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Week 34 Matthew

I was thinking some more about Matthew’s list of OT names in chapter one.
I was wondering how much OT-related content Matthew had brought over into his gospel.
The simplest way for me to do that was to count how many times he quoted straight out of the OT. The editors of my bible already did some homework to help me. They typeset OT quotes using all upper case letters. Here’s an example: …for so it has been written by the prophet, AND YOU, BETHLEHEM, LAND OF JUDAH…
I got a sheet of paper and then started scanning through Matthew looking for upper case sentences. I wrote the references in a column on the left-hand side of the page. When I got to the bottom I started a second column at the top. Fifty references. I’m solid with the number 50 because I’m pretty sure I missed some. 50 OT references in 28 chapters rounds up to 1.8 OT references per chapter.
I noticed Matthew also dropped names: the Queen of the South, Solomon, Jonah, Elijah, Abel, Zechariah, Noah, who I guess he figured any reader would know about. Like knowing who George Washington was.
Two conclusions from the exercise:
Matthew used a bunch of OT material in his NT book.
If I haven’t read the OT I won’t get what Matthew is driving at as well as I could.

Note: quote from Matthew 2:5-6 (NASB)

Week 34 Matthew

Joseph shows up on page one of the NT so technically I’d considered him a NT guy. But he appears just one page after Malachi so he’s a kind of borderline-OT guy, a just barely legitimate NT guy.
My tendency is to batch die-hard OT guys under the Legalistic, Hard-liner, Paternalistic, Rules-is-Rules Guys heading. I know it’s a crazy stereotype, a dumb default but I still end up sliding Joseph closer to the chilly, impersonal, judicial side of the spectrum.
So this story is a bit of a surprise. Joseph’s engaged to Mary but before they marry she admits she’s pregnant. Joseph’s reaction? Don’t know for sure. I figure he might have been shocked, upset, baffled, dismayed, angry; felt betrayed, jealous, blind-sided. Can’t say what-all. But his fiancée had had sexual intercourse with another guy.
Matthew tells us this much: because Joseph…was a righteous man and did not want to expose (Mary) to public disgrace, he had in mind to divorce her quietly.
There’s something going on with Joseph. Mary hurt him but he doesn’t want to disgrace her publicly, loudly, explicitly, humiliatingly in return.
A basic principle of life is that if someone hurts me I want to hurt him back. It’s a foundational rule of homo sapienity. But Joseph breaks from the pack.
An example of NT-style righteousness shows up on page one: don’t take revenge on your fiancée.

Note: quote from Matthew 1:19 (NIV)

Week 34 Matthew

Before I’m half a dozen words into the NT I’m into another list of names. More than forty family names in sixteen verses.
Matthew says in verse one that his gospel story is about Jesus. In fact he calls it: the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, and he starts by highlighting the family tree of Jesus that goes through David, all the way to Abraham.
Hundreds of pages of OT anecdotes are reduced to a list of about four dozen names.
One nice surprise is that I recognize a few of them: Abraham Isaac Jacob Judah Perez Tamar Rahab Boaz Ruth Obed Jesse David Solomon Rehoboam Asa Jehoshaphat Joram Uzziah Hezekiah Manasseh Josiah Zerubbabel.
There are stories behind the names. I’m guessing Matthew figured he could get away with sixteen verses of genealogical shorthand because his audience already knew the stories.
Matthew 1:1-16 is a kind of argument for reading the OT because Matthew is telling me that the NT story of Jesus, the last person in his list is where I’ve being headed for the last thirty-three weeks. A kind of ending-beginning.
Abraham and Judah and Ruth and Solomon and Uzziah all lived their own independent personal lives in what seemed to me a pretty jagged, haphazard, coincidental, mish-mashed chain of tragic & comic family history. But Matthew is saying that, no, there was purpose behind it all. Jesus is the last link. He’s the exact one.

Note: quote from Matthew 1:1 (NASB)

Week 34 Matthew

In my print bible the OT ends on page 1334, a left-hand page, which only has three verses of Malachi on it so it’s about 80% white space.
There’s white space on the next page too. It only says two things. In a big bold font: The NEW TESTAMENT. Then a bit below that a more discrete heads-up: Words of Christ in RED LETTER. That’s all. It doesn’t say anything like START READING THE BIBLE HERE! or, SKIP THE FIRST 1334 PAGES. I’d have to fill those in myself.
I’m pretty sure it can be shown statistically that quite a few people prefer the NT to the OT. I do. Let’s say I lived in Russia in 1949 and Joseph Stalin condemned me to Siberia and I could only take along a copy of the OT or the NT I would take the NT. No question. On the other hand, if I could take the OT and the NT or just the NT I’d take both.
If I figured that the OT said anything enlightening at all, anything that helped me understand what was going on then I figure I’d be crazy not to read it even if the enlightening parts were mixed in with a bunch of hard-to-understand things. Which is why it’s taken me thirty-three weeks to get to page one of the NT.

Week 33 Malachi

Let’s say I’m living in Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile. The temple is rebuilt and animal sacrifices are back on the agenda.
Let’s say I have a prize-winning sheep.
And I also have an old worn-out crippled half-blind sheep.
I have to go up to the temple to sacrifice one of them. Question: which one do I choose?
Pretty clearly for me it makes better economic sense to give the Lord the old sheep that’s on-its-last-legs.
So one of the first reminders Malachi gives is that OT regulations aren’t just stand-alone exercises. He asks the people: when you give blind animals as sacrifices, isn’t that wrong?…Isn’t it wrong to offer animals that are crippled and diseased? The Lord clarifies things when he says: you have despised my name by offering defiled sacrifices on my altar.
The big issue with giving a beat-up animal to the Lord is that the animal isn’t the big issue.
When I sacrifice I’m sending two signals: a publicly observable signal, and a private signal, a signal to the Lord.
Anyone else seeing me sacrificing my sheep will be thinking: good-religious-guy.
But sacrificing a bad animal to the Lord is like holding up a sign to the sky saying: I Despise You.
So is the secret of sacrificing making sure I offer a blue-ribbon animal? Not really. The secret is to not despise the Lord.

Note: quotes from Malachi 1:8 & 6 (NLT)

Week 32 Zechariah

Yesterday morning I read Zechariah 1-6.
Last night I reread it in the furnace room, hoping a second time would help.
The six chapters talk about eight visions Zechariah had. I don’t know exactly how visions work – it seems like they’re kind of hyper-realistic dreams, although Zechariah doesn’t say he was asleep. They’re also detailed and pretty normal on one level: I saw a man sitting on a red horse that was standing among some myrtle trees in a small valley. Sounds like a middle-eastern Zane Grey western.
But the vision gave Zechariah the ability to see things that were usually hidden, that there’s more to things than meets-the-eye.
Anyway one thing I noticed is that Zechariah seems like a guy who is in-over-his-head. Even though the basic idea with a vision is that you’re being enlightened Zechariah acts like he’s in the house with his sunglasses on. I counted nine times where he asks for clarification about what he’s seeing.
The horses: What are all those horses for?
The four horns: what are these?
Four blacksmiths: what are these men coming to do?
Nine questions. Asked because he didn’t understand things that were meant to help him understand. About as many questions as there were answers.
Sitting on the wooden bench last night at nine o’clock there was quite a bit I didn’t understand. So it was reassuring to know Zechariah was stymied too.

Note: quotes from Zechariah 1:8, 9, 18, 20 (NLT)

Week 32 Haggai

Most things that have been organized could have been organized differently.
I was reminded that the bible could have been organized differently while I was reading Haggai today.
Approximately 641 pages ago I was reading Ezra. Ezra’s story was about how the Jews in Babylon returned to Jerusalem after the exile. They began rebuilding the temple. Then they stopped rebuilding it. I flipped back to Ezra 5. About sixteen years had passed and: at that time the prophets Haggai and Zechariah son of Iddo prophesied in the name of the God of Israel to the Jews in Judah and Jerusalem.
Haggai told them they needed to restart the project. Which they did.
I sat looking at the verse I read twelve weeks ago where Ezra named Haggai, wondered why I  had to wait three months to find out who he was.
With a bit of editorial work I could pretty easily insert the content of the book of Haggai between Ezra 5:2 and Ezra 5:3. That way Haggai would appear exactly when and where he’s supposed to appear.
But whoever all organized the content of the bible decided to group the short prophets in a short-prophets-section at the end of the OT.
Which is an okay decision.
But not the only possible decision.
Which reminds me that being mentally wide-awake can be useful in keeping bible content from getting away on me.

Note: quote from Ezra 5:1 (NLT)

Week 32 Zephaniah

The prophets are relentless.
That’s one reason bible-readers avoid reading Isaiah-to-Malachi start-to-finish. It’s one reason some bible-reading plans split up the prophets so I can, let’s say, read Zephaniah then catch a break by adding psalm 23.
The prophets are relentless.
The prophets realized it. They knew they weren’t publishing best-sellers. But they were kind of stuck with saying what they had to say.
One of the things I’ve noticed is that they use an on-the-other-hand style of composing quite a bit. I think I first saw this technique in Jeremiah. He makes bleak, gloomy, depressing, troubling, unsavoury, scary projections. I don’t know how many. A lot. But along the way he keeps inserting the-other-side comments, things about the Lord’s interest or care or patience or he’ll-give-you-another-chance-if-you-come-around guarantees. Relentless maybe, but Jeremiah knew he couldn’t just play the blues.
Anyway this practice shows up in Zephaniah. Chapter one is as dark as an eclipsed sun, and then: beg the Lord to save you…Walk humbly and do what is right. Perhaps even yet the Lord will protect you from his anger on that day of destruction.
And better yet: Cheer up, Zion! Don’t be afraid. For the Lord your God has arrived to live among you…He will rejoice over you with great gladness. With his love, he will calm all your fears.

Note: an example in Jeremiah of light-following-dark is 12:7-14 & 12:15. Quotes are from Zephaniah 2:3 and 3:16-17 (NLT)

Week 31 Nahum

I read Nahum today. Nahum’s prophecy was an international forecast, written to Nineveh.
A couple of days ago I read Jonah’s story. He had a Nineveh interest too. He’d predicted that a catastrophe would hit the Assyrian capital in forty days but it turned out that the prophecy didn’t come true because the people believed Jonah and got a reprieve.
It’s many years later now. Jonah’s forty-days came and went many times over. Dozens of times. Maybe hundreds. Long enough ago that the Ninevites came full circle, decided to repent of their repentance. Now their time had come.
Nahum says: the Lord is slow to get angry, but his power is great, and he never lets the guilty go unpunished. Which are three pretty important things to know about the Lord.

Note: quote from Nahum 1:3 (NLT). Bible-reading note for July: in my bible the OT has 1334 pages. As of today I still have to read Ecclesiastes, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi in the OT – which is a total of about 36 pages. So on July 31 I’ve read 1298 pages, about 75% of the bible. July 2020 was a kind of ragged and distracting month for me so I’m satisfied with the 75% (even though finishing those last 36 pages would have been a nice way to end the month.)

Week 31 Jonah

Standing on one of the top rungs of the stories-in-the-prophets ladder is Jonah. It’s one of the best (I like Jeremiah a lot too).
The Lord told Jonah to travel east to Nineveh and so Jonah headed west – directionally-speaking Jonah couldn’t have made his preferences more clear. And so the Lord chastised him.
It’s hard to fathom a corrective event that could have been more terrifying and claustrophobic and suffocating and desperate than being partially-digested by a fish. When he escaped his near-death ordeal Jonah headed east.
One of the unique things about Jonah’s story is that it highlights the international range of the Lord’s interests. The Lord might be specially focused on Israel, but not in an exclusionary way.
I saw this a couple of days ago in Amos. Amos is a prophet to Israel but he spends the first chapter-and-a-bit talking about other states. So did Isaiah. And Jeremiah. And Ezekiel. And Daniel. And Joel. And Obadiah.
The Lord is pretty definitely interested in Israel. But that isn’t the same as saying he’s not interested in anyone else.

Notes: prophecies to foreign states are in Isaiah 13-23, Jeremiah 2-6, Ezekiel 25-32, Daniel 7-12, Joel 3, Obadiah 1. Like other prophets Jonah predicted disaster for the Assyrian capital of Nineveh. But the thing that makes Jonah’s story a surprise is that the people in Nineveh actually took him seriously. They actually believed and repented.