NUMBERS 34
I’m having an awe-filled moment with God right now. I love this little chapter. I just love the straightforwardness of it. It’s God, simply spelling out to His people the land they will inherit in Canaan. He plots out the land for them with no ceremony, no pomp, no fanfare. What I absolutely love about this is, the Canaanites were living in this land. Undoubtedly, they thought the land belonged to them. They thought they were the rightful inhabitants. They were wrong.
NUMBERS 33
So, right off the bat, you know that there is a lot in the Old Testament that would seem to contradict the title of this particular blog. If God is not a destroyer, He certainly has a lot of explaining to do... because it seems like He has gone around and done (or condoned) an awful lot of destruction in the Bible.
NUMBERS 32
So, the Israelites are again poised to enter the Promised Land, when the Reubenites and Gadites come to Moses and request to settle where they already are, outside the border of Canaan. After Moses makes sure they don’t intend to desert their Israelite brothers in the effort to drive out the Canaanites from the land, Moses makes the deal to let them have the land on the other side of the Jordan as their inheritance.
NUMBERS 31
This has to rank right up there as one of those "horrifying" chapters in the Old Testament that make us cringe and want to run to the "safety" of Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild in the New Testament. But there is a lot going on here, and I would suggest that there is much more going on than meets the eye.
The first-time father
at eighty-six.
The bastard child
also blessed with twelve tribes.
The barren woman
gifted with twins.
The birthright
given to the baby.
The servant
becoming the master.
The poor
suddenly
rich.
The weak
suddenly
strong.
The inconsolable
suddenly
in-high-spirits.
God has been overturning tables
long before He
whipped the temple
into a frenzy.
NUMBERS 30
There is a very simple point in this chapter: God listens when we speak. Our words are important to Him. And He wants us to take our words as seriously as He takes them.
Nowadays, business is run on the basis of written contracts. If you have to take a business partner to court, the court will make a judgment based on the terms of the signed contract. With little exception, what is contained in "the four corners of the contract" determines the outcome of the case.
NUMBERS 29
There’s an interesting observation to be made in Numbers 29. Here, we find instructions for three religious festivals that the Israelites were to observe in the seventh month. Actually, this was a very practical thing, because this was the time of year between harvest and seed-time, so it was the perfect opportunity for the people to slow down and attend to worship.
NUMBERS 28
Before the Israelites entered the Promised Land, once again, God went through His expectations of them regarding the offerings and sacrifices they were to bring to Him at the sanctuary. This included daily offerings, Sabbath offerings, monthly offerings, and sacrifices to be offered during The Passover and The Festival of Weeks. With daily, weekly, monthly, and annual sacrifices prescribed, it sounds like God wanted the Israelites to come see Him often.
NUMBERS 27
Long before there was the National Organization of Women, there was God. In this chapter, the daughters of a man named Zelophehad came to Moses to plead their case: their father had died, never having had any sons, and under the current rules of ownership in Israel, they would be left without any land inheritance. So they said, "Why should our father’s name disappear from his clan because he had no son? Give us property among our father’s relatives." (vs 4)
NUMBERS 26
Just before entering the Promised Land, God had Moses take another census of the Israelites — men over the age of one month. And the census ends with this declaration: "These are the ones counted by Moses and Eleazar the priest when they counted the Israelites on the plains of Moab by the Jordan across from Jericho. Not one of them was among those counted by Moses and Aaron the priest when they counted the Israelites in the Desert of Sinai. For the Lord had told those Israelites they would surely die in the wilderness, and not one of them was left except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun." (vs 63-65)
Photo © Unsplash/Patrick Fore
Nobody plans to win the lottery.
Not really.
The unexpected doesn't arrive
when it's expected.
Nobody goes to the well for water
supposing to find a husband instead.
And nobody who goes to the well for a wife
imagines the answer
before the Amen.
Instead, we assume an ordinary life,
quickly forgetting (did we ever know?)
that ordinary
is the largest part of extraordinary.
The miracle always comes
in the midst of the mundane,
the exceptional
in the midst of the everyday.
In a world conceived by the Supernatural,
there are no natural moments.
Even if you're
on your same way
down the same road
to the same well
with the same jar
in the same shoes you were wearing yesterday
and every day for the last ten thousand days,
this is
no ordinary day
no ordinary shoes
no ordinary jar
no ordinary well
no ordinary road
no ordinary way.
Expect.
NUMBERS 25
If you’ve already read the chapter for today, you might be wondering how you can find the "fairness" element in it. It’s a pretty gruesome chapter. The men of Israel went off whoring with some Moabite women — who subsequently took them to church in order to offer sacrifices to their god, Baal. What happened next wasn’t pretty: the ringleaders of this little jaunt were killed and publicly exposed, an Israelite man and Moabite woman were both run through with a sword and killed after acting in open defiance against the Lord’s command, and then a subsequent plague killed thousands of people.
NUMBERS 24
Sometimes, I get these tiny glimpses of God and see, once again, just how far removed He is from our human nature. I find Him acting in ways that are totally contrary to how I would act, and I’m in awe all over again! There was another such wonderful glimpse for me in this chapter. Balaam is still blessing Israel. By the time this chapter is over, he will have handed out seven blessings — ah, such a Biblical number!
NUMBERS 23
I love this! Right on the heels of yesterday’s blog, God is not a manipulator, comes today’s message: Neither can He be manipulated by others! Both of these are important, right? We don’t want God to be someone who pulls puppet strings and manipulates us. But neither do we want Him to be someone that we can push around.
NUMBERS 22
Here’s what I love about this chapter: it proves that God is not a manipulator. He’s not a control freak. He doesn’t stack His own deck. How do I know that? The story of Balaam shows just how few options God really had for "prophets." Prophets are the people who are supposed to be in tune with God, the ones who will listen to Him. And what do we find in Numbers 22? A donkey was more attuned to God’s presence than Balaam: "When the donkey saw the angel of the Lord standing in the road with a drawn sword in his hand, it turned off the road into a field. Balaam beat it to get it back on the road." (vs 23)
NUMBERS 21
There’s no way to write a blog about Numbers 21 without talking about the poisonous snakes. Oh, the snakes. Here’s how the story reads: "Then the Lord sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, 'We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us.' So Moses prayed for the people. The Lord said to Moses, 'Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.' So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived." (vs 6-9)
NUMBERS 20
In this chapter, we see part of what it means to say that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. It doesn’t mean that God arbitrarily punishes children who have wicked parents. It doesn’t mean that He "takes out His anger" over sins committed by the older generation on the younger generation. It does mean that the evil tendencies and influences that children grow up with have an effect on them too, and often, they repeat the same behaviors and hold the same attitudes as their parents. (Look no further than our own society for modern-day examples of this.)
Photo © Unsplash/Scott Rodgerson
God
promised
Abraham
Canaan, the land,
as a gift to him and his descendants.
Years passed with no fulfillment of the vow,
but Abraham
had learned to
trust in
God.
When
Sarah
passed away,
he bought a grave,
and laid her there to rest in promised land.
Israel's first piece of Canaan was a
burial plot,
a wager
on God's
word.
*Tetractys: A poetic form consisting of at least 5 lines of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 10 syllables, respectively. Tetractys can be written with more than one verse, but each must follow suit with an inverted syllable count.
NUMBERS 19
Right off the bat, I have to be honest. This was a weird chapter, and it was difficult to settle on what I was going to write about. It felt a little hard to "get my bearings" in this chapter. First of all, I don’t understand why the red heifer. After doing some research, the best I could find was that it may have been another repudiation of Egyptian custom and tradition. Apparently, the Egyptians regularly sacrificed red heifers in worship to their "evil god" Typhon. But that connection was somewhat tenuous, at best.
NUMBERS 18
After the blogs on defiance over the last week or so, I’ve been itching for a short and sweet blog. And Numbers 18 gives me the perfect opportunity for that. Nestled in amongst instructions to Aaron and the Levites about their priestly ministry in the sanctuary is this little nugget: "But only you and your sons may serve as priests in connection with everything at the altar and inside the curtain. I am giving you the service of the priesthood as a gift." (vs 7)
