What’s so important about the springs?

Negev Desert Acacia Trees (Photo credit: Stellas mom)

I’m currently reading the Bible through from cover to cover. One fun thing about that is discovering random bits which are easy to miss out otherwise. Take Joshua 15 for example.

We’re in the middle of a long description of what geographic area each tribe of Israel was allocated, when this happens:

…Caleb said, “Whoever strikes Kiriath-sepher and captures it, to him will I give Achsah my daughter as wife.” And Othniel the son of Kenaz, the brother of Caleb, captured it. And he gave him Achsah his daughter as wife. When she came to him, she urged him to ask her father for a field. And she got off her donkey, and Caleb said to her, “What do you want?” She said to him, “Give me a blessing. Since you have given me the land of the Negeb, give me also springs of water.” And he gave her the upper springs and the lower springs. (Joshua 15:16-19)

…then it goes straight back into the land allocation. As it’s so easy and convenient to do so, I asked my good friend Matthew Henry what he thought about it:

From this story we learn, 1. That it is no breach of the tenth commandment moderately to desire those comforts and conveniences of this life which we see attainable in a fair and regular way. 2. That husbands and wives should mutually advise, and jointly agree, about that which is for the common good of their family and much more should they concur in asking of their heavenly Father the best blessings, those of the upper springs. 3. That parents must never think that lost which is bestowed upon their children for their real advantage, but must be free in giving them portions as well as maintenance, especially when they are dutiful. Caleb had sons (1 Chronicles 4:15), and yet gave thus liberally to his daughter. Those parents forget themselves and their relation who grudge their children what is convenient for them when they can conveniently part with it.

I’d probably add something else to his wisdom. God gives grace upon grace to us. I’ll first break down the story into chunks, then show how I’d apply it:

1. Caleb offers a reward for completing a task.
2. Othniel completes the task, gets the reward, yet ultimately asks for more (apparently Kiriath-sepher was in a really dry place).
3. Caleb goes further than requested, and gives more than requested.

I think you know where this is going. It’s all about Jesus:

1. God offers the free gift of eternal life to all who put their faith in Jesus Christ.
2. Even after having received the ‘reward’ of salvation by grace, we still go back to God in prayer, asking him to give us more gifts (apparently some people find the Christian life a bit hard – I suppose that makes sense, seeing as Jesus promised we would).
3. God blesses us in more ways than we can ever realise.

Related articles

• Choosing an Attitude of Gratitude in 2013 (Part 1) (keepingandreaping.wordpress.com)
• “Father! give us a great year, I pray” (sophialorenabenjamin.wordpress.com)

Evan Almighty

Cover of Evan Almighty (Widescreen Edition)

A couple of weeks ago I watched the film Evan Almighty again. A couple of things stood out to me.

Those moments throughout that suggest that God has a sense of humour are spot on. Christianity’s a relationship with a perfect Person, so it makes sense that he’s a funny guy.

Evan knew that God had spoken to him, but it still needed faith. Christianity isn’t blind faith in spite of the overwhelming evidence that disproves it, we Christians know that what we believe is true!

The conversation about God giving opportunities rather than fuzzy feelings is genius. If you ask God for patience does he magically make you patient, or give you opportunities to become more patient?

Of course Evan was laughed at, he looked and sounded like a madman! There’s no wonder that the prophets in the Old Testament, Jesus’ disciples and the early church, and Christians ever since have been ridiculed for what they believe, because of course it flies in the face of what the world believes! Sex only for marriage? How foolish!

It’s all about God’s grace. Every single individual in the movie has the chance to pause for a moment and think, ‘Perhaps Evan’s story is true,’ but no-one did. Evan’s desperate cries to the people who would be drowned to ‘get on the ark!’ because of one man’s sin is emotional, but the cry from Acts 4:12 is exactly the same: ‘there is salvation in no-one else!’ To actively choose to ignore that warning and head into eternity without Jesus as Saviour is to drink judgment upon oneself when the offer of a free ride is available.

The precious Puritans

I’m pretty happy saying that I like ‘the Puritans’ without ever defining exactly who I mean when I say that. I’m pretty certain I’m not the only one.

A bit of back story, however. My first in-depth encounter with the Puritans came in the form of Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible, which I still maintain has been one of the most influential books in my life, because (although I didn’t realise it at the time) it showed me how the Puritans approached the Bible. They wanted it to change them, and not simply use it as a nice collection of quotes. Matthew Henry read and studied the Bible as if it were actually all breathed out by God and profitable. Legendary.

So I’m grateful for the Puritans.

And I’m also grateful for free music – I enjoyed listening to a free album given away by the rapper Propaganda from the first beat, but was thrown a little by a track dropped in there called Precious Puritans.

It essentially communicates that Propaganda is frustrated when people quote the Puritans as if their words were breathed out by God, when their flaws were many and varied, and he particularly picks out their support of the slave trade. Here’s a sample verse:

How come the things the Holy Spirit showed them in the valley of vision didn’t compel them to knock on they neighbors door and say, “You can’t own people!”?
Your precious puritans were not perfect.
You romanticize them as if they were inerrant. As if the skeletons in they closet was pardoned due to the they hard work and tobacco growth.
As if abolitionists weren’t racist and just pro-union.
As if God only spoke to white boys with epic beards.
You know Jesus didn’t really look like them paintings. That was just Michaelangelo’s boyfriend.

You can read the full lyrics here. And Joel Beeke responded saying he didn’t much like the tone of the rap here.

My take? Pretty much the same as Propaganda’s:

And, it bothers me when you quote puritans, if I’m honest, for the same reason it bothers me when people quote me–they precious propaganda.
So, I guess it’s true.
God really does use crooked sticks to make straight lines.
Just like your precious puritans.

The Puritans were not perfect, and neither’s Propaganda, or me. And thank God that He is willing and able to redeem these ‘crooked sticks’ for His glory!

How bitumen shows that the Bible’s all useful

The Destruction Of Sodom And Gomorrah, a painting by John Martin (painter), died 1854, thus 100 years. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Partly in response to this post I recently decided to knock my Bible reading plan on the head and just go ahead and read the thing from start to finish. (Or should that be ‘the Thing’?)

Anyway, I opened at page one and went to work, and it struck me pretty quickly that the book of Genesis moves through events way faster than I’m used to in a book. The author (Author?) decided that descriptions that would give you a sense of time or position are simply not as important as the things that needed recording, so a conversation is recorded over 500 words, immediately followed by hundreds of years of people having babies over 500 words, with seemingly random bits and bobs thrown in here and there.

I was thinking this when I was reading Genesis 14. Verse 10′s an odd one, which shows this off perfectly. Right in the middle of an account of a battle we’re told that ‘the Valley of Siddim was full of bitumen pits, and as the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled, some fell into them, and the rest fled to the hill country.’ Why are we told that some fell into the bitumen pits? Who knows? Nothing else happens to them, and they’re never mentioned again in the entire Bible. Maybe they’re still there now!

But the reason it really stood out to me was that a couple of chapters earlier I’d just been introduced to bitumen.

…they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens…” (from Genesis 11)

That’s the start of the Tower of Babel, which led to the peoples of the earth being scattered and unable to communicate with one another. But again we have this question: why mention the bitumen so specifically?

2 Timothy 3:16 tells us that all Scripture is useful: why is this useful?

Well, I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the material used to build a tower designed to escape from God is the same material that ends up as the downfall of the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah! At this point none of the horrific scene involving Lot and the angels has happened yet, but it just goes to show that God is in complete control. Every little detail in the Bible is there for a reason.

But the reason for the bitumen is even more mind-boggling.

Bitumen is mentioned one other time in the whole of Scripture, in Exodus 2. It’s the material that’s used to keep the baby Moses’ basket waterproof. This is how God shows redemption in bitumen:

• Man used it to try to become like God.
• Man fell into it and suffered as a direct result.
• God took what we intended for evil, and used it for good.

God’s grace is phenomenal.

Jesus wept

I read a bit of a silly book recently. It suggested that because the whole of humanity fell in Adam’s sin, the whole of humanity also was raised in Jesus’ perfect life, death and resurrection.

Jesus Wept (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Sounds nice: no faith required, everyone ends up in glorified bodies for eternity…surely that’s good news?

Well, no. It might sound good, but it’s wrong.

Here’s why: Jesus wept over Jerusalem.

If everyone ever was going to be fine, why would Jesus weep? Why not laugh, thinking, ‘oh, they’re going to look back at themselves now and realise they got it wrong’…but he didn’t.

There is Good News, but it requires us to take action to spread that news!

Politics is hell

English: President George W. Bush applauds former Prime Minister Tony Blair after presenting him Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2009, with the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom during ceremonies in the East Room of the White House. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s pretty easy to moan about politicians, but Kevin DeYoung does a good job of showing us (a) why we should be grateful that’s them not us, and (b) why God’s grace is so incredible:

Imagine your life were an open book.

Every conversation recorded. Every errant word written down. Every gaffe broadcast before all.

What if everything you ever did was fair game?

What if every action and every decision were held up to the severest scrutiny?

What if all your last minute apologies failed to satisfy?

How would you feel to realize someone knew everything about your past? And someone was chronicling everything about your present?

How would you like to face a barrage of questions for every inconsistency in your life?

What a fearful proposition: anything you ever say or ever do can, and often will, be held against you. If an adversary so desired, he could paint an ugly picture of any of us. And without resorting to lies.

It’s a scary thought to think that your whole life could be an open book. With defenses that do not hold, and sorry’s that do not stick, and excuses which only make things worse.

That’s politics.

And that’s the day of judgment without the blood of Christ.

Great is the darkness

Darkness (Photo credit: Roberto F.)

Like it or not, some bits of the Bible are a bit mysterious. That’s not a problem but it does raise some interesting questions. Take this quote from Jesus, for example:

The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. (Matthew 6:22)

Part one: easy. Conclusion: make sure that what you’re looking at is good, because it affects everything about you. Look at the Bible and it will be good, look at naughty stuff, it won’t. And its effect will be bigger than you might think. Thanks for the heads up, Jesus.

If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Matthew 6:23)

Part two: what? The rhetorical question seems straightforward enough; if the light is darkness, how much darker must the darkness be…but there’s a little word in there that confuses things: ‘then’. Jesus doesn’t say: ‘the light in you is darkness, therefore how great is the darkness’, he links it as his conclusion from verse 22.

So my conclusion was: change what you’re looking at. Jesus’ conclusion was: darkness is awful, isn’t it?

Note: this is interesting. I know that what I think, say and do misses the mark, and my default reaction to that is: well, stop it. Do better. But Jesus’ reaction is revealing; he simply says, ‘Wow, you’re really messed up, aren’t you?’ He actually doesn’t seem to want us to try better but instead to realise that we are far worse than we think we are, because that’s when we realise how much we need the help of someone who doesn’t need to improve.

The Christian message is not one of ‘Behave yourself! Read your Bible more! Stop watching that stuff!’ but ‘Come as you are, the Father knows everything you’ve ever thought, said and done and still wants to welcome you into his house.’

That’s good news by the way.

This man receives tax collectors and sinners, and eats with them!

Just a thought…if a middle-aged, middle-class straight white male were to walk into a ‘typical’ British church the chances are he’d feel pretty normal.

But if Dizzee Rascal did, I imagine he’d feel a bit out of place.

As The Church, do we receive people in the same way as Jesus did, or do we judge people against some odd man-made standard?

I think I need more grace than I allow myself to think.

Do you believe in free will?

English: Worship being conducted at the International Church of God’s Grace, in Sao Paulo Português: Culto sendo ministrado na sede da Igreja Internacional da Graça de Deus, em São Paulo. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Most people, if they’ve heard the good news of Jesus properly, will question it by asking something along the lines of:

Wait one cotton pickin’ minute, does that mean I can keep on committing sin and God will still forgive me no matter what?

The answer given by most Christians would be something like:

Well yes that’s right, but if you’ve really understood God’s grace in forgiving you and giving you eternal life, then your actions should reflect your gratitude, so in practise you probably won’t keep on sinning.

It’s interesting, therefore, that the Bible answers this question a different way. Check it out:

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? (Romans 6:1-2)

Paul, who wrote this, chooses some interesting words. ‘By no means!’ On other occasions he asks himself a question and responds ‘Certainly not!’ but here he exclaims that it would be impossible for someone to continue in sin after having believed in God’s grace, and the following sentence explains it: Christians have died to sin.

That means that a Christian’s actions shouldn’t simply ‘reflect their gratitude’, but they should do good all the time as their immediate, instinctive and only actions. As Paul goes on to say, we used to be slaves to sin, but are now slaves to righteousness.

Here’s the challenge. It’s a biggy. If you were to give Paul’s answer in a conversation with a non-Christian, would they say ‘That sounds great!’ and immediately become a Christian, or ‘Well, your actions clearly show that isn’t true’?

Is it ok to say it’s ok?

A fighter attempts to escape from an armbar by slamming the opponent to the ground. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have a habit of making myself laugh. I think that it keeps me feeling young and vibrant, but Anna thinks it just makes me look like an idiot. I’ll let you keep your thoughts in your own head, thank you very much.

Anyway, the other day I didn’t see someone coming through the door behind me so almost let it slam right in their face. ‘Oops, I’m sorry,’ I said. They replied, ‘That’s ok.’

So as I approached the next door, I thought to myself that I ought to let that one slam them right in their face. They’d just said it was ok, so surely they wouldn’t mind, would they?

You’ll be glad to know I didn’t go through with it.

Of course, we say it’s ok when someone says they’re sorry more out of habit than anything else; more often than not it’s actually not ok, but we’re saying thanks to them for saying sorry.

A guy has passed on that his pastor told him that saying ‘I forgive you’ is better, because it reminds you of your sin, and reminds them that they’ve done something wrong and therefore should be sorry.

A good idea, but I’m not sure that work when someone squeezes through me to get out of the tube next week. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.