers arrived instantly he found out that he had to expect and manage shorter and longer feedback wait times.

Note: quotes from Daniel 9:3 21-22 & 10:2-3 12 (NLT)

Week 32  Daniel 2

Daniel’s prayer told me several things about the Lord:
He alone has wisdom and power
He determines the course of world events
He removes kings and sets others on the throne
He gives wisdom to the wise…
He reveals deep and mysterious things
(He) knows what lies hidden in darkness
Though he himself is surrounded by light.
While I’m reading through I usually look for things that the bible says about the Lord – and Daniel’s prayer told me seven or eight.
But one caught my attention: the Lord determines the course of world events.
That’s what it says. And I sat wondering what it meant.
If the Lord determined every single action to the point where no individual in reality actually decided anything independently then that would be Total Determination. It’s possible that if every single action was totally determined then I maybe wouldn’t know about it but either way if Total Determination’s the rule it’s a pretty theoretical one.
I’m more interested in practical day-to-day reality where I decide to do something and then it happens. In which case when the Lord determines the course of world events it makes sense that he’s managing it in an open-ended Non-Total kind of way. People in China Brazil Turkey Canada Russia make decisions that push world events in one direction…and different decisions would push them in another direction. But while all that’s happening the Lord makes overall determinations. He’s a Determination Coordinator.

Note: quote from Daniel 2:20-23 (NLT)

Week 32  Ezekiel 40

The last big section of Ezekiel is about Ezekiel’s vision of a Temple. A bible reader might think it’s tedious reading but – for me – it’s tedious in an interesting way. There are quite a few exact measurements of the structure and detailed descriptions of the floor plan & decorative elements & furnishings. If I’m trying to mentally reconstruct the temple it’s easy to get lost. But I’m not really aiming at an architectural replica.
Last year I wrote that “Ezekiel’s Vision-Temple was never built (that I know about) and whether it’s a future building-project waiting-to-happen is debatable.” And I was thinking about that same thing this year.
There’s at least two ways to think about Ezekiel’s Temple. The first is that it was a building that Ezekiel was shown in a visionary experience and he was toured around the facility and given specific measurements. And the plan was that that building would eventually be built. That’s one way to see it.
The other way is to see it as a vision of something fantastic to come. But not a real live temple like the one Ezekiel saw in his vision.
Two ways: a temple-in-a-dream that was a forecast of a temple that would eventually become a temple in real life. Or else a temple-in-a-dream that would never become a real temple because it was meant to represent something temple-like but not an actual temple.

Note: see “Ezekiel’s Temple” July 13, 2021.

Week 31  Ezekiel 16

I count six times where Sodom is mentioned in the chapter. The cross-reference in the margin points me back to Genesis 13 but I’m familiar with the story – a couple of “guys” from The Other Side have crossed over into this world and gone to the city of Sodom where a testosterone-jacked local mob try to gang-rape them (unsuccessfully).
The Genesis story of Sodom leaves me with the feeling that Sodom’s problem was that they were sexual adventurers who – I guess – did whatever they sexually wanted. So what Ezekiel says adds detail to the Sodom Story.
He says that a couple of other reasons the residents of Sodom were punished was because they were:
Arrogant, overfed and unconcerned
They did not help the poor and needy
They acted haughty and
Did detestable things before (the Lord).
I wonder about the list…wonder if it’s comprehensive. But my guess is that it’s more likely a representative list (for instance ‘haughty actions’ and ‘detestable things’ sound like general headings that would include specific ‘actions’ & definite ‘things’).
Ezekiel’s details are a help since Genesis is pretty generic: the men of Sodom were wicked and were sinning greatly against the Lord.
But I had to read more than a thousand pages between Genesis 13 and Ezekiel 16 before I get those details. So this is another good reminder to read all-of-it before coming to conclusions.

Note: quotes from Ezekiel 16: 49-50 & Genesis 13:13 (NIV)

Week 31  Jeremiah 28

Q: What events had happened just before Jeremiah 28?
A: The Babylonians had conquered Israel. They’d shipped off king Jehoiachin to Babylon and stolen a load of religious utensils and set up a Babylon-sponsored lackey-king to caretake things in Jerusalem.
So…in 28 a prophet – Hananiah – made a prophetic forecast. He said that within two years Babylon would release Jehoiachin and ship him and the temple implements back to Jerusalem and things would pick up where they’d left off.
Jeremiah admitted that it was a pretty nice prophecy but that – unfortunately – things wouldn’t turn out that way. He explained the Test of a Prophet to Hananiah: the prophet who prophesies peace will be recognized as one truly sent by the Lord only if his prediction comes true.
A prophecy is true if it comes true.
Which means prophecy creates a bit of a dilemma for the audience. When people have two opposing predictions they can’t know which is true until one comes true. How is a prophetic prediction legitimized? If Pre-diction = Post-diction then I’ve got a Genuine Forecast.
By the time future-time morphs into present-time and the forecast becomes either true or false it might be too late to be of actionable use to the audience. So maybe prophecy has as much value for a person looking back as for a person who was looking into the uncertain future.

Note: quote from Jeremiah 28:9 (NIV). End of July reading report: 66% of the bible read in 58% of the year.

Week 29  Jeremiah 25

Most chapters in the bible aren’t dated but yesterday I found one that was. In the first verse of this chapter Jeremiah said that a prophecy had come to him during the 4th-year of Jehoiakim’s reign…which happened to be the 1st-year of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign in Babylon (that was 605 BC).
In that same chapter Jeremiah went on to predict that Nebuchadnezzar would eventually attack and conquer Jerusalem. Since I found out yesterday that Jerusalem was captured by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 BC – roughly eight years later – Jeremiah’s forecast had to wait awhile before people realized it was true. Of maybe long enough that by then they’d forgotten it.
Anyway not only did Jeremiah predict that Nebuchadnezzar would attack Jerusalem and Israel’s geopolitical neighbours but also that: this whole country will become a desolate wasteland, and these nations will serve the king of Babylon for seventy years. But when the seventy years are fulfilled I will punish…the land of the Babylonians for their guilt.
I was already searching up Nebuchadnezzar so it was easy to find when Babylon was conquered – 539 BC. 605 BC to 539 BC is closer to 66 years than 70 so I’m not sure what to do with the discrepancy. Maybe 2500 years ago the practice was to round-up to the nearest decade.
Anyway apart from the technical debate over the 70 years in Jeremiah’s forecast his prediction about the fall of Babylon is still pretty impressive.

Note: see Jeremiah 25:1. Quote from 25:11-12 (NIV)

Week 29  Jeremiah 1

The introduction to Jeremiah says: the word of the Lord came to (Jeremiah) in the thirteenth year of the reign of Josiah son of Amon king of Judah, and through the reign of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah, down to the fifth month of the eleventh year of Zedekiah.
When I read that a couple of days ago I did some homework looking for extra details about when Jeremiah’s kings were kings. This is what I found:
Josiah (639-609 BC)
Jehoahaz (609 BC)
Jehoiakim (608-597 BC)
Jehoiachin (597 BC)
Zedekiah (597-586 BC).
Jeremiah started to prophecy during Josiah’s 13th year (~626 BC) and he continued until Zedekiah’s 11th – and last – year (~586 BC). The time span from 626-586 BC is roughly 40 years. That’s what I discovered last Monday – Jeremiah was a prophet for 40 years.
Anyway today I started reading chapter 25 and it said that those events occurred: in the fourth year of Jehoiakim son of Josiah king of Judah. So right away I looked back at Monday’s homework notes and calculated that from Josiah’s 13th year (~626BC) to Jehoiakim’s 4th year (~604BC) is roughly 22 years. But  it turned out I didn’t need to run those numbers because Jeremiah says two verses later: for twenty-three years – from the thirteenth year of Josiah…until this very day – the word of the Lord has come to me. So by the time I arrive at Jeremiah 25 Jeremiah is 23 years into his long stretch of prophesying.

Note: quotes from Jeremiah 1:2-3 & 25:1 3 (NIV)

Week 29  Jeremiah 5

A horrible and shocking thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophesy lies, and priests rule by their own authority, and my people love it this way.
Prophets prophesied lies.
Priests ad-libbed the rules.
And the people loved being misinformed.
This meant that when Jeremiah spoke to people in Jerusalem their instinct wasn’t to sit down and evaluate what he said. They didn’t ask: is what I’m hearing true? They did ask: is what I’m hearing what I want to hear?
It sounds like the people were using an ancient near-eastern version of the Data Assessment & Confirmation Procedure (it’s a test that’s still in use in Alberta). There’s five-steps:
One: I listen to Message X
Two: I ask myself ‘is Message X the message I want to hear?’
Three: if Message X is what I want to hear then it qualifies as an acceptable message
Four: if Message X is not what I want to hear then it’s an error and irrelevant
Five: I can move on to Message Y.
Jeremiah’s point wasn’t that people had been tricked or deceived. It was that being deceived was their natural preference. Being tricked or deceived was about equal to – or maybe better than – not being tricked or deceived. It was an instinctive and normal and natural response even though it was like preferring a mirage to a spring of water.

Note: quote from Jeremiah 5:30-31 (NIV)

Week 29  Isaiah 61

The opening verses of Isaiah 61 sound familiar. I check the cross-reference in the margin: Luke 4. In the gospel story Jesus publicly reads this passage from Isaiah while he’s in a synagogue in Galilee.
I looked at the paragraph in Luke then flipped-back and reread Isaiah. They’re very similar. I copied the two sections phrase-by-phrase. Isaiah’s original…then Luke’s version:
Isaiah: the Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me
Luke: the Spirit of the Lord is on me
Isaiah: the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor
Luke: he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor
Isaiah: he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release for the prisoners
Luke: he has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed
Isaiah: to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
Luke: to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
The discrepancy is in that third phrase and I wonder what to make of it. Luke skipped the brokenhearted phrase and added recovery-of-sight.
I don’t figure that Luke was just jerking his reader’s around. And I’m not sure a secretary made a copying error. It’s more likely that Luke’s version was a paraphrase that was – for Luke’s purposes – close-enough.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 61:1-2 & Luke 4:18-19 (NIV)

Week 28  Isaiah 45

I have a couple of lists I add to while I’m reading through. They’re my Concentration-Intensification Lists. They help me focus.
One of them is titled About God and any time I read something about the Lord – what he’s like or his characteristics or qualities or like that – I add the reference to the list.
I added several items from Isaiah 45:
I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God
There is none besides me. I am the Lord, and there is no other
I am the Lord and there is no other
There is no God apart from me…there is none but me
I am God and there is no other.
At first I feel pretty pleased with my find. But then it occurs to me that even though Isaiah is saying something about-the-Lord he isn’t describing the Lord’s attributes or qualities. He’s getting at something else.
And I wondered if there was some kind of Deity Caste System back in Isaiah’s day – a ranking scheme of great-greater-greatest gods – and Isaiah’s point was that no matter what people thought there wasn’t actually a great-greater-greatest hierarchy. There was just The Lord.
Whatever-all other beings exist – whoever and however special they are – there’s just the one God. A singularity. A stand-alone. A one-of-a-kind.
On the left: The Aggregate of Everything/Everyone Else.
On the right: The Lord.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 45:5 6 18 21 22 (NIV)