Medicine Hat Joe

Week 6  Leviticus 19

By the time I get to this point in Leviticus I’ve read a whole bunch of legal-religious data. Specific details about animal or vegetable offerings & methods to process offerings & ordination rules & kosher or non-kosher foods & infectious diseases & sexual red-lines not to cross. Like that.
There’s enough of these rules that don’t have any contemporary practical or experiential or personal value that I’m formulating an (unwritten) guideline that none of them are of any relevance. Then I get to chapter nineteen and see things like this:
don’t slander people…
don’t endanger your neighbour’s life…
don’t hate your brother in your heart…
don’t seek revenge
love your neighbour as yourself.
Hmmmm….these sound like pretty believable and decent comments (I could likely even get away with saying them out loud to someone here in town…depending on the person).
I figure one of the crosses a reader has to carry is to be making discriminating choices all along the way about what I value and what I don’t. (What I don’t think I get to say is: “None of it’s of any use”.)
And come to think of it I figure I might be crazy to dump any of it. Just because I’ll never ever have any personal use for post-menstruation separation-purification rules I’m reluctant to say that regulation is worthless. I’m a bible-reader…trying to frame up the basic structure of the bible’s early times…and I need all the materials I can get my hands on.

Note: paraphrased from Leviticus 19:16-18

Week 6  Leviticus 18

The final paragraph is pretty interesting. Moses is talking about the land of Canaan – which is Israel’s destination – and he says that the land has been defiled. That’s the word he uses…defiled. It basically means getting dirtied up. But there’s more to it. It’s like when something that people consider important has been desecrated. De-sacredized. Un-venerated. Like for instance if someone blew up a statute of the Buddha then that’s something way more than just physical property damage.
So Moses is talking about Canaan being degraded and defiled.
It sounds like something more than environmental degradation resulting from human stupidity or greed. If I pour toxic effluents into the lake and the water gets polluted that’s a pretty detectable cause-effect.
But Moses is making a less detectible connection. For about 18-verses he’s been listing sexual practices that he calls ‘defilements’. Moses says that the sexual practices have tarnished the people practicing them. But then he goes a bit farther and says those personal defilements have spilled over into the actual physical landscape of their near eastern homeland.
This link seems like mind-boggling lunacy here in Alberta where we mostly figure that sexual actions are personal and private and have no effect on anything. We know that mercury in the lake = contaminated fish. But sexual actions? No big outcomes.
Yet here in Leviticus 18 Moses identifies personal sexual tarnishments that expanded with enough symbiotic oomph to eventually taint the whole prairie.

Note: see Leviticus 18:24-30

Week 5  Psalm 33

There’s always saber-rattling going on somewhere. I haven’t checked the news yet but when I do I predict that today – Thursday, February 3, 2022 – some country will be challenging another one. I’ll maybe see a map with a bunch of little blue tanks jets infantry weapons with bracketed numbers beside them and they’re facing east and then there’s a yellow line and on the other side of the yellow line facing west I’ll see red tanks jets infantry weapons with bracketed numbers beside them. Red Country’s red tanks might say (1000) and Blue Country’s blue tanks (200). So…the mathematical forecast of Modern Warfare calculates  that Red 1000 will beat Blue 200.
Today I read:
…the best-equipped army cannot save a king, nor is great strength enough to save a warrior
...don’t count on your warhorse to give you victory – for all its strength, it cannot save you.
I checked the course offerings of the Royal Military College in Kingston Ontario and didn’t find any syllabi with titles like – for instance – Religious Factors & Influences in Armed Conflict. By contrast David didn’t isolate international warfare from the unpredictables of outside-the-normal-envelope influences:
…the Lord looks down from heaven and sees the whole human race
…the Lord shatters the plans of the nations and thwarts all their schemes
…we depend on the Lord alone to save us…protecting us like a shield.

Note: quotes from Psalm 33:16, 17, 13, 10, 20 (NLT). Added note: When I checked today’s news I saw my forecast was wrong. My predicted yellow line was actually white.

Week 5  Exodus

I started reading Leviticus today but was still thinking about the 10 Commandments (10Cs).
Personally I think that if Moses had lost all his Exodus data from 20:17 to the end of the book I’d be okay. I’d still have the Essential Code. But the fact is his data wasn’t lost…I’ve got all 21 chapters…all 692 verses.
From the 692 I subtracted 113 verses of non-legal material – stories or narrative content (e.g. the golden calf).
That left me with 579 verses of legal / law-related material.
The 10Cs – The Essential Code – is only 17 of those 579 verses. Which means that the 10Cs make up just 2.94% of Exodus 20-40. I don’t think the remaining 97.06% are non-essential. They’re not inconsequential. But they’re in a different league.
The last twenty-one chapters of Exodus begin with the ten rudiments at the fountainhead and from there spread out into a hundred applications.
The Lord spells out The Essential Code at the top of Sinai and then Moses moves on to describe some of the drip-down effects those fundaments will have on personal and public life (in this specific case within a tribe in the ancient near east).
So while I’ve been reading through Exodus I’m trying to remind myself: you’re looking at an actual historical case study (so don’t just dismiss it). At the same time it’s an old case study. So I need to make a mental transposition before I can puzzle-out how the 2.94% trickles down in its applications to personal and social life in 21st century Alberta.

Week 5  Exodus & Psalm

Today David said something about the Lord’s anger: his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime…
Then twenty minutes later Moses said the Lord was: a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.
These are a couple of useful things to know about the Lord’s anger. First it’s relatively brief. Second it takes quite a while before the Lord transitions to anger.
But useful or not my sense is that plenty of reader’s don’t like thinking about a God who is angry. So Moses and David take a kind of unwieldy emotion and begin adding some substance to it.
But substance or not some people prefer totally eliminating the idea of divine anger…to think of God exclusively as a non-angry God.
That’s a pretty appealing option. A better approach for me is to try to fit anger into the framework of a Total Bible System. Once I figure out what-all pieces I’ve got to work with then I can ask: can the system function if I eliminate that particular piece? Because if I find out that divine anger is a functional necessity in the Bible System then the question isn’t: am I willing to tolerate divine anger? It’s: will I accept the system as I find it?

Note: quotes from Psalm 30:5 & Exodus 34:6-7 (NIV). January reading update: Genesis + Exodus + Psalms 1-30 = 120 chapters (out of 1189 total).

Week 4  Exodus 25-28

Reading through the plans and designs for the Tabernacle I get a pretty strong impression there’s a huge load of detail.
But I also get a pretty strong impression there’s a huge lack of detail.
I’m thinking about it from the perspective of a contractor reading these plans. Questions left unanswered. For example how long are the acacia wood poles? What’s the design of the cherubim? How thick is the gold plating? What’s the load-bearing capacity of the rings? What are the designs & capacities of the platters and bowls? What shape are the petals on the lampstand? What’s the thread count of the curtains? What thickness are the tabernacle boards? What are the designs & dimensions of the horns on the altar? What fashion are the priests’ clothes and the specifications of the ephod and all its extras? Which tribal name gets engraved on which gem? What’s the size of the gold medallion on the turban?
Three times there are references to patterns that Moses was shown on the mountain. So it’s possible that he had specific design ideas in his head that he didn’t write down (and I guess other details might show up later in the book).
But there’s also those occasional references to builders: carpenters, engravers, weavers, metal-workers, artisans and like that. People inspired with individual talent. It’s possible that uniquely gifted people were given freedom to design and craft items of unique & individual beauty…just as long as they complied with the plans’ specified conditions.

Week 4  Exodus 20

The Ten Commandments (10Cs) are interesting because they’re really the keystone feature of a plan the Lord had for re-engineering Israel.
Israel had lived in perpetual servitude as Egypt’s under-class and had no resources for building a successful nation so the Lord gave them the 10Cs as the foundational handbook charting the route forward.
On the surface they seem to be a straightforward list of dos & don’ts. It looks like if I slavishly and robotically don’t do the don’ts and do do the dos then I’m in compliance. But it turns out that robotic compliance is pretty much just a First Level Success. A success for sure…but a fleeting one. More like a rest stop on the way to the next level. I think people figure the 10Cs are dumb and legalistic but the laws are only dumb and legalistic if I stop at the Dumb Legalism Stage.
That’s because one of the (unwritten) rules of the 10Cs is that they start on the outside of me and then they can either stay out on the surface or – over time – they can begin to percolate (a gradual process of leaching from outside to inside).
That’s likely what the Lord was getting at in the NT when he said it was good not to murder some guy. But on the other hand if I hated him being alive then there was more percolating in need of doing. Successful 10C assimilation seems to assume a kind of transformative osmotic diffusion.

Week 4  Psalm 24

David asks: who may climb the mountain of the Lord?
There’s no actual physical Mountain of the Lord to climb so I figure David is trying to freeze a pretty fluid idea for me– solidifying-for-manageability’s-sake.
I draw an inverted-V on a sheet of paper (the mountain) & a squiggle at the apex (the Lord) & a stick figure at the bottom (me). He’s there and I’m here…so how do I close that gap…climb the mountain? That’s the question.
David’s answer is that I have to become a certain kind of person. He names three qualities I need…
My hands and heart have to be pure
I can’t worship idols
I can’t lie.
I’m guessing this is an abbreviated list but even if it isn’t there’s still three things to do/not do and a certain kind of person to become before I get into the vicinity of the Lord.
I look at my sketch and wonder how things unrelated to climbing get me up the mountain. The answer seems to be: indirectly. Work on things I can work on so I can make progress on the thing I can’t.
So…for instance what happens if I quit lying to myself and to other people?
David lists four results:
…the Lord will bless me
…I’ll be in good standing with him
…I’ll be able to approach him
…and I’ll be able to worship him.
Doing something hard to achieve something impossible.

Note: see Psalm 24:3-6

Week 3  Exodus 14

While I’m reading about the exodus today I’m still thinking about David’s comment: some nations boast of their armies and weapons but we boast in the Lord our God. Which means – roughly – that a difference of opinion will emerge when people have different assumptions about what they can or can’t rely on.
That difference of opinion comes to life in the story of Israel’s escape from Egypt. It’s a case study of an event where a man with a numerically superior force assumed that numerical superiority would ensure a predictable outcome.
The only hard data I can discover is that Pharaoh had 600 top-of-the-line chariots (plus all the other chariots in the country) and had officers in each of them. Things that I don’t know are the ratio of officers to soldiers & the size of the cavalry & the number of infantry & if there were mercenaries and like that. Comprehensive numbers are tough to land on.
But Egypt was fighting an unarmed ragtag bunch of slaves. Sure…there were a lot of them – 600,000 men – but the contest really shaped up to be like shooting fish in a barrel. On paper the Egyptian army should have massacred the Hebrews.
So…question: if I had total material dominance over a foe would it be possible for that enemy to defeat me?
Answer #1: Not very likely.
Answer #2 (David’s answer): Wrong question! You should be asking: who or what can the enemy count on for help?

Note: quote from Psalm 20:7 (NLT). And see Exodus 14:7 & 12:37.

Week 3  Psalm 20

Last night in the news I saw where a big country is threatening a small country. Let’s call them Red Country & Blue Country. Red Country is powerful and parks 100,000+ troops – plus tanks artillery jets and like that – on Blue Country’s border. It there’s a war Reds will beat Blues because of pure numerical superiority. That’s how numbers work.
It’s hard not to think about the Reds & the Blues while I read verse 7: some nations boast of their armies and weapons. Today’s application of this verse would read something like this: Red Country can boast & strut & rattle around because they have more soldiers and materiel than Blue Country and so they’ll win a war.
I keep reading to the end of verse 7: some nations boast of their armies and weapons but we boast in the Lord our God. So for David another uncounted factor was in the mix.
I can’t say with any precision how this non-numerical element works out in real day-to-day life – like for instance with the Reds and the Blues. My guess is that it’s a bit unpredictable and dependent on other factors. But that’s not the real point…which is that a Basic Principle in Bible World is that there’s a world I can see and I world I can’t see.
Reds and Blues run their numbers assessing tangible-material-visible assets. Meanwhile – if David is right – a pretty crucial wild-card isn’t getting factored into the spread sheets.

Note: quote from Psalm 20:7 (NLT)