Medicine Hat Joe

Week 2  Genesis 32

Twenty years after leaving home Jacob was finally going back.
At one of his stops along the way angels of God came to meet him. When Jacob saw them, he exclaimed, “This is God’s camp!” So he named the place Mahanaim (the footnote said Mahanaim meant two camps). This paragraph was interesting to me because I’ve been thinking about the story of Jacob’s Ladder-Dream.
That ladder – or stairway – reached from earth to heaven
On the stairway the angels of God (were) going up and down.
It’s possible this was a purely visionary event that had nothing to do with reality. It was maybe just a dramatic visual used to catch Jacob’s attention. But I started wondering if the vision – as dreamily non-real as it was – was also a visionary tableau of something kind-of-similar that was actually going on in reality.
There’s quite a few bible references that distinguish between the earth (where we are right now) and another place (where the Lord is) – a Lower Region and an Upper Region. There’s a border between them and none of us get to go to the Upper Region. But Jacob’s Ladder shows that there’s one-way traffic from Upper to Lower. That angels had passports giving them access to our space.
So since I’d been wondering about angelic migration between Upper & Lower I noticed Jacob’s Mahanaim camp. Only one camp Jacob thought. But wait a second. The Lord’s camp is here too. Mine’s visible. His isn’t.

Note: quotes from Genesis 32:1-2 28:12 (NLT)

Week 2  Psalm 8

The psalm is a rough & ready three-item guide describing Who Fits Where. It’s pretty straightforward:
First there’s God. At the top. His glory is higher than the heavens. His name fills the earth.
Second there’s us. People. We’re rated as being only a little lower than God (and from the footnote we’re a bit lower than angels too). But even though we’re ranked below the Lord he still crowned us with glory and honor.
Finally there are all other living things in creation – birds & animals & fish. The Lord put us in charge of everything (he) made. (Last week I read where the Lord created Adam & Eve and then he said they will be masters over all life. So that’s reconfirmed here.)
(I know that not everyone necessarily likes this framework. For instance a few weeks ago I read where an environmental guy said that the life of a worm was worth more than the life of a person. So he would want to rejig the structure of psalm 8 so that it looked something more like this: God > Animals > People. The bible does make a point of contact between me & worms – both of us were made by the Lord. But while we’re similar in being creatures we’re also different because we’ve been assigned a different rank.)
So anyway this psalm’s order – God > People > Animals – is a brief and handy reminder of the basic Anatomy of Things.

Note: quotes from Psalm 8:1 5 6 Genesis 1:26 (NLT)

Week 2  Genesis 18

The story is about one of the rare times when the Lord actually visibly appeared to someone. Abraham’s tents were pitched in a grove of oak trees and the Lord just came walking down the road.
The two talked for a bit. The Lord said he’d heard that Sodom & Gomorrah (S&G) were very corrupt communities. That he was here to check-it-out. Abraham instinctively knew that trouble was brewing. He knew about S&G – the terrible twins. He figured they were marked for annihilation.
So Abraham asked the Lord: will you destroy both innocent and guilty alike? (Abraham didn’t wait for an answer): surely you wouldn’t do such a thing, destroying the innocent with the guilty. Abraham figured that if the Lord destroyed people willy-nilly then he would be treating the innocent and the guilty exactly the same. He said surely you wouldn’t do that because – after all – should not the Judge of all the earth do what is right? Abraham’s line of thinking was like this:
The world’s judge has to do what’s right
Judicial “rightness” means making distinctions between people
Innocent people are treated one way
Guilty people are treated a different way
Innocent people in S&G would be saved. It was the guilty people who’d be destroyed.
So early-on in my reading-year I get a useful tip-off about how things work in the bible:
There are two sorts of people in the world – Guilty People & Innocent People.
And they get treated differently.

Note: quotes from Genesis 18:23 25 (NLT)

Week 1  Genesis 5

This chapter is a list of family names: Adam Seth Enosh Kenan Mahalel Jared Enoch Methuselah Lamech Noah. From Adam to Noah.
One (secondary) thing about the list is that the age of each man is given and one surprising thing is how old these guys were (Enoch was the youngest and he lived for 365 years!) There’s likely quite a few people who think these ages are a bunch of cockamamie exaggerations. I think that idea is based on the fact that the numbers don’t reflect contemporary life expectancy (for instance in 2023 in Canada it’s about 83 years). If the Rule is: If It Can’t Happen Now It Couldn’t Happen Then that means it’s impossible to live 900 years. Personally I think a smarter approach might be “I don’t know for sure”. Another one would be “I think it’s possible that some things could have been different then”.
Anyway Methuselah is the oldest man on the list: 969 years. The fact that Methuselah was only two generations before Noah got me thinking. So I ran a couple of numbers on Methuselah-Lamech-Noah.
Methuselah was 187 years old when Lamech was born.
Lamech was 182 years old when Noah was born.
So Methuselah was 369 years old (187 + 182) when Noah was born.
Noah was 600 years old at the time of the flood. Which means Methuselah was 969 years old (369 + 600) when the flood came.
And so that means Methuselah died in the Year of the Flood.

Note: don’t take my numbers to the bank. Check Genesis 5:25-32 and 7:5.

Week 1  Genesis 1-2

Reading the story of creation it’s almost impossible to not mull over contemporary questions – non-24-hour days & natural selection & geology & dinosaurs & like that.
But then a couple of years ago I started noticing the things bible writers mulled over about creation. And so far I haven’t found any of them that’re very curious about the big-bang or Neanderthals.
It’s other things about creation that catches their interest. Creation’s creator for instance. Jeremiah says: you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power. Nothing is too hard for you. Someone who can create the universe can do pretty much anything.
The creation also acts like a huge advertisement about the creator’s capacity: the heavens tell of the glory of God. The skies display his marvelous craftsmanship. The ingenuity of the created world’s creator is on permanent display. A masterful design means a masterful designer
Bible writers also connect creation to personal outcomes:
You have forgotten your creator, the one who put the stars in the sky. Will you remain in constant dread of human oppression? Technically being on the creator’s side makes antagonism manageable. I’ll be braver.
Not only that…I should be paying better attention. Should be more loyal and compliant: You created me. Now give me the sense to follow your commands.
Anyway what I’ve been consistently seeing is that when it comes to creation bible writers show almost zero interest in modern questions about origins.

Note: quotes from Jeremiah 32:16 Psalm 19:1 Isaiah 51:13 Psalm 119:73 (NLT)

Week 1  Genesis 1

Was anything going on before Genesis 1:1?
Here’s list of a few things I found last year:
Lord…before you gave birth to the world…you are God
Your throne, O Lord, has stood from time immemorial. You yourself are from the everlasting past
Jesus’ prayer: Father, bring me into the glory we shared before the world began
Jesus’ prayer: Father…you loved me even before the world began
Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ
God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can’t see – such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world
God’s plan: from before the beginning of time was to show us his grace through Christ Jesus.
This truth gives (believers) confidence that they have eternal life, which God promised them before the world began
God chose (Christ) as your ransom long before the world began
The Lamb who was killed before the world was made.
Verses like these are a good reminder that Genesis accounts for the beginning of the material world. But it doesn’t account for very much about Pre-Material happenings – about events that were going on before our space and before our time.

Note: quotes from Psalm 90:1-2 Psalm 93:2 John 17:5 John 17:24 Ephesians 1:4 Colossians 1:16-17 2 Timothy 1:9 Titus 1:2 1 Peter 1:20 Revelation 13:8 (NLT). Credit & thx to (I think) Francis Schaeffer for some of these refs.

Week 1  Genesis 1

The bible’s story begins: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was empty, a formless mass cloaked in darkness. And the Spirit of God was hovering over its surface.
The footnote says the opener could read: in the beginning when God created… Or even: when God began to create…
But the alternate readings don’t make much of a difference. The main thing for me today is how the New Earth is described:
Empty
An unformed mass
Dark.
In the beginning the earth had no contents. No structure. No light.
I try to picture it. I don’t think of it like the dark side of the moon – a barren – but solid – surface. I visualize it more like the middle of the Pacific Ocean at night during a storm. Mostly water. Something…but almost nothing. A shapeless unstructured dark mass with nothing in or on it.
If someone described hell this way I guess I could believe it. It’s an eerie & terrible-sounding place. But it was physical & material. It was something at least. Not nothing.
One thing I wonder about this empty unstructured dark place is how long it stayed that way. A week? A thousand years? Five billion years?
I don’t really need to know the answer. But I’m curious. So I’m only two-verses into my bible-reading year and I get Example #1 of an unexplained curiosity.  Plus I’m reminded that not all my curiosities are likely going to get explained.

Note: quote from Genesis 1:1-2 (NLT)

Week 1  Psalm 1

The last verse of the psalm says: the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
It sounds pretty straightforward but I figure I could make it a bit simpler for myself. For instance:
“The way of righteous people leads to life
The way of evil people leads to death”
That seems like a clearer way to write up the basic principle. It’s nicely balanced. And it’s still a legitimate bible idea. But that’s not how David wrote it. He complicated – and unbalanced – it a bit by including the idea of the Watching-Lord:
The Lord watches over the way of the righteous
But the way of the wicked will perish.
I could link-up David’s ideas with mine:
The Lord watches over the way of the righteous
The way of righteous people leads to life
The Lord also watches over the way of wicked people
The way of the wicked will perish.
But whatever modifying I could do with it I’m still getting reminded that the psalms are both nice & simple and not so nice & simple.
I’m glad about their nice simplicities but don’t want to be fooled into thinking that’s all there are.
I think of the psalms as a primer…but they’re a primer for Living Like a Sage.
The psalms are both what they are on the surface and also a little more than that in the sub-surface.

Note: quote from Psalm 1:6 (NIV)

Week 52  Revelation

This morning I was thinking about churches. Seven specific churches. Ephesus Smyrna Pergamum Thyatira Sardis Philadelphia & Laodicea.
I thought about ranking them: Best-to-Worst. In the end I figured it was a waste of time. I already knew who’d land at the top and bottom ends. Smyrna & Philadelphia would be #1A & #1B (I’d probably flip a coin to decide). Laodicea would be #7. The other four would be harder to put a number to.
I thought of other NT congregations. Rome. Corinth. The Galatian group. Philippi. Colossae. Thessalonica. Each one of them a bit different from all the others but lots of them in that middle-range mix of some strengths along with some weaknesses. Some of them heading generally up. Some tilting down. Some idling in neutral.
Anyway my tendency is to think that operating independently (being personally free of the church) has its merits. One big problem is that by the time I get to the book of Acts I know the standard practice is for independent believers to band together into something like Incorporated Believers Guilds. So overall it seems that forming a union is most common. For me it’s also preferable to going it alone.
I’m not much of a New Year’s Resolution guy. But it crosses my mind that a) being a better church-team player would be a good 2024 aim for me. And that b) my church Gold Standard should be something along the lines of the Smyrna-Philadelphia Model.

Note: I’m finished Revelation. Tomorrow: Genesis 1.

Week 52  Case 7 Laodicea

One of the things I’ve noticed about the six previous churches is that John either a) says some Good Things & some Bad Things about each church or else b) he just says some Good Things. But he’s got nothing Good to say about Laodicea.
As far as that goes he doesn’t have a list of Bad Things about Laodicea either. It’s like he has nothing much to say about them one way or the other. They aren’t hot. They aren’t cold. They’re the lukewarm church in the list – The Indifferent & Neutral & Nonpartisan Church of Laodicea.
It’s pretty clear the people in the Laodicean church didn’t view themselves that way. They’d done some kind of a self-assessment and discovered three very self-affirming things (a kind of Laodicean Creed):
I am rich
I have everything I want
I don’t need a thing.
This didn’t square with the church-assessment that the Lord had done. According to his findings the Laodicean congregation was: wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.
At least Ephesus Pergamum Thyatira & Sardis each had a couple of strengths – virtues to (arguably) balance out the shortfalls. But Laodicea had nothing. It was a nonchalant & unconcerned & easy-going Devil-may-care congregation.
The Lord ended by telling them to be diligent and turn from your indifference. But it’s hard to know how they’d manage a back-to-front 180-degree swing that would take them from I’m-Definitely-Okay to I’m-Not-Okay-At-All.

Note: Revelation 3:14-22. Quotes from 3:17 19 (NLT)