Medicine Hat Joe

Week 25 Two Psalms

I read psalm 105 yesterday.
106 today.
Both are history-of-Israel psalms.
While I was reading 105 I started asking: where are all the delusional crazinesses that Abraham’s family got into (I spent ten weeks from January-to-March reading that story so I know the psalm-writer missed a bunch of negative content).
I counted 29 ways in 105 that the Lord helped Israel – 29 benefits. And what about the Abraham-Family-Reputation? Bright and shiny. What’s going on?
I reread the writer’s intro:
     Give thanks to the Lord and proclaim his greatness…
     Tell everyone about his miracles…
     Think of the wonderful works he has done…
Okay. So the writer is saying that this isn’t about Israel’s stunning imbecilities. It’s a subject-specific psalm and the specific-subject is that the Lord is good. Okay.
So then I came to 106 and my concern about 105’s limited selection criteria was answered in a different way: 106 fills in 105’s gaps.
I read through 106 then went back and start counting. There were 26 things Israel did to provoke the Lord. 26 provocations that 105 didn’t focus on.
So psalm 105 tells part of the story, and 106 tells another part.
Bible-reader’s reminder: I’ve gotta read the whole thing.

Note: Quote from Psalm 105:1-2 (NLT version). As weird as it might seem psalm 106 isn’t as much of a downer-psalm as you’d think. Marbled through the 26-item list of Israel’s eyes-wide-open stupidities are 15 good things the Lord did for them. As deep a hole as Israel digs, the Lord isn’t deterred by chasmic depth.

Week 24 Psalm 104

Psalm 104 starts exactly the same way that psalm 103 started yesterday: bless the Lord, O my soul.
From that point 103 goes in one direction: and forget not all his benefits.
104 goes in another: O Lord my God, you are very great!
Of course, there’re probably plenty of people who don’t think God is too great, maybe figure he isn’t great at all. But the psalm writer thinks the Lord is really great and the specific really-greatness he’s thinking about is the fact that God created the world and continues to track its progress.
I’ve read people who say Genesis has some responsibility for the environmental degradation of the planet. After all, God created everything and then told Adam and Eve: be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion… That subduing-and-having-dominion part must be a kind of biblical carte blanche to pollute, deforest, strip-mine, load up the air with industrial toxins and the oceans with plastic microbeads, pave agricultural land, dump raw sewage in the drinking water, overpopulate, burn the rain forests & clear cut the rest, gobble down fossil fuels, and not-to-worry about destroying species, the ozone layer, and all our natural life-support systems. Like that. The Genesis mandate in action.
Anyway, reading psalm 104 this morning I get the impression that the Lord’s approach runs along different lines.

Note: quotes from Psalm 103:1-2 & 104:1; Gen 1:28 (ESV version)

Week 24 Isaiah

If Judah had been showing some reverence for the Lord I guess that Isaiah wouldn’t have been necessary. But he was. Like most of the prophets Isaiah showed up as a cautionary type of guy; an admonitor, a warn-er. Pictorially a prophet is usually sketched up as an old-guy with a sign board saying The End of the World Is Near, and based on this cartoon evidence it’s easiest to think of them as one-dimensional prophets of doom.
The thing that’s easy to forget is that that’s not all they were.
I noticed this right away in chapter one. Isaiah starts with fourteen verses of Judah’s failings. Then right away there is a change: come now, and let us reason together…though your sins are a scarlet, they will be as white as snow.
I started to chart the two components on a Gloom-and-Doom vs. Hope-and-Promise table.
There’s both purge and refuge in chapter four.
The Lord: shall be your fear, and He shall be your dread. And then in the next sentence: He shall be your sanctuary.
What about the people who walk in darkness? They: shall see a great light.
The dystopian desertification of chapter 34 is followed by 35’s wasteland-in-bloom.
I’m not saying there’s as much upside as downside content. But up to chapter 39 I’ve tracked 35 G&D verses & passages vs. 35 H&P. My numbers aren’t take-em-to-the-bank accurate or comprehensive.
But Isaiah pretty clearly shows both despair and hope.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 1:18, 4:4-6, 8:13-14, 9:2 (NASB version)

Week 24 Isaiah

Isaiah 36-39 is a block of narrative text I’m familiar with. I’ve already read it twice this year – Week 17 in II Kings and Week 19 in II Chronicles 32.
It’s the story of King Hezekiah’s dilemma: the Assyrian army has arrived.
Hezekiah has 0% chance of beating Assyria. But he believed in the Lord so he prayed a desperation prayer. It was Isaiah who relayed the Lord’s answer to the king.
I read the Lord’s reply a couple of times. It was mostly addressed to the Assyrian king. All along Sennacherib had been doing his empire-building for whatever personal reasons and reasons-of-state he had for doing them. Then the Lord asked Sennacherib: but have you not heard? It was I, the Lord, who decided this long ago. Long ago I planned what I am now causing to happen, that you should crush fortified cities into heaps of rubble.
That would have surprised Sennacherib. He figured he himself was doing what he was doing, doing what he wanted to do (that seems pretty clear in verses 24 & 25). He wasn’t doing what he was doing because he figured the Lord wanted him to do it. And yet Isaiah says there’s a correspondence, a tie-in between the Lord’s big-plan and Sennacherib’s small one.
Sennacherib: working in the small envelope of the world he knew; operating in the bigger envelope of a world he didn’t.

Note: quote from Isaiah 37:26 (NLT version). Isaiah’s full reply is 37:22-29.

Week 24 Psalm 100

I figured I’d make up time reading Psalm 100 today. It’s a short psalm – only five verses. But I didn’t.
Verse two said: serve the Lord with gladness – the psalm also managed to jam in similar ideas like joy, singing, being thankful, being commendatory to the Lord. In less than a hundred words.
I sat looking at the line: serve the Lord with gladness.
I was reading an English bible but the words had a foreign-sounding vibe.
Serve the Lord with gladness.
100:2 is near the bottom of page-851, the right-hand page in my bible. I was just sitting there loitering over glad and glanced across to page 850 and saw a verse I had underlined sometime before: light is sown like seed for the righteous, and gladness for the upright in heart.
I got out a word book. Glad is used about 100-times in the bible; about 40 of those glads are in the psalms.
Glad in 100 is connected with serving the Lord. Glad in service.
Glad in 97 is linked to an upright heart. Gladness in uprightness.
Glad is a tricky word.
I’m glad if it’s a sunny day, which is a real but kind of a lighter-weight glad.
The psalm glads are heavier-glads. Higher-on-the-ladder glads. 
Glads in the psalms are like slips of litmus that colour up to the pH of my soul.

Note: quotes from Psalm 100:2, 97:11 (NASB version)

Week 24 Isaiah

I read Isaiah 13-23 all-at-once – which was maybe a too-much-at-one-sitting mistake and I don’t think I’d recommend it. But it’s a coherent reading-unit where Isaiah looked out past Israel’s borders and forecast things that would be happening to other nations – to the outsider states.
So then I read Isaiah 24-27.
It’s hard to know exactly what to make of the section. Isaiah is a prophet who is mainly concerned with Israel, and then secondarily concerned with other states in his Middle East. But now in 24-27 Isaiah seems to take one more step out and starts talking about the whole world: the Lord is about to destroy the earth and make it a vast wasteland…the earth will be completely emptied and looted. Whereas in 13-23 Isaiah named names of identifiable local states now he’s speaking to: you people of the earth. Everyone.
One of the things bible prophets did was forecast things-to-come, and some of those things-to-come came-and-went. Future-of-the-past. But prophets also forecast things-to-come that even now we’re still waiting for, that still haven’t happened. Our future. And to me Isaiah 24-27 sounds like one of them.
Forecasts to the nations in 13-23 were seriously cataclysmic but 24-27 sound even more seriously, apocalyptically and finally cataclysmic.
The language of the section is pretty dispiriting and doesn’t leave me with a confident-feeling reassurance that that-was-then so I don’t need to worry now.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 24:1, 3, 17 (NLT version)

Week 24 Isaiah

Something changes in Isaiah 13 and stays changed for eleven chapters.
Something geopolitical.
I drew a rectangle on a sheet of paper, and then inside that I drew a smaller one. I wrote “ISRAEL” in the inside box and outside that I wrote “EVERYONE ELSE”.
If you’re a bible-reader you pretty much figure on spending your time in the small box alongside Abraham, the twelve tribes, Israel in the desert, Israel in the promised land, Israel the nation, Israel in captivity. Enough Israel to forget about “EVERYONE ELSE”.
But Isaiah 13-23 is a reminder that the Lord is not just a parochial deity in a jerkwater province. He’s a fair bit bigger than that. The bible’s focus on the small box isn’t saying the Lord lacks focus outside the lines.
Instead of just Ephraim-this and Zion-that Isaiah also shines a light on Babylon, Assyria, Philistia, Moab, Damascus, Ethiopia, Egypt, Edom, Arabia, and Tyre. Each one important, each with opportunities, each making decisions, each acting actions that’ll have outcomes.
In chapter 14 the Lord has a plan for Assyria. And also bigger plans: I have a plan for the whole earth, for my mighty power reaches throughout the world. The Lord Almighty has spoken – who can change his plans?
Isaiah 13-23 is a nice reminder of the bible’s internationalism. And a nice reminder of comprehensive planning.
The bible concentrates on the insiders, so I tend to, too.
But the Lord isn’t quite as provincial.

Note: quote from Isaiah 14:26-27 (NLT version)

Week 23 Isaiah

Isaiah 10 is about Assyria.
I turned back to II Kings: the king of Assyria invaded the whole land and went up to Samaria…and carried Israel away into captivity.
So Assyria was doing some empire-building. But then Isaiah quotes the Lord, who says that Assyria was: the rod of My anger.
I doubt that Assyria thought of itself as the Lord’s rod. As far as it was concerned it had its own independent foreign policy agenda which was to conquer other nations. Assyria wasn’t consulting the Lord.
And yet Assyria is referred to in this instrumental way – the tool of the Lord – and Isaiah says the Lord’s plan was to: send (Assyria) against a godless nation and commission it against the people of My fury.
So two things are going on: Assyria has a plan and the Lord has a plan. And the plans come together.
It’s pretty clear that the Lord’s in the driver’s-seat. But the driver’s not taking the passenger where the passenger doesn’t want to go. In fact Assyria figured it was in the driver’s seat because it said: by the power of my hand and by my wisdom I did this.
The Assyrians figured they were the initiators. So it’s hard to imagine them complaining that they were forced to do something if what they were forced to do was exactly what they wanted.

Note: quote from I Kings 17:5-6, Isaiah 10:5-6, 13 (NASB version)

Week 23 Isaiah

Three different things jump out at me as I read.
One: Isaiah had a vision: I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple.
It reminded me of Week 22’s post Out of Sight. The events there with Micaiah and Job were located in an outside-of-the-world place, maybe a different dimension. And here Isaiah reports another event, something happening out past the borders of the natural world.
Two: Isaiah mentions a person called The Branch, and he predicts that: he will delight in obeying the Lord. He will never judge by appearance, false evidence, or hearsay. He will defend the poor and the exploited. He will rule against the wicked and destroy them…He will be clothed with fairness and truth.
The Branch is a heroic person. But when I checked a word book I saw The Branch was only mentioned six times in the OT. Not many for such a key-sounding player.
Three: there’s a forecast about Babylon’s fall that left me with a bit of a shiver. Death is bad enough, but what about a place of the dead? Isaiah says: Sheol from beneath is excited over you to meet you when you come. It arouses for you the spirits of the dead.
Maybe not enough there to develop a postmortem view of things. But it makes you wonder what’ll happen.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 6:1, 11:3-5, 14:9 (NASB and NLT versions)

Week 23 Isaiah

Isaiah prophesied during the reigns of four kings: Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah.
In chapter seven King #3 – Ahaz – was under attack.
Isaiah went to him with a not-to-worry promise from the Lord.
Since anyone can make a promise Ahaz was offered a follow-up reassurance: ask me for a sign, Ahaz, to prove that I will crush your enemies…Ask for anything you like, and make it as difficult as you want.
So the idea was that if he asked for something impossible and the impossible thing happened then he’d be confident that the victory-promise was solid.
But Ahaz refused to ask for a sign: no, he said, I wouldn’t test the Lord like that.
At first I was thinking how nice is that? Bravo Ahaz! You’re not putting God to the test. What a good guy you are.
But I remember that Ahaz wasn’t a good guy. I read about him a month ago in II Chronicles 28. I went back and looked at his story. He was a terrible king.
What Ahaz said was: oh no, I wouldn’t test the Lord like that.
What Ahaz meant was: what do I care about the Lord and his stupid tests? (and instead he hired a mercenary army).
So anyway this was a bible-reader’s alert to me about jumping to quick conclusions.
I quick-jumped this morning by congratulating Ahaz. Then I had to jump back.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 7:11, 12 (NLT version)