Numbers 18-20: Who Will Mourn You?

I'm going to focus on two very small parts of these three chapters, but here are my notes/thoughts on the whole passage.

• Chapter 18 is about duties of the Levites.  It says that they will "bear the guilt in connection with the sanctuary."  Does anybody know what that means?  I may have to look it up.
• This is interesting.  In chapter 19 the priests have to slaughter a heifer in the presence of Eleazar (Aaron's son, the next high priest), and then burn it and place its ashes outside the camp.  Those ashes would be used when somebody was unclean, to cleanse them.  I'm not sure if they placed the ashes in water, or if the ashes somehow represent water, because it says they're kept "as water to remove impurity" and speaks about people washing in it.  Anyway, this is what Hebrews 9:13 is talking about when it mentions "the ashes of a heifer" cleansing people outwardly.  I always wondered what that was talking about.
• Then it talks about people who are in contact with a dead person being unclean for 7 days.  If a person died in their tent, everyone in the tent was unclean too, and any jar or anything that didn't have a lid on it was unclean.  I think this must have been one of those sanitation things.  People didn't know about germs until the 1800s so they didn't know why people would get sick from being around someone else who was sick, and they also didn't know how long germs could live or anything like that.  So this was a way of keeping disease from spreading, I think.
• At the beginning of chapter 20, Miriam dies.  The heading "Death of Miriam" is over the first seven verses in my Bible, but the only part that's actually about her is verse 1.
• Then we have another water incident.  This is the part where God tells Moses to speak to a rock and it'll bring forth water, so what does Moses do?  He hits the rock, because that's the method that worked before.  And for this, God tells him he will not enter the promised land, because he didn't trust God to provide - he fell back on something that had worked earlier, maybe because he thought the power was in his staff or how hard he struck the rock and not in God who doesn't really need Moses to do anything in order to make water come from a rock.
• The people reach Edom - if that name sounds familiar, it's the other name for Esau, and it's now the name of the land where his descendants are living.  The Israelites send a message asking to travel peacefully through the land and promise to stay on the highway - they won't even touch the wells to get a drink - and Edom says "no way, get out of here."  I think this shows that the old sibling rivalry is still very much alive and well.  I'm proud of what Israel does, though. Instead of getting mad and attacking Edom, they travel all the way around the country to get where they're going next.
  
• At the end of the chapter, Aaron dies.  He gets seven verses.  What happens is he goes up to a mountain and his priest uniform gets put on his son Eleazar, and then Aaron dies.
  

As you have probably guessed, I'm focusing this post on comparing the deaths of Miriam and Aaron.  This is what the text says about Miriam's death:  "Now Miriam died there and was buried there."  She doesn't even get a full verse because the first part of the verse just says that they arrived in the wilderness of Zin and the people stayed at Kadesh.

This is what the text says about Aaron's death:
"Then the LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron at Mount Hor by the border of the land of Edom, saying, Aaron will be gathered to his people; for he shall not enter the land which I have given to the sons of Israel, because you rebelled against My command at the waters of Meribah.  Take Aaron and his son Eleazar and bring them up to Mount Hor; and strip Aaron of his garments and put them on his son Eleazar.  So Aaron will be gathered to his people, and will die there."  So Moses di just as the LORD had commanded, and they went up to Mount Hor in the sight of all the congregation.  After Moses had stripped Aaron of his garments and put them on his son Eleazar, Aaron died there on the mountain top.  Then Moses and Eleazar came down from the mountain.  When all the congregation saw that Aaron had died, all the house of Israel wept for Aaron thirty days."

Quite a bit of difference, isn't there?  We don't even know how Miriam died or whether people mourned for her.  With Aaron we get a whole story - that's more than what we got with Abraham, if you can remember back that far.  And we find that people mourned him thirty days.  Remember when Ronald Reagan died, and Bush commanded that all flags be raised to half-mast for thirty days?  That's not what this was like.  Mourning was something very important to ancient people - in fact, some people could do it professionally.  It involved sackcloth and fasting and wailing and all that sort of thing - it was a big deal, and it did usually last for a few days as far as I can recall.  But this was hardcore.

What I find really great about this passage is that it happens right after the waters of Meribah incident, where God tells Moses and Aaron that because of their lack of trust, they won't enter the promised land.  The last significant event in Aaron's life was a screw-up.  And still he gets to go up to a mountain to die in peace next to his brother and his son, and he gets a celebrity funeral.  I think it goes to show, you don't have to have lived a perfect life to die a good death.  But in contrast with Miriam's death, I think it also shows that you're not going to get an epigram like that unless there's a good reason for it.  Aaron may have been number two to Moses for most of his life, and he may have griped and complained about it, and he was even the one who made the golden calf back in Exodus, but he was the high priest of Israel, handpicked by God for a divine purpose.  And the people may have whined about God playing favorites with Moses and Aaron, but when one of their leaders died, they felt it so deeply that they showed him tremendous honor in his death.

I guess it's just something to think about.  Who would mourn you for thirty days when you die?

Numbers 15-17: More Rebellion (Surprised?) and the Sabbath

I'm going to do a lot of blogs really close together from now on because I'm reading every night and I want to be able to talk about each passage as much as I feel like I need to.

So here's the breakdown of chapters 15-17:

• God tells Moses that when they enter Canaan, they are supposed to present offerings to God, and there are intsructions about how to do that.
• God explains that Israel is to have the same laws for native Hebrews as they have for foreigners who join them (whether temporarily or permanently).
• Then it goes into the difference between unintentional sins and defiant sins.  Even though Israel was supposed to be an example of holiness to the other nations, God knew they would mess up even if they had the best intentions, so He specifically gives instructions for how to present a sacrifice to atone for those sins when they happen.  However, sins that are "defiant" are a different matter.  A person who deliberately broke one of God's laws to blaspheme Him or show blatant disrespect for Him was to be cut off from the congregation.
• Somebody is caught gathering wood on the Sabbath, and God says to stone him.
• A bunch of leaders decide to rebel against Moses because they don't think he should be the head honcho.  So Moses says God should decide, and the ground opens up and literally swallows the guys who rebelled.
• Then a bunch of other people blame Moses for the people above dying.  God tells Moses again that He'll just kill all the people, Moses says don't, God ends up putting a plague on the ones who are grumbling against Moses.
• To quell any further doubts, God asks Moses to collect the rods of twelve leaders (one from each tribe) including Aaron, and write their names on their rods, and then He'll show which man is chosen for the priesthood.  The next day, Aaron's rod has buds, flowers, and ripe almonds on it, so God has Moses save it (it was later placed in the Ark of the Covenant) as a testimony.

About the guy who got killed for working on the Sabbath.  In a discussion about the Sabbath, a friend of mine said the following:

"[The author of Hebrews] contrasts the rebellion many Israelites had toward the Sabbath in the wilderness with the rebellion many people in general have toward Grace in the Eternal Now. Those who do not accept God's grace and refuse to take part in the Sabbath rest of Christ will surely perish and be denied God's rest just as the rebellious Israelites were.
Those who reject the grace of God make themselves exempt from it, as God swears they shall never know rest, which is the Sabbath, which is His grace."


Note my friend's word choice - "refuse to take part in the Sabbath rest."  You see, the command to keep the Sabbath wasn't given as a burdensome obligation, another check box on the list of do's and don'ts.  It was given to man as a gift, a way to commune with God in joy and peace, without distractions.  Not participating in the Sabbath is essentially refusing that communion.

I think there was more going on in this story than a guy picking up sticks.  The Bible says that the things that happened to Israel in the Old Testament as examples and warnings for us today (1 Corinthians 10:11).  I think maybe this event happened as a warning to us today of what happens when we say "no" to the Sabbath, which to us today is a relationship with Christ (read Hebrews 4).

I think I'm going to start taking the spirit of the Sabbath more seriously from now on.  By that I mean, I think I really should take one day each week to focus on God and rest.  But I also mean that I think I can access that Sabbath rest at all times.  Hebrews says that there "remains" a Sabbath rest for us, so I think it's something that is always available, and it should be taken advantage of.

Numbers 11-14: I Take That Back

In the very last few chapters, we saw Israel as a group of devoted followers of the LORD who were just ready and raring to go wherever He led them, right? Well, not anymore. That's right - the very next thing we read is that the people start complaining. And this time it's contagious - meaning, they're not the only whiners in this bunch. Let's see who all is guilty of it this time around:

1. The people - they complain that they don't have meat and they're sick of manna. They say, "we had it soooo great in Egypt - fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, garlic - we had it all! Now our soul is dried up."

2. Moses - that's right, the big guy complains to God that God's been picking on him, putting him in charge of all these people so that he has to baby-sit them all the time, and he doesn't have any help at all. So he says, "God, can you just kill me?"

3. Miriam and Aaron - Moses' support system, the dynamic duo get jealous of Moses (the guy who hates his job because he's all alone, remember?) and think they need more fame and glory for the work they do.

4. Ten spies - Moses handpicks twelve leaders from among the tribes, people that everybody looks up to and respects, guys that he thinks he can trust, and sends them into the Promised Land to check it out. When they come back, all but two of them have their tails between their legs because the Canaanites are tall. Dude, news flash: everyone is tall compared to Hebrews. Okay, so these happen to be legitimate giants maybe, but the spies conveniently forget that this guy called God Almighty has recently rescued them from the most powerful empire on the planet, and maybe He's got a plan for getting them into the land He promised them.

5. All the congregation, all the sons of Israel - I love that it makes a point now of saying "all," as opposed to just "the people" who were complaining earlier. They say "I wish we would have died in Egypt, or that we could just die here in the wilderness (which is what we were complaining would happen earlier) because God's leading us straight into a deathtrap!" Boo hoo.

So finally, God says to Moses, "How dense are these people? I have half a mind to do just what they want and make them all die in the wilderness." You know, whenever God says this stuff, I always wonder if He really means it, or if He's just saying it to Moses as a test or something. You know, like, "Hey Moses, you said you were sick of leading these people, so here's your chance to get off the hook. . . ." Maybe? I don't know.

So what happens with all these complaints?

1. God throws a fireball at the outskirts of camp (I guess as a warning shot), but then He gives them quail. But some of the people are so greedy that God puts a plague on them.

2. God tells Moses to get seventy elders from the people to help him out. This is, presumably, in addition to all the people Moses already appointed as judges at the advice of his father-in-law Jethro way back in Exodus 18 (see, he's not alone after all).

3. God gives Miriam and Aaron what-for, and then he gives Miriam leprosy. Moses pleads with God on her behalf, and God says fine, she'll only remain unclean for seven days (which is how long a person remained unclean for anything, as we saw in Leviticus), and then she'll be fine.

4. Caleb and Joshua say "Whatever, we can take this land because God is with us! Check out these grapes. If we lived here, maybe we'd become giants too!" (Okay, so they didn't say that last part.)

5. Moses reminds God of His promise to deliver Israel into the promised land, and says that if He doesn't, all the rest of the world will never believe that the LORD is God (which was kind of the point of doing all this stuff - so that they would all know).

6. So God decides to give the people their wish - sort of. The people who griped and complained and wished to die in the wilderness will never get to see the Promised Land; instead they're going to have to wander in the desert for 40 years until they're all dead, and their children will get to go in and take the land.

Then guess what happens? The people say, "Omgosh! We're sorry! Let's go take over Canaan right now!" So they try, and they get beaten pretty badly. No surprise.

So what can we learn from this? I think the pretty obvious lesson is, dude, just do what God says, because sin and disobedience have serious consequences. But I think there's another lesson when we compare this passage to the passage we just discussed, and that is this: when everything is going well, and everything's cool between us and God, don't get complacent. Don't just assume that because you're doing a pretty good job of following God right now, that you're always going to feel like doing what He says. Don't slack off and start wandering - you might start going in the wrong direction. That's what happened to these people.

Leviticus 9-15: Clean and Unclean

Well, it's been a while, but I'm going to do a big chunk (maybe two chunks) today so I can keep moving.

This part is all about what makes something ceremonially unclean, and what you're supposed to do when something (or, yes, someone) becomes unclean. It's pretty weird, but sort of neat. Some thoughts:

Chapter 9
(This is about Aaron offering sacrifices before God, after all the preceding chapters about how to do so)

• I wonder sometimes why Aaron was chosen to be the high priest instead of Moses, and why there's not much in the Bible about him if he was so important. I suppose Moses was too busy to be the high priest. Still, I find it interesting.
• There's a lot of instructions about how to present an offering to God. Why was the method - or formula, we could say - so important? If there was nothing inherently special, spiritual, or magical about the animals (or their various body parts), why did it matter what the priest did with which parts? I really don't know.
• In verse 24, when Aaron offers the sacrifice, fire shoots out and burns up all the stuff on the altar, and the people freak out and fall down. I love that. They've already seen God do a bunch of awesome stuff, but it never gets old.

Chapter 10

• Right at the beginning of this chapter, Aaron has two sons named Nadab and Abihu who put some weird incense that wasn't God-approved on the altar, and they die because of it. This is what I wrote in my notes when I read that: Harsh! What did they do that for? They knew the rules, and God made a really big deal about following them - like, the last NINE LONG CHAPTERS that have taken me forever to get through were all about how to do a sacrifice and how important it was and what it meant and all that. How could they just blow all that off? No wonder God was mad at them. I'm mad at them. That's likw how I feel when people post things on the board that I've expressly said "Do NOT do this!" Still, I'm sad that they died. That seems really rough.
• In verse 6, Israel mourns the deaths of Aaron' sons, even though Moses doesn't let the mourn. That must have been really hard on them, since obviously they're the ones who would be the most sad over it. But I am glad that they didn't prohibit everyone from mourning. In fact, Moses said that the whole house of Israel would "beail the burning which the LORD has brought about."
• I don't understand what happens in verses 16-20. Moses goes looking for the goat of a sin offering that they just offered, but it had been all burned up, so Moses goes to Aaron's sons (the ones who are still alive) and asks them why they didn't eat it, and Aaron says it's because his sons were burned up and it wouldn't have been good in the eyes of the LORD for him and his sons to eat the sin offering today. And Moses goes "oh, okay," and that's the end of the chapter. I don't get it. There must be some significance to all this stuff that I'm missing.

Chapter 11
(This part is about clean and unclean animals)

• It's really weird to me that animals which have split hooves and chew the cud are clean. I mean, it's not a random selection of different animals, or even based so much on what they eat or anything. I suppose God could have made "clean" animals that didn't have cloven hooves, but he gave all the animals he wanted the Israelites to eat those two things in common. How funny. I mean, with the fish it makes more sense: scales and fins. That's pretty general. Hooves and digestive process just seems so weird to me.
• We all know that the pig is considered an abomination to the Jews (as well as to Muslims and Hindus). But it's not the only animal that was unclean. I wonder why it became the sort of poster child of unclean animals.
• I also think it's weird that God never says why certain animals were unclean. Today we think it's because of sanitation and preventing disease and whatnot. But God doesn't tell the Israelites that, and I'm sure they didn't know about bacteria and all that to figure it out. But then again, maybe it wouldn't have done much good to tell them why because they didn't know anything about that stuff. So maybe sometimes God doesn't answer our "why" questions because the answers would be more confusing than the questions.

Chapter 12 (it's okay, this one is really short)

• Now, this chapter is really funny to me. It's about how when a woman has a baby, she becomes unclean for a certain amount of time. If it's a boy, she's unclean for a week, and on the eighth day when the boy is circumcised, that's when she enters a purification period of 33 . But if it's a girl, she's unclean for two weeks and has a purification period of 66 days. Why? I'd also like to know what the practical implications of this whole unclean period are. Is that kind of like maternity leave? Or is it a purely ceremonial thing that has no connection to "practical" matters like the unclean animals do?
• What I do like about this chapter is that it tells what sacrifice to bring to the Lord when your kid is born. You're supposed to bring a lamb, but if you're too poor for that you bring a pair of turtledoves or pigeons. I think it's neat that God has different requirements like that. And notice, He doesn't just make it so that -everyone- has to bring birds. If you can afford a lamb, that's what you should bring.

Chapter 13-14
(These two are about leprosy, or icky skin diseases, and what to do about them)

• The closest Israel got to having doctors was priests. They had to be able to tell what was just a scab and what was a serious disease, and they had to tell people how to treat each. Nasty job if you ask me. What really sucks is, there wasn't any treatment for disease, whether it was leprosy or just a burn. Pretty much you just wrap it up and try to stay away from people so you don't infect them. I wonder why God didn't give them more information about medical treatments? Lots of other ancient people groups had herbal remedies for all kinds of things (don't know about leprosy though). Well, maybe Hebrews did use herbs for things too, and we just don't know about it. But this leprosy stuff was apparently highly contagious, so people really had to stay away for their own good. I wonder if it was risky for the priests to be looking at their sores and stuff.
• All of chapter 14 is about cleansing a leper and his house and stuff, so apparently people did recover from it. That's really encouraging. But not everybody did.

Chapter 15
(This chapter is just weird. It's about, um, bodily discharge)

• Okay, first of all, why is this chapter in the Bible? This is like TMI to the nth degree for me! Now, it is my opinion that some books have a sort of personality, as though they were almost people themselves, separate from their authors (if you are an author, or if you have listened to one talk about their books, you understand how this is possible). And the Bible is called a "living book" so I think I can say it has more personality than other books, and its personality is totally candid. It is not at all apologetic when it talks about nasty stuff, or about deep stuff, or hard-to-believe stuff, or stuff that you just wish wasn't in there. It puts all its cards on the table, face-up, as it were. This chapter is an example of that. Now, I really don't know why this was so super-important to God or to Israel, but it apparently was worth writing 33 verses about (the baby chapter only has 8 verses), so we mustn't overlook it.
• What I do find interesting here (yes, I said interesting) is that no matter what kind of discharge a person has, at the end of it they have to bring birds for a sin offering and for a burnt offering. Now, the text doesn't treat any of these things like sins. The people don't get punished for them, and generally it's something that the person can't help (like menstruation). But you have to offer a sin offering anyway, and I wonder why that is.

So that was a lot of really weird stuff in those chapters. Burning, dying, eating, scabbing, birthing, discharging, sacrificing stuff. All I can say is, no wonder Hebrews says that the Law is only a shadow of the things to come.

Leviticus 7-8: More Sacrifice

Yikes . . . three months. Sorry 'bout that. Slowly but surely, I will make it through Leviticus!

I read chapters 7-8 a while ago, so I'm just going to write what I have in my notes, and then I'll start up again with chapter 9 next time.

Chapter 7 starts off with the guilt offering, which is "most holy." For some reason I wondered how many things in the Old Testament are "holy" and how many things are "most holy," and what the difference really is. That's all I wrote down about chapter 7.

In chapter 8, we first hear about the Urim and Thummim. Those words mean "lights" and "perfections." According to what I've heard, they were these little rocks that the priests or whoever used to cast lots and hear from God, or something. Do we really know much about them? What is the significance of their names? Unlike almost everything else in the Pentateuch, these little deals are never really explained or described, just taken as given. This leads me to wonder if they had been around since before the Exodus and therefore the Hebrews wouldn't need an explanation for them. But I don't know.

In chapter 8, Aaron and his sons have to be consecrated before they can serve as priests before the LORD. I wonder, did Moses have to be consecrated before doing anything? I mean, he was the one who consecrated Aaron, and he's the one offering the sacrifices in this chapter and earlier in the story.

My other thought, which I've been musing over for some time, is this: what was the point of the sacrifices (other than the fact that they pointed to the future sacrifice of Jesus)? Was there something the blood of certain animals that had spiritual power? That sounds silly, so I don't think so. In fact, Hebrews even says that "it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins" (10:4). And yet, that same book also says that "without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins" (9:22). As Christians, we believe the only blood that has the power to forgive sins is the blood of Jesus Christ. So what was with the animals, and why did the people have to kill them to be forgiven if the animals' blood itself was powerless?

I think it wasn't about the blood at all, not directly. The animals the Jews sacrificed were not what forgave sins nor what covered them. I think the point was to show the people what the consequence of sin is: death. It was like God was saying to them, "this should be you - but I've made another way." I guess that's why Hebrews says, "In those sacrifices there is a reminder of sins year by year" (10:3), because when you have to kill an animal because you screwed something up, you have to take it seriously. It makes you realize that God is so far removed from impurity that even one little slip separates you from Him. And it reminds you of what exactly God is saving you from, the ultimate consequence of your own actions.

Well, that's all I've got today. Next time I'll do more than two chapters.

Exodus 19-40: The Covenant

I'm going to finish Exodus today. It's 22 chapters - wow - but I'll try not to write a novel.

Mostly what happens is, Moses talks with God and gets a bunch of commandments - kind of an overview of what we'll see in the next few books of the Law. The people say they'll obey everything God tells them to do, so then God starts telling Moses about how to build the tabernacle and priestly garments, which takes about seven rather lengthy chapters. Meanwhile, the people down in the camp go ballistic and have Aaron make an idol for them. God gets really mad, and Moses goes back and freaks out and kills a bunch of people. Then Moses goes back up on Sinai for a while and gets more instructions, and then the people make the tabernacle, and then we have a short scene describing God's presence in the tabernacle by day and by night.

So here are some thoughts.

1. I went to a synagogue once when I was staying with my Jewish friends for a weekend. My friend's Sunday school class (yeah, they have Sunday school too) was going over the Ten Commandments. The way they number them is a little different: the first commandment to them is "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt" (Ex. 20:2). I'm not really sure how that's a commandment, but that's how they have it. Then they merge what we consider the first and second commandments into one: no other gods. I just think that's interesting.

2. Murder is punishable by death if the victim is a man, a woman, a child, or even an unborn baby - but not if it's a slave. Why is that?

3. A lot of sins were punishable by death according to the Mosaic Law. If we applied all of them today, we would have the death penalty for the following:
a) murder
b) manslaughter, but you could get asylum
c) kidnapping
d) being an obstinately rebellious son or daughter
e) having a dog that has a habit of biting people and you didn't put him down and he bites somebody and they die
f) being involved in Wicca, astrology, palm-reading, tarot cards, the occult, etc.
g) bestiality
h) adhering to a religion other than the state religion

And that's just from two chapters; there are a few other things that could get you executed. Nobody crucify me here, but I think it's funny that people point to the Law for the reason why the death penalty is in effect today, but only where murder and perhaps rape are concerned. Not too many people want the death penalty to apply to witchcraft or rebellious children. Take that however you will; it's just an observation.

4. The other day I was rereading my very early IM conversations with Justin. It was funny to compare our relationship now to our friendship back then. One thing I noticed is that certain things that we thought would be potential issues back then, did become issues when we started dating. I also saw that even in IM, the same weaknesses and tendencies which each of us has today were present kind of as seeds at the very beginning. Not that we haven't worked through any of those things, but I'm just trying to use an analogy for Israel right here. Right away, as soon as they're out of Egypt - actually no, even back when they're still in Egypt - we can see a pattern of distrust and unfaithfulness. They believe in God, they don't believe in God. They obey Him, they disobey him. It becomes much more evident in chapter 32 - it was only a few weeks ago that they said "All that the LORD has spoken, we will do!" - and already they're saying, "What happened to Moses? He might not come back. Let's make a god we can see instead of the scary cloud on the mountain." This is really foreshadowing what the rest of Israel's history will look like. Like I said last time, yo-yo.

5. This is something I got from my Bible teacher. I don't know how intentional it is in the text, but give it some thought. When the people told Aaron to make them a god, what they meant was a god they could see. They had a god, but He wasn't really tangible. So far, their way of knowing God came by hearing God's word through Moses. Is it any coincidence, then, that when they told Aaron to make them a visible god, he had them take the rings off their ears - a symbol of hearing? Just like Eve in the garden, who heard God's command not to eat the fruit, but saw that the fruit was good, so she ate it. Actually, you could say that a lot of themes in the Bible have to do with seeing versus hearing. "We walk by faith, not by sight" (2 Cor. 5:7) and "now faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ" (Rom. 10:17). Or, as someone once said (I really wish I knew who it was), "In the beginning was the Word, not the video."

6. God told Moses he would kill all the Israelites and then make him into a great nation, and Moses seems to talk God out of it. I mean, the text actually says, "So the LORD changed His mind" (32:14). Was God -really- going to kill them all? Considering that God has been so determined so far to keep His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I doubt it. Was He perhaps testing Moses then? And if so, what if Moses had said "sure, go ahead and kill them all"?

7. Aaron's a lousy excuse-maker. I don't understand him. The future high priest of the LORD is the one who makes this gold calf thing. Yet when Moses questions him, he makes it seem like the calf made itself - he says he threw the gold into the fire, "and out came this calf." Whoa, strange coincidence! What's weird is that Aaron still gets to be the high priest later.

8. Even after Moses intercedes for the people and asks God to be merciful to them, he has the Levites kill about 3000 people. Was he supposed to do that? God didn't tell him to. Personally, I think Moses has a hot temper. In chapter 11, when Moses warns Pharaoh about the last plague, it says he goes out from Pharaoh "in hot anger." I don't believe that phrase is used anywhere else in Scripture. Then with the golden calf incident, he gets so mad that he breaks the stone tablets that have the words of the covenant written on them. Then he tells the people to kill each other.

9. Right after Moses has the people kill each other, it says that God punishes everyone who was unfaithful to Him by "smiting" them. At first I thought that meant He killed them all, but when you think about it, if the vast majority of the people died, that wouldn't leave very many - and we find out in chapter 38 that there's over 600,000 men when the tabernacle is built. Also, Aaron was unfaithful, and clearly he's still around after the calf incident. Turns out the word use really means "to strike," not necessarily to kill. Personally, I think maybe God hit them with some kind of plague-like thing, even though in the laws He just gave Moses, it says that worshipping another god deserved death. So again, even in His judgment, God is showing mercy.

10. How big is this group of people right now? A lot of estimates say over a million, but critics say that's crazy because there simply wouldn't be enough room for them; I mean, we know from the beginning of the book that they outnumbered the Egyptians, but we don't know by how much. More importantly, though, is that a line of a million people, even if they were walking ten abreast, would be over 90 miles long by my estimation. Yet in chapter 38, it says that the men over age 20 numbered 603,550. Can somebody explain to me how this would work?

Okay, I'm sorry I made that so long, but seriously, it's 21 chapters.

Exodus 7-12: My Deliverer Is Coming

Let me preface this post by saying that I really wish I had my Prince of Egypt soundtrack with me right now, or that I had ripped it onto my computer, because it's been running through my head since I started Exodus.

We start with God telling Moses exactly what's going to happen: Aaron is going to talk for him, Pharaoh's not going to listen, plagues are going to hit Egypt, Israel's going to be saved, and all Egypt will know that YHWH is God. Then we see it all happen more or less exactly the way God told Moses it would.

Imagine with me for a second that you're Pharaoh. You have the coolest empire in the world right now, and you've got a bunch of slaves to make it cooler by building stuff for you (we know that the Hebrews built Pithom and Raamses; we don't know what else they built. We also don't know that they were the only slaves in Egypt, and they probably weren't). If I remember 7th grade history right, approximately 2/3 of Egypt's population was the slave class. That doesn't mean 2/3 of the population was Hebrews, necessarily, but there were quite a few of them. So if you were Pharaoh, and some guy came to you and asked you to let a huge chunk of your population, your cheap labor force, and the people who make your empire cool, go off into the wilderness for a couple days, you would say no too.

I don't think the plagues were just about letting the Hebrews go. They were about showing Egypt - and the rest of the world, because word spreads - that the Hebrew God was number one. That's why the text says over and over, "then you will know that there is no one like Me in all the earth" (9:14) and things like that.

The Egyptians, as we all know, were polytheists. They worshipped the sun and the river and all this other stuff, and a lot of their gods were represented as birds or frogs or dogs or what have you. In sending plagues that attacked various Egyptian deities, God was asserting His sovereignty and authority over the gods of Egypt. If Egypt is powerless before YHWH, then surely no other nation could stand before Him. That's what I think, anyway.

I find the parts about Pharaoh's heart being hardened very interesting. Four times (after the first, third, fifth, and seventh plagues) the text says "Pharaoh's heart was hardened," twice (after the second and fourth plagues) it says "Pharaoh hardened his heart," and four times (after the sixth, eighth, and ninth plagues and before the tenth) it says "The LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart." Hebrew writers are usually pretty intentional about patterns and stuff, so I think these distinctions are worth noticing. Some people seem to think that God hardening Pharaoh's heart means that God made Pharaoh act against his will, like if God had left him alone, he would've let the Hebrews go the first time. That's not what I see in the text. First of all, it doesn't draw any extra attention to the fact that God hardens Pharaoh's heart; secondly, it specifically shows Pharaoh hardening his own heart, and thirdly, by the time we get to where it says that the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart, he's already done it himself six times (including the time Aaron's staff became a snake), so by now he's in such a habit of being contrary, the real miracle is that he ever let the Hebrews go.

I also find it interesting and sort of odd that it's only during the fourth, fifth, seventh, ninth, and tenth plagues that God sets Goshen, where the Hebrews are, apart from the Egyptians. Did they have to endure the other five? The text gives us no reason to believe they didn't, because it makes such a point of God setting them apart when He did. To take the text at face value, we have to assume that the Hebrews dealt with water turned into blood, frogs, gnats (or lice), boils, and locusts just as the Egyptians did. Weird, isn't it? But that seems (to me) to be the way God does things. He doesn't typically remove His people from disasters and trials and persecutions; He preserves them through those things. That's what He did with Noah and his family, and that's what He's been doing with the Israelites, and that's what He did with Job, and that's what He did with the early church, and that's what He does with us today. That's why I stopped believing in a pre-trib rapture. God has never been in the habit of stopping bad things from happening to His people. We can never be sure that He'll remove us from evil, from pestilence, from persecution, or even from difficult situations, but we can be sure that He will be faithful to be with us and help us through those times.

Finally, we have Passover. This is one of my favorite parts of the entire Bible I think, and I can't possibly do it justice with my writing, but I'll try to show you what I find fascinating about this passage.

First each family has to take a year-old lamb, a perfect lamb, and keep it in the house for four days. Now, I don't have much experience with lambs, but we bought a lobster from Walmart one time for dinner, and before we had even gotten home my little brother had already named it. If you keep a cute fluffy animal in your house for more than a few seconds, you can just bet that everybody will fall in love with it. Then four days later you slit its throat. That's kind of morbid, isn't it? Killing something that for a while was a sort of pet?

The second thing is that they have to put the blood on their doorways using a hyssop branch. Later on, when we get into Leviticus and talk about the sacrificial system, we'll see hyssop is used a lot in sacrifices to cleanse the people from sin. When I read this, I immediately thought of Psalm 51, where David says "Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me and I will be whiter than snow." I'm pretty sure that is a direct reference to the blood of a sacrificial animal that was sometimes sprinkled on the people (like at Mt. Sinai) to represent that the animal's death covered their sins and made them blameless before God. But as Hebrews says, "it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins," because they're only animals. That's why people had to sacrifice them day after day, year after year, from the first sacrifice back in the Garden of Eden until the Atonement Day when Jesus died. After that, all those sacrifices became obsolete, because the blood of the true sacrifice, the only sinless man who ever lived, had been sprinkled over the people, washing us and covering our sins for good.

The third thing is that this wasn't just for the Hebrews. At the end of the chapter it says foreigners could eat the Passover meal if they became circumcised first, and I wonder if there were any Egyptians who did what Moses said and were spared that night. It says that "a mixed multitude" went out of Egypt with them - does that mean some Egyptians went with the Hebrews? I don't know. I think the text leaves that option open.

Exodus 1-6: Israel in Bondage

Welcome to Exodus! In case you ever wondered, the original name of this book was Shemot, which means "names." Likewise, the original name of Genesis was Bereshith (spelling varies), meaning "in the beginning." All the books were named according to the first couple words in the book, and if you read the Hebrew Scriptures those are the names they still use.

So here are my observations:

Why does the story call Moses' father-in-law Reuel the first time and Jethro the other times? My first guess is that Reuel is more of a title or a description than a name. It means "friend of God," and he was the priest, so maybe "friend of God" is another way of saying "priest." I don't really know.

A lot of people who preach on this passage point this out, but God knew how to prepare Moses for his future job. First he was raised in the Egyptian palace as the son of Pharaoh's daughter, so he had the best education you could probably get anywhere in the world, plus his mother no doubt taught him Hebrew religion and history. Then he spends 40 years as a shepherd, which means he had to learn how to be in charge of lots of dumb animals. Very soon he would be in charge of lots of dumb people, and I think herding a tribe of people who don't like you across the country is probably not too much different from herding a flock of sheep. Maybe.

Don't miss the last couple verses of chapter 2, because they're very deliberate. It says, "So God heard their groaning; and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God saw the sons of Israel, and God took notice of them." In other words, God wasn't ignoring them, nor had He forgotten them - just like we saw with Noah during the flood. When bad things happen to us, our first tendency is often to think that God either doesn't care or isn't around, but that's not true. He 1) hears us when we cry out to Him, 2) remembers (i.e. doesn't forget) His promise never to leave us, 3) sees us in our misery, and 4) pays attention to us. Those are four very deliberate actions on God's part.

When God calls Moses, Moses makes lots of excuses. First he plays the "I'm not good enough" card, and then God answers him by saying "I will be with you" - in other words, it doesn't matter who you are. Then Moses asks who he should say sent him (I'm not sure why he asks this; if anybody has an idea, let me know), and God gives him His covenant name, YHWH. YHWH is derived from the verb hayah, which means "to be." That's why it's translated "I AM WHO I AM," in all caps like that. It's God's personal name, His most holy name, the name that describes Him as the One who is. I think it's a pretty awesome name.

Next Moses says that the Hebrews won't believe him, so God gives him three signs which I imagine each symbolize something and could be made into a sermon (you know, because there's three of them, and sermons always have three points): turning the staff into a snake, making his hand leprous, and turning water into blood (Moses doesn't actually do that one at this time, God just tells him about it).

So then Moses says (he's getting more personal now) that he's not good at talking. I think Moses might have been like me a bit in that respect, because I'm not very good at talking either, and if God told me to go before the ruler of the civilized world and tell him something he really wouldn't want to hear, I wouldn't want to do it either. God has a really good comeback here: "Who has made man's mouth? Or who makes hi mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the LORD?" This is really, really important. When God calls you to something, He also equips you with everything you need to accomplish your calling, even if it doesn't seem like enough to you. Moses thought that talking to Pharaoh required being able to speak well, but in God's eyes, Moses didn't need that. He gave Moses all the tools he needed, and then promised that He would help him along the way. And He did: He sent Aaron to be his speaker, and He trained Moses along the way, so that by the end of the story we see Moses talking, not Aaron. Which is pretty cool.

This principle is something I realized one day in ballet class, when I was thinking about how bad my turnout was. I realized that God had given me the body I needed to have for whatever task He's called me to do. And whatever that is, I don't need perfect turnout to do it. I have all the tools I need to be the dancer God has called me to be, and I have everything I need to go wherever God wants me to go. All I have to do is use what He gave me, and He'll help me do the rest. That was a huge encouragement and relief to me; maybe it will be to you as well.

Moses finally gives his most personal excuse: "God, please send somebody else." Deep down, he really just doesn't want to do it, and I can't say I blame him. Moses had what seems to be a nice, quiet life over in Midian. He had a wife and kids, a father-in-law who seems pretty cool, and some sheep; what more could he want? Then along comes this wacked-out bush that turns out to be Jehovah God telling him to drop it all and go back to a country where he's wanted for murder and tell the most powerful man alive to give up his number one source of labor. I wouldn't want to do it either. I really don't think God was all that concerned with what Moses wanted to do, because what Moses wanted to do was continue his nice, quiet, safe little life. God isn't safe, and He doesn't guarantee us safe lives as His followers. The only thing He really does guarantee is that He'll be with us. Actually, that's a lot.

That's all for today; tomorrow we'll look at the 10 plagues. Won't that be fun?