Medicine Hat Joe

Week 27 Jeremiah 

During the long siege of Jerusalem the Lord told Jeremiah to buy some land in his home town of Anathoth. It didn’t seem like a wise investment choice because Nebuchadnezzar would soon own that land.
So after the deed was signed and sealed Jeremiah prayed: O Sovereign Lord! You have made the heavens and the earth by your great power. Nothing is too hard for you!
It’s a pretty emphatic comment. Nothing is too hard for you! Nothing takes in pretty much everything.
But then Jeremiah’s prayer ended with an and-yet. You’re the greatest and most powerful and you can do anything: and yet, O Sovereign Lord, you have told me to buy the field – paying good money for it before these witnesses – even though the city will soon belong to the Babylonians.
Jeremiah knew for sure that the Lord was way past the borders of any known limitation – he was a permanent resident of nothing-too-hard country, a spirit of hyper-potent and insuperable capacity.
And yet Jeremiah was concerned about his property.
It’s like I win the lottery and I’m distressed about my broken gate-latch.
Normally you’d think that being totally personally certain about one big thing that by definition took care of everything else would – in a natural, seamless kind of way – carry-over and guarantee total personal certainty about other small things.
But Jeremiah was concerned about his gate-latch.

Note: quotes from Jeremiah 32:17, 25 (NLT version)

Week 26 Psalm 119

I read Psalm 119 today.
I didn’t plan to because it’s pretty long. At first I figured I’d group the twenty-two sub-sections into five-paragraph chunks, read one-a-day and finish the last two on June 30. But in the end I read it all.
The 119th is a psalm about how the bible can help me in some personal ways where I need personal help. I’d forgotten about how 119 hammers away at the importance of the bible. it doesn’t let up. Things it can help me do. Things it can help me avoid. Once I got started it wasn’t so hard to keep at it.
Here’s one example: how can a young man keep his way pure? It’s a pretty good question: how can I live and speak and think and act and feel my way through the day in as decontaminated a way as possible?
119 says the answer is: by living according to your word.
So a long and likely complex process (personal pollution-control-and-management) starts with a fairly simple exercise (read the bible).
I need to start with the reading-your-word part so I can locate the track that I need to start tracking so I can actually start the living-according-to-your-word part so I can begin becoming more immaculate than I am right now.
Becoming a more pristine guy will no doubt have untidy, disconsolating, hit & miss, and complicated days, so it’s fortunate that it begins simple.
It begins with starting to read.

Note: quote from Psalm 119:9 (NLT version)

Week 26 Jeremiah

Chapter 26 is a day-in-the-life-of-a-prophet story.
That morning the Lord told Jeremiah to go to the temple and give a public speech: if you will not listen to me…then I will destroy this temple…and I will make Jerusalem an object of cursing.
Not exactly a feel-good speech, and when Jeremiah was finished the audience’s reception was very cool. In fact they wanted to kill him for being unpatriotic. Serious questions about whether the temple would, or could, or might possibly in fact be destroyed weren’t up for discussion. Jeremiah had broken a non-negotiable-topics taboo. Which couldn’t be tolerated.
Fortunately for him the crowd was divided on the death penalty. The temple priests and the prophets lined up in favour of capital punishment. But the crowd and city officials wanted to hear him out. Some of them remembered a story, a precedent from long before. The prophet Micah had spoken a darkly critical omen against Hezekiah but the king didn’t execute him. So in a better-safe-than-sorry decision Jeremiah’s life was spared.
This was probably a tenser day than usual for Jeremiah.
But based on what he’s been saying for the last 25 chapters you wonder how frequently he operated close to the cultural no-fly zone.

Note: quote from Jeremiah 26:4-6 (NLT version). The Micah-Hezekiah story might be from II Chronicles 32:24-26. (Micah comes 147-pages after Jeremiah in my bible, but he prophesied many decades before him.)

Week 26 Jeremiah

I’ve been tracking the things that Jeremiah prophesied against. Since idolatry was one of the top-ranked problems I was thinking about idolatry. So Psalm 115 surprised me because it talked about idols:
They have mouths, but cannot speak
Eyes, but they cannot see…
Ears, but cannot hear
Noses, but they cannot smell…
Hands, but cannot feel
Feet, but they cannot walk.
Idols have none of the normal sensory capacities a person does. As far as being human goes, idols are sub-human.
But 115 says something unexpected: those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.
I guess I shouldn’t have been caught off guard. A couple of weeks ago Isaiah was talking about a carpenter going into the forest, cutting down a cypress tree and carving it into a god. Then what happens? He bows down to it and worships. He prays to it.
His icon gains the carpenter’s trust. Eventually he’ll become like what he made.
What’s he becoming if he’s becoming something less than human?
This is a pretty worrisome question.
The bible contrasts an idol’s nothing with the Lord’s something.
The bible says I can devolve to a point where I prefer the nothing to the something.
I have the capacity to trade in being human, and once that’s done I can start working at becoming nothing.

Notes: quotes from Psalm 115:4-7, 8; Isaiah 44:17 (NIV & NASB versions)

Week 26 Jeremiah

When the Lord told Jeremiah to quit praying for Jerusalem because prayers were now useless Jeremiah reacted. He was a never-say-die pro-Jerusalem guy and so he argued.
He figured the Lord should consider the fact that the people in Jerusalem had been lied to by their leaders. Q: since they’ve been propagandized with false information don’t you think you should cut them some slack?
The Lord admitted: the prophets are prophesying lies in my name. I have not sent them or appointed them or spoken to them. They are prophesying to you false visions, divinations, idolatries and the delusions of their own minds. The next verse says that the propagandists would be punished.
Okay…and what about the people who’d been propagandized? Will they be absolved? Verse sixteen doesn’t reassure Jeremiah. Those gullible people will: be thrown out into the streets.
The way Jeremiah frames his argument is that there are two categories of people: guilty people who propagandize and innocent people who are propagandized.
But the Lord groups it differently. Deluders and the people they delude are both guilty. It’s people who are propaganda-resistant who are innocent.
Chapter fourteen is a good reminder. If I have a bunch of lies coming at me I need some kind of self-protective lie-detection-alert-system because I can’t blame the liar for fooling me with his lies. Just myself for believing them.

Note: quotes from Jeremiah 14:14, 16 (NIV version)

Week 25 Psalm 111 & 112

I read Psalm 111.
Before I flipped over to Jeremiah I glanced at Psalm 112.
111 & 112 both start with praise the Lord.
Both have ten verses.
Both have a paragraph break at verse-seven.
Might not mean much but there’s a kind of visual symmetry.
I walked into the other room and scanned pages 866 & 867, scissored-out the two psalms, taped 111 together at the page-break, then clipped them onto a sheet of yellow 8½ x 11. I lined them up side-by-side.
The content is different: 111 is about the Lord; 112 about a person who reveres the Lord.
But I see that 111:3b says the Lord’s righteousness endures forever, and 112:3b says the person’s righteousness endures forever.
111:4b says the Lord is gracious and compassionate. 112:4b says the person is gracious and compassionate.
I disregard the verse-numbers and count the number of phrases in 111. There’s 22. 22 in 112, too.
So I’m thinking that maybe something’s going on, something I didn’t see before. Maybe some kind of literary form. A kind of Hebrew sonnet.
How many times do I ask: couldn’t he have written this in an easier way?
Maybe he could have. And maybe he did. Maybe he wrote a soothing ancient-near-eastern sonnet that only translated into teeth-grinding contemporary English.
While I’m looking at bible content I can’t forget about content’s submerged side. Maybe culture, or language, or 22-line sonnets.
So it’s useful to remind myself: if you want low-demand reading go look at a Canadian news magazine.

Note: quotes from NASB version.

Week 25 Jeremiah

The Lord is quoted in Jeremiah six. He’s speaking to people who’ve lost their way: stand by the ways and see and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is, and walk in it; and you shall find rest for your souls.
Another version: stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.
Another version: stop right where you are! Look for the old, godly way, and walk in it. Travel its path, and you will find rest for your souls.
A couple of years ago I read an essay where a guy was quoted saying that: post-modernism is xenophobic to the past. Hmmm. I’m not sure how much fear contemporary people have of the past. Some I guess. Personally I think a more common feeling is to disregard it. Different? Check. Contemptible? Check. Inapplicable? Check. Irrelevant? Check.
But the Lord says I should look back. Back might feel foreign, but it’s a good way. There’s rest in back, something for my soul in back.
It isn’t an easy choice, no doubt about that. Which is too bad because what I decide about the ancient paths makes a pretty big difference.

Notes: quote from Jeremiah 6:16 NASB, NIV & NLT versions. Makoto Fujimura ‘Walking Backward Into the Future’ in refractions: a journey of faith, art, and culture (Navpress: Colorado Springs, 2009) 133, quotes Thomas Oden’s After Modernity…What? (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1990).

Week 25 Jeremiah

By verse three I know that Jeremiah worked as a prophet during the time of three kings of Judah: Josiah, Jehoiakim and Zedekiah. Jeremiah was there right up until Jerusalem was sacked and the people exiled to Babylon.
But that doesn’t catch me totally by surprise. I read that history seven weeks ago.
I turn back to Chronicles. Josiah reigned thirty-one years.
I flip over two pages. Jehoiakim reigned eleven years.
On the same page I see that Zedekiah reigned eleven years.
31 + 11 + 11 = 53 years of kings.
Jeremiah says in verse 2 that he became a prophet when Josiah had been king for thirteen years. So 53 – 13 = 40. The ninety-six page Book of Jeremiah covers about forty years of Jeremiah’s life.
While I’m looking at the last chapter of Chronicles I see that Zedekiah, last king of Judah: did evil in the sight of the Lord his God; he did not humble himself before Jeremiah the prophet who spoke for the Lord. And nine verses later the Babylonians totally deconstruct Jerusalem: to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah.

Notes: Josiah II Chronicles 34:1; Jehoiakim 36:5; Zedekiah 36:11. Scanning through I realized I’d forgotten about two other kings during that time. Neither lasted more than four months and Jeremiah didn’t include them: Jehoahaz (36:1-2) and Jehoiachin (36:9). Quotes from 36:12, 21 (NASB version).

Week 25 Isaiah

I finished Isaiah today.
I noticed quite a few great verses and ideas in the second part of Isaiah – chapters 40-66.
All of chapter 53 is really good, but in a sad way. It’s about someone identified mostly as ‘he’ (he’s also described as the righteous one and the Lord’s servant in verse 11, but he still comes across as a shadowy stranger.)
This evasive he isn’t the Lord God. But he’s obviously really important, even if it is important in a terrible and distressing way because of his destiny.
He’s mentioned about 45 times in the twelve verses.
In those 45 times I found about a dozen where he’s described as a substitute, a stand-in for other people, a sort-of proxy, an alternate. But a dreadful alternate because of what he had to stand-in for. The Lord: laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Moses talked about a similar taking-on-someone-else’s-offences-scenario 859-pages ago. It was on the Day of Atonement. There are two goats. One is sacrificed in an act of atonement. The other one, the scapegoat doesn’t lose its life. Instead the collected sin of the nation is ritually loaded onto it and then its driven away: the goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities.
The dark load is so far beyond a person’s capacity to carry that it needs to be dumped onto someone else – in Leviticus the scapegoat, in Isaiah the mysterious he.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 53:6; Leviticus 16:22 (NASB version)

Week 25 Isaiah

When I started reading Isaiah this month I was impressed by the critical shots he took at Moses’ laws. He really blasted them.
It left me wondering: what’s Isaiah’s take on formal religious law and ritual?
Now that I’m almost finished the book my impression is that Isaiah didn’t affirm Moses’ law, and he also did affirm it.
For example, real fasting meant: to let the oppressed go free. So he didn’t.
But he said the Lord’s law was: great and glorious. So he did.
The law is a tricky thing because it seems to have an outside and an inside.
If the law that materializes on the outside isn’t propelled from the inside then it’s flawed.
Law that shows up on the outside and has been animated from the inside? That’s good.
So…comprehensive-law is: Law 1 (Outside) plus Law 2 (Inside).
Classic example: Cain and Abel both did Law 1. But only Abel managed Law 2. They were bros when it came to ritual; strangers otherwise.
I guess a huge temptation for an OT-guy would be to go through the ceremonials and check-off the Law 1 box. Which had benefits because who, other than the Lord, would ever know the condition of his Law 2?
Law 2 would complicate things, make them more intrusive, elusive, personal, interior.
My sense is that what Isaiah didn’t care for was an independent Law 1.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 58:6; 42:21 (NASB version)