Medicine Hat Joe

Week 14 Psalm 34

A while ago I created three categories of psalms using my Title Underlining System:
     Good psalms (not underlined in my bible);
     Really good psalms (underlined in black);
     Best psalms (underlined in red).
Today I landed on: PSALM 34 (red underlined, so one of my best).
Verse four caught my attention: I sought the Lord, and He answered me, and delivered me out of all my fears.
While I’m reading the bible two things are going on. First, I’m reading my chapters to get through. Secondly I’m asking: is there any kind of mutuality going on here – anything in play between me and the text? Is there some derivative for me? 
But then there’s something else going on. Let’s say I find a derivative that makes good sense to me. If I do that’s pretty satisfying.
But what if I find a derivative that doesn’t make sense? Let’s say the text says: I prayed to the Lord, and he answered me, freeing me from all my fears. But what if my real life experience is that I prayed to the Lord, and he didn’t answer me, and didn’t free me from all my fears?
Sure, one solution is to just say the bible is useless. But my rule-to-self is: you gotta make distinctions between what the text says and what the text means. If the bible was a grade-three reader I maybe don’t need the rule. But I’m thinking it isn’t. 

Note: quote from the NASB and the NLT.

Week 14 I Samuel

Saul was Israel’s first king, and he started out pretty well. The Lord endorsed him, put his spirit on him, helped him get established. But in chapter thirteen something happens. After that it’s all down, down, down for Saul.
The tricky thing for the bible reader is that what Saul did seems wrong, but it’s also understandable.
What he did was to offer a sacrifice to God. Since he wasn’t a Levite he shouldn’t have. So when Samuel arrived he asked Saul a probing question: what is this you have done?
But Saul had an answer, had his reasons…
     My troops were panicking
     You didn’t get here in time
     The Philistines were ready to attack
     A sacrifice needed to be made
These were all true, and under the circumstances made logical sense. But Samuel paid no attention to Saul’s excuses. He just said: how foolish! You have disobeyed the command of the Lord your God. Then he added that the Lord was looking for a king who – unlike Saul – was: a man after his own heart. Obedience and heart. 
This juxtaposing of OT-law-and-your-heart has come up before. I saw it in Deuteronomy, quite a few times. Now here it is again. OT obedience isn’t so much looking like a mechanical legalism, isn’t like dancing with a droid. I think it’s more like finding an Andalusian gypsy who wants to fandango.

Notes: quotes from I Samuel 13:11, 13, 14. Deuteronomy  6:4-9 is a nice example of religion of the heart.

Week 14 I-II Samuel

Israel was battling the Philistines. Idiotically they decided to take the ark of the covenant into battle – a kind of big, good-luck charm.
The Philistines won anyway. Even worse, they captured the ark.
The ark landed in Ashdod. Right away an epidemic began. People died. As pre-scientifically dopey as the Ashdod Philistines were they started putting two-&-two together.
They shipped the ark to Gath. Epidemic arrived in Gath.
Gath shipped the ark to Ekron. Epidemic ravaged Ekron.
It seemed pretty clear: the ark was a health hazard. But they decided to run a more definitive social scientific-type case study to test the link between the ark and the plague. They put the ark on a cart and pointed the cows toward Israel. The logic was that if the cows left Ekron then: we will know it was the Lord who brought this great disaster upon us. But if the cows did the natural thing and stayed home: we will know that the plague was simply a coincidence.
The Philistines proved to their satisfaction that the plague was not a chance epidemic. Which is all they wanted to know. Philistine theology seemed to be that geographic proximity was a factor for gods. Get far enough away and you’re safe. Which is a pretty handy idea. A god who could transcend distance would obviously be a bit more of a concern.

Note: quotes from I Samuel 6:9 (NLT version). The ark is described back in Exodus 25-27.

March 31, 2020
At the end of February I was running a deficit in my reading schedule, and not feeling too great about it.
I decided on two action-steps: (a) start reading one psalm a day, and (b) read extra chapters to finish I Samuel by the end of the month.
So the month-end numbers are in: Deuteronomy finished, Joshua (1-24), Judges (1-21), Ruth (1-4), I Samuel (1-31). 100 chapters. Adding the first thirty-one psalms brings it up to 131 chapters.
That makes a January – March total of 329 chapters.
There are 1189 chapters in the bible, and 329 of them is 27.7% of the total. Reading 27.7% of the bible in 25% of the year is about where I want to be.

Notes: quotes are from  the NASB and the NLT versions. I started reading the psalms on March 1 and today I was reading Psalm 31. There’s a nice phrase in verse 15. The writer says: my times are in (the Lord’s) hand. Another version says: my future is in your hands. I’d read the verse sometime before since it was underlined in red. That’s probably because the mhj-version of my-times-are-in-your-hand tends to go something like this: my times are in my own hands, and when they aren’t I don’t like it. So the verse was a soft reminder to me as I tracked my personal progress today.

Week 14 I Samuel

Whatever life Hannah lived before marriage, it didn’t improve much after. Her biggest hope was to have kids, and when that didn’t work out the other wife badgered and mocked and goaded her. Hannah gradually discovered that one of the cruel places in the world can be right there at home.
Years passed and she might have tried different ways to cope with her dispiriting life. Eventually she turned to the Lord. If prayer wasn’t the only thing she tried, it’s only the prayer that’s reported.
Hannah’s prayer was a vow-prayer. Please, please, please Lord let me have a child and if you answer my prayer, then I’ll give the child back to you (the if and the then are right there in verse eleven). It was a hazardous prayer, with a potential risk down the road. The Lord did the if and gave her a son. And Hannah, just as she promised did the then.
Hannah is a really impressive person. It might have been tempting for her to forget about the then. But she took on the regret that came with the reward.
I guess that early on the biggest love and deepest devotion Hannah could have imagined was for her boy.
But as you read her second prayer in chapter two you get the impression that at some point she discovered someone deeper than her deepest.

Note: the Hannah story is in I Samuel 1.

Week 13 I Samuel

I’m not so surprised when I start I Samuel and see this I-can’t-have-any-kids story.
I’ve seen it before.
Back in the middle of January I was reading about Abraham’s wife. Sarah couldn’t have any kids when she was young, but then the Lord’s guarantee came through years later when she was way too old.
Jacob’s wife Rachel couldn’t have kids. But eventually: God remembered Rachel.
Samson’s mom couldn’t have kids either. Then an angel visited her and said: you shall conceive and give birth to a son.
Ruth didn’t have kids with her first husband. The bible doesn’t actually say that she couldn’t have any, but kind of implies that because when she married Boaz: the Lord enabled her to conceive.
And now the Hannah story. Elkanah with his two wives: Peninnah who did have kids, and Hannah who didn’t. In fact she couldn’t – the bible says that definitively: the Lord had closed her womb. It’s only later that: the Lord remembered her. And Samuel was born. Hannah named him Samuel: because I have asked him of the Lord.
From time to time the bible returns to this interest the Lord has in people’s reproductive capacities, in conception, and in kids being born.

Notes: Sarah was asked: is anything too difficult for the Lord? (Genesis 18:14). Rachel: Genesis 30:22. Samson’s mom: Judges 13:3. Ruth: Ruth 4:13. Hannah: I Samuel 1:5-6, and 19-20. (Quotes from NASB version).

Week 13 I Samuel

Let’s pretend a guy took an Old Testament and tore it up into 39 bundles of pages.
But he did it carefully, splitting the binding with a razor so that each bundle of pages ended up being exactly one OT book.
The guy took 39 manila envelopes and put one bundle in each of them. Then he licked and sealed them.
Let’s pretend the guy hired a pilot.
Then he told 39 of us to go stand in the playing fields up by the Leisure Centre.
Before very long the small plane buzzed over us and the guy dumped the 39 brown envelopes, dark rectangles tumbling out of a blue sky.
Each of us ran to grab one.
So the question is… when I open my envelope and see that I have I Samuel will I be:
     Really Happy;
     Pretty Disappointed; or
     Somewhere in between?
Answer: I can tell you that if I got the I Samuel envelope I’d be pretty pleased – maybe even Top Ten-pleased – especially if the manila envelope pretend-guy had told me that’s all I could read for the next month.
I Samuel has a bunch of really good content. For me it’s a good-fortune-read to close out the first-quarter of 2020.

Note: Whoever got the Psalms envelope would be gloating, I guess. Jeremiah, Genesis, and Deuteronomy would also be top-enders for me. I don’t figure I’d be high-five-ing anyone if I got Song of Solomon, or Obadiah, or Judges.

Week 13 Psalm 25

Yesterday I read a psalm that just came right out and said: good and upright is the Lord.
Since I had just read the last three chapters of Judges I sat thinking about those two different things I’d read back-to-back.
I thought back to an old memory I had from when I visited Victoria in British Columbia. It was an early evening in late summer and the heat was going out of the day and I was walking along Government Street and saw a crowd on the sidewalk leaning on the iron railing, looking down. Across the inner harbour the sun was setting but that’s not what they were watching. I stopped and looked over the edge with them. At the bottom of the stone-block wall and out toward the quay a man was standing semi-circled by people. He was a juggler. We all stood watching him juggle balls, and bowling pins, and burning torches. It was entertaining, even kind of mesmerizing to see him keeping things in the air. At the end he started up two chain saws and juggled those too. It was pretty amazing to watch and you wondered how he could do it.
Yesterday I sat with my good memory of the juggler on the Victoria quayside and thought about how hard it was to keep different things in the air.

Note: Psalm 25:8 (NASB version). See Judges 19-21 for the violent-Levite story.

Week 13 Ruth

Ruth is one of the great stories in the bible.
Plus, it’s a really nice story – a kind of consolation story after reading the mostly dark, violent, and (for me) kind of depressing book of Judges.
Couple of things I noticed.
First, Ruth is not an Israelite woman. But she migrates and in the end marries into the tribe of Judah – a bit like Rahab. Israel is exclusive. But some outsiders are let in.
A second thing is the family connections that show up at the end.
Boaz – a wealthy Israelite and a good-guy – marries Ruth – a poor Moabite widow and a quality-gal – and they have a son named Obed. Obed will have a son Jesse, and a grandson David (so a famous name appears).
But chapter four also gives us the genealogy going backwards from Boaz: Salmon, Nahshon, Amminadab, Ram, Hezron, and Perez.
This is interesting because in the second-week of January, back in Genesis 38, I was wondering about Perez. Or more accurately about his mom Tamar, who tricked her father-in-law – the lackluster Judah – into having paid-for sexual intercourse. As a result of that a son was born: Perez. And now generations later the Perez family has gone forward through Hezron, Ram, Amminadab, Nahshon, Salmon right down to Boaz – and through Boaz-Ruth the line is heading toward Obed, Jesse, and David.

Note: family list from Ruth 4:18-22 (NASB version)

Week 13 Judges

I finished reading Judges but went back and re-read Samson.
The story is hard to figure.
Samson seems like such a dim-witted, self-destructive guy but the bible says the Lord intervened directly with Samson seven times:
     the Lord blessed Samson when he was a boy
     in his early life the Spirit of the Lord began to stir him 
     Samson’s choice of a non-Hebrew wife was of the Lord
     the Spirit of the Lord came upon him mightily (the lion)
     the Spirit of the Lord came upon him mightily (thirty Philistines)
     the Spirit of the Lord came upon him mightily (a thousand Philistines)
     Samson was dying of thirst and the Lord miraculously provided water.
There are seven other times when the bible doesn’t specifically say that the Lord helped Samson, but divine help seems likely. Samson:
     caught 300 foxes
     broke the ropes at Lehi
     carried Gaza’s city gates 
     broke Delilah’s seven fresh ropes
     broke Delilah’s new ropes
     broke Delilah’s loom in
     pulled down the arena.
I guess no parent in the history of the world ever advised his son: be like Samson.
And yet this enormously defective, terrible-role-model of a guy was frequently utilized by the Lord. Which is hard to figure.

Notes: First seven references: 13:24, 13:25, 14:4, 14:6, 14:19, 15:14, 15:19. Second seven references: 15:4, 15:13, 16:3, 16:9, 16:12, 16:14, 16:30.