Medicine Hat Joe

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.

Week 31 Amos

Back in April when I was reading the Kings and Chronicles I thought about reading some of the prophets at the same time.
Jeremiah prophesied during the last years of Judah so he could be read right at the end of II Chronicles, or the end of II Kings.
And Jonah predicted some successes for the northern kingdom in II Kings 14:25. So I could have read his story right then for a nice change-of-pace.
Not a bad idea, but it’d take a whole new complicated reading plan. I did about a ten-second cost-benefit analysis and I figured it wasn’t worth the effort.
So in the spring I read the long histories. My summertime reading is the prophets.
Amos was one of the prophets who prophesied before the exile. He tells us that he had his prophetic visions about Israel: in the days of Jeroboam son of Joash, king of Israel.
This can be a bit confusing for a bible reader because there were two Jeroboams who were kings in Samaria. The story of the first Jeroboam – the son of Nebat – is in I Kings 11. I remember him because he is often described by expressions like Jeroboam-the-son-of-Nebat-who-made-Israel-sin.
Amos’ Jeroboam – Jeroboam II – lived many decades after the first Jeroboam and he doesn’t show up until II Kings 14.
This is a useful reminder that bible books aren’t in chronological order.

Note: quote from Amos 1:1 (NASB)

Week 29 Daniel

There are probably a few stories in the OT that are better than the one about Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in chapter 3. But only a few.
What happened was that Nebuchadnezzar had a huge statue built and then called a gathering of public officials and told them that when they heard horns, flutes, lyres, harps, bagpipes: and all kinds of music you are to fall down and worship the golden image.
So with the exception of SM&A all the government officials bowed down.
And SM&A learned the same lesson in Babylon that I learn each day in Alberta: you’ve gotta conform and if you don’t there’ll be a price to pay! For SM&A the price was physical incineration.
One thing that really stands out is the high degree of indifference the three men showed to social pressure. They told the king: if we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God whom we serve is able to save us and He will rescue us from your power, Your Majesty. But even if he doesn’t, your Majesty can be sure that we will never serve your gods or worship the gold statue you have set up.
The outcome made no big difference to them. Being normal guys they likely would have preferred staying alive. But who they worshiped was a bigger than mere life.
Worship the wrong god? You’re already dead.

Note: quotes from Daniel 3:5, 17-18 (NLT)

Week 29 Daniel

Today I read Psalm 137: beside the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept as we thought of Jerusalem. A picture of a melancholy guy on the bank of a sluggish Babylonian river watching the fish go by, depressed and thinking about home.
I’m pretty sure Daniel didn’t write psalm 137. But he could have. He’d been exiled to Babylon too. But he didn’t have much time to be disconsolate.
He was a very smart and capable guy and part of an elite group of Jews the Babylonian state decided to groom into the habits of the new country. So starting right now: a new educational program, new literature, new language, new names, new customs, new and better ways to think about things, a new scheme to overwrite the old. Let’s reprogram these Jews, make them just like us. Stock the big Babylonian lake with a school of little Jewish fish that’ll become big Babylonian ones.
And so Daniel swam, swam as well as the others, better than the others, learning all about the Babylonian lake. The thing the Babylonian state didn’t count on was a little Jewish fish staying a Jewish fish. Why would you want to?
In chapter one a conflict came up over kosher food, which seems like a pretty minor issue. But there was a bigger thing behind the smaller thing, and it was that Daniel wasn’t planning to evolve into an authentic Babylonian fish.

Note: quote from Psalm 137:1 (NLT)

Week 28 Ezekiel

In Ezekiel’s time people were using a parable that said: the parents have eaten sour grapes, but their children’s mouths pucker at the taste.
When they used it people were basically saying that they were suffering because of their parent’s bad actions.
Ezekiel’s chapter eighteen tries to explain that the parable is a crazy one to rely on.
He illustrates by mapping out a three-generational example:
Let’s say there’s a man who’s a good guy. Outcome: he will surely live.
That good guy has a son who’s a bloody and violent man. Outcome: he must die and must take full blame.
But then the vicious guy has a son who makes good choices. Outcome: he will not die for his father’s sins; he will surely live.
Ezekiel’s point is that every single person is singly and personally responsible for his own personal and singular decisions and actions.
I have no doubt that I’m floating in a simmering symbiotic soup of all the things that affect and influence me. I guess everything that’s non-me in the world affects me one-way-or-another.
But none of them exonerate me from my own self-serving stupidities. My blundering evils are all mine.

Note: quotes from Ezekiel 18:2, 5, 13, 17 (NLT). On the other side I’d be pretty surprised if Ezekiel is saying that environmental things like my mom, my siblings, my social & economic circumstances are 100% irrelevant. It’s just that his focus in this chapter is on the person who unilaterally shifts personal blame onto someone else.