Medicine Hat Joe

Week 1 Genesis 1-24

When I’m reading through I expect to find reliable things, things I can depend on, fundamental things.
A nice example of a solid thing I can latch onto is in the story of Abraham trying to barter a kind of bottom-dollar deal with the Lord over the preservation or destruction of the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. His line of reasoning is that the Lord will not destroy what’s worth saving, the Lord will salvage what’s salvageable. And Abraham asks the question: should not the Judge of all the earth do what is right? It’s a statement put in the form of a question. Abraham isn’t looking for an answer. He knows that the judge of all the earth will do what is right.
That’s one of the solid reliables I’ll try to keep in mind as I move forward. A basic rule, a dependable rule is that the Lord does what’s right.
If God takes action then I know that the action is right.
If God takes action and I can’t dope out why it’s right then I still know that the action is right. My problem with doping it out is still a problem for me to work on, but my having a problem with it doesn’t make the action wrong.

Note: Abraham’s question is in Genesis 18:25 and the words are taken from the New Living Translation.

Week 1 Genesis 1-24

Sometimes obvious things aren’t obvious until they are.
A while ago someone tipped me off to something obvious about the family name lists in Genesis. It went like this: right now you think of them as an annoying nuisance, correct? Mm-hmm, I admitted. You ever think about them as the structural key to the whole book? Not exactly, I realized. So that was a bit of a mental jump for me.
It turns things around when I think that if, when the author uses the expression ‘this is the history of’ and then gives a list of names, and does that nine times through the book, using up about 180 of his 1533 verses, taking up roughly 12% of the book, and being a smart enough author to know that reading a list of names is not as intriguing as the story of Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt, then maybe he is saying something like I’m tracing this bloodline of Adam, Noah, Shem, Terah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob because this family line is an important one.

Note: the formula phrase ‘this is the history of’ is used in Genesis 5:1 6:9 10:1 11:10 11:27 25:12 25:19 36:1 and 37:2

Week 1 Genesis 1-24

Reading through means reading everything.
If I don’t read everything, if I don’t read the names, then I didn’t read through.
There’s a bit of a technique to reading names. I think of it like oil thinning slickly over the surface of a hot pan. I shimmer across the pages’ surface, glancing at unrecognizable names, roll fleetingly over clusters of letters and slide over the black markings on the page.
I put a credit card under the line of names and draw it down the page steadily, quickly enough to only let names register on my eyes, not sounding them out, not concerned with pronunciation. Ashkenaz and Riphath and Togarmah slip across my line of vision, meaningless names. I try to stay in focus. I notice a narrative bit: Nimrod was a mighty hunter before God. I see tribal names: Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites. Family land holdings are geographically located with vague directions, as though the writer figured the reader ought to know where Mesha is in relation to Sephar.
Reading slickly I remember almost none of it. I’m not trying to remember; this isn’t a memorization exercise. I’m reading to read through a certain type of written material, using a reading technique I won’t use in other places.
I’ve just read Genesis 10, the family list of Noah, read it quickly, like hot oil, its surface now superficially filmed over.

Note: MHJ estimate: if Genesis 10 takes me more than 2.5 minutes to read it’s taking too long.

Week 1 Genesis 1-24

Genesis 1-3 – what I called Scene One – ended with Adam and Eve being expelled from Eden. Scene Two opens with the beginning of their new lives.
They started a family with whatever hopes and dreams they had. I can’t say for sure but I doubt their plan included one of their boys killing his brother. So right away one of the early, practical, real world actions recorded after the fall is murder.
This story weighs on me; it seems so unfair.
Abel is the good brother – he reveres and he obeys the Lord. And he gets killed. His short life comes to an early end. He doesn’t get to live out his days.
Cain is a man who disregards the Lord and he definitely hates his brother. But even though he kills a good man he gets to live. Sure, he’s punished with a curse, and getting cursed isn’t such a great thing to be saddled with. But to me the curse doesn’t seem like vindication enough. Cain gets to live out his life, gets to have a family, his family will go on to be ranchers, musicians, metal-workers. Meanwhile Abel is dead in the ground.
Something isn’t right about this. It just doesn’t seem to be fair.

Week 1 Genesis 1-24

The bible can be divided in different ways. One is to break it down into two scenes:

Scene One – Genesis 1 – 3
Scene Two – Genesis 4 – Revelation 22.

I read all of Scene One today. It’s about how things were in our world a long time ago, and then how things turned over. Life in Scene One was good, and then it wasn’t good. What happened in Scene One makes it just about the saddest story in the history of the world.
Tomorrow I’ll start reading Scene Two – and I’ll be reading it for the rest of the year. It’s about how things are in the world now. Today I saw how things were; tomorrow I’ll begin seeing how things are.
I have trouble imagining what life in Scene One was like, everything being good and all. But I don’t have any trouble recognizing Scene Two. I look at the news, look out the window, look in the mirror and see a busted-up landscape of broken-down good.
In the first scene the good God made a fine home for Adam and Eve and Adam and Eve burned it to the ground, more or less. Now in Scene Two I’m left sifting through the raw materials of my inheritance, ashes of a significantly inferior world.

A long time ago I spent two summer months in Brussels with a group of international Christian students – there were a couple of dozen of us.
We lived together downtown in a narrow house with many rooms that climbed four high-ceilinged stories up stairways of many steps.
One morning I got up early, came out of my room, and was surprised to see a girl at the end of the hall sitting on the floor at the very top of the staircase. Her feet rested one step down and she was bent forward, elbows tucked close to her ribs, hair curved across her face like a bird’s wing. Her forearms rested on her legs and knees; she was reading a bible.
She sat while most of the house slept, having her inconvenient time of devotion in as private a place as she could find in a house full of people. A slight, still figure with something to do, make-shifting a time and place to do it.

A couple of years ago Patrick McGinnis wrote a book for people working ho-hum, pay-the-rent-type jobs but who weren’t exactly ecstatic with their ho-hum-rent-paying and had dreams of something bigger. McGinnis’ aim was to tell motivated people how they could start living their dream.
He looked at time, pointed out that we all have free time – downtime, thumb-twiddling, idling, worthless and frittering time. He figured that all of us can carve out ten percent of our day because we pretty much waste that on pointless things. 10% he said. Do something with your wasted 10%.
Of course, it was a business book aimed at entrepreneurial-type guys who wanted to be successful and make a bunch of money. But that number caught my attention – 10% seemed like a big number to classify as wastage. Ten percent of a sixteen-hour day is 10% x 960 minutes = 96 minutes. More than an hour and a half every day. Basically wasted.
So…note to MHJ: whatever excuse I use if I fail to read through in 2020 remember: do not use I-didn’t-have-enough-time (at least not if Patrick McGinnis is around).

Notes: Patrick McGinnis The 10% Entrepreneur; Live Your Startup Dream Without Quitting Your Day Job (Portfolio: NY, 2016)

On January 1, 2020 I’ll start reading through. I don’t want to be slaved to one of the detailed prepackaged plans – even if I do know they’re helpful. Instead I’ll try to manage the reading-year using my own rough & ready list. My goal will be to read about 100 chapters per month.
There are 1189 chapters in the bible. Divide that by 12 months and that’s 99.08 chapters a month. The ball-park list below tells me what I should be reading each month. It’s close enough for my purposes.

January:  Genesis 1 – Leviticus 10
February:  Leviticus 11 – Joshua 24
March:  Judges – I Kings
April:  II Kings – Ezra
May:  Nehemiah – Psalm 35
June:  Psalm 36 – 150
July:  Proverbs – Isaiah
August:  Jeremiah – Ezekiel
September:  Daniel – Malachi
October:  Gospels – Acts 10
November:  Acts 11 – Philemon
December:  Hebrews – Revelation

I already know that I have a bit of concern about spending more than a month in the Psalms. So I might make some creative adjustments in this scheme. I’ll have to see how things play out.

Last post I asked a what-if question. What if I think the OT is mostly just a tedious relic of antiquity?
I’ve talked to people that figure the OT is basically that – a collection of out-of-date rules and a bunch of just-barely-out-of-the-stone-age cultural weirdnesses. So why bother reading it? It’s a pretty good question, really. I’d tend to understand it if, for example someone said they weren’t reading the OT because it was no more interesting to them than reading an old Calcutta telephone directory. That comment I can understand. If someone said that they weren’t reading the OT because it was of no more value than reading listings of Calcutta telephone numbers then that’s quite a bit different. Uninteresting and valueless are different.
Anyway, all that aside, here’s a New Testament reading plan that might appeal to people who aren’t on the OT-Train. A group called Navigators has a well-organized plan for reading the NT in one year. It’s a nice, manageable plan, and reading the NT in 2020 is a nice goal and a manageable accomplishment. I recommend it.

And by the way…merry Christmas.

Notes: navigators.org/resource/bible-reading-plans

I listened to an online debate last summer that discussed the value of the Old Testament. One guy was pretty resolute about the high value of the OT. The other guy not so much. The other guy said that the OT is not very relevant, it’s dated, difficult to understand, taught things that we no longer pay any attention to. The OT is of secondary value to us. It’s a second-rate testament.
To be fair, he didn’t actually use the words second-rate; but he definitely conveyed that idea.
And when you think about it, it isn’t such a big revolutionary thing to say. If you asked a thousand people – bible-reading people, religious people – to choose between the OT and the NT how many do you think would pick the OT? 100? 10? 1? It’s a rating question, and the OT comes in second.
So anyway, I’ve been planning to read through this year, and reading through means reading through the NT and the OT. But what does a guy do if he’s thinking the OT is obsolete, irrelevant, boring, harsh, temporary, legalistic, superseded, etc? What does he do if he’s faced with reading a second-rate testament?
Well, one of the time-tested answers to that question is this: he doesn’t.
And there’s a plan for that, too.