Happy New Year 2012!

What do you mean, I'm late? We're only like 4% of the way through the year! It's still new!

And it's that time of year again. The time of year again when blogs contain things like this and this... posts about ways to start a Bible reading plan and stick to it. I've done the same myself from time to time, and we've even got some Bible reading plans available at ScriptureMenu.com if you want to get your toes wet. It's the time of year for "resolutions," and judging from the number of weight loss/dieting/exercise/stop smoking ads I've been getting in my mailbox and seeing on TV, resolutions are still alive and well.

If you've been following this blog for a while, you will know that I'm on an on-again, off-again quest to read all the way through the Bible. In fact, I am planning to do it all in one year. That year is 2010, so I am officially starting my third year of  my one-year Bible reading plan. I faltered a little bit that year when we had some family situations that basically disrupted our lives for several months; at the end of the year I renewed my commitment to keep at it. And I did keep at it... for a while, at least! I wound up getting stuck at the end of the book of Jeremiah, not because Jeremiah was a particularly hard book, but because this summer we moved to a new town and I ran into an intense spot at work that often left me drained at the end of the day. To make things worse, the new place is a bit smaller (we'll be moving into a bigger house soon), which means it's a little bit harder to get away from the racket of having a 4-year-old and an 11-year-old in the house. Basically, it got hard, so I never officially "quit" reading, but I sort of just didn't continue reading consistently.

You know what? I can see the effect that it had on me when I was reading consistently, and I can see that it's not there now. I'm convinced: just reading the Bible consistently really does change you for the better. It's not just something that the Bible publishers say to get you to buy Bibles, and it's not just what your pastor says because it's his job; it's a reality. And listen, this blog is certainly not my job. I don't get any dollars or brownie points for saying this. It's the honest truth.

My good friend Justine blogged a few weeks ago about her failure to follow her Bible reading plan last year to the letter (or the number... make sure you check out her post if you're a math nerd like she is!) But actually, she didn't call her experience a failure, and I don't either. Time in the Word is never a failure, even if it's not as much time as you had planned. I don't really do the "resolution" thing, but now is as good a time as any to get back on the horse and ride... so last night I opened my Study Bibles back up to where I left off.

Lamentations.

I almost laughed when I realized I was picking up at maybe the least popular book in the whole Bible! I mean, even Leviticus isn't as not-popular as Lamentations. At least Leviticus is part of the Pentateuch, and everybody loves Genesis and Exodus. I wasn't afraid of Lamentations, but I wasn't particularly looking forward to it, either. I didn't have any feelings either way when I opened it up.

What I found when I read chapter one of Lamentations was a beautiful, vivid poem about how much sadness there is when God's people have ignored His instructions and leaped (not fallen) time and again into sin. I had read the story in the Historical books, and I read read the warnings in the Major Prophets, and this was the aftermath. I kept thinking about how sometimes I'll tell my kids, "You need to stop doing that or else I'm going to have to punish you," and then they keep doing it and keep doing it, and finally I know that if I don't punish them, I'm going to lose their respect as an authority figure who they need to obey. I've given them the rule, I've outlined the consequences, and I've even given them mercy a time or two, but they've proved that they have an unrepentant heart, and they've brought consequences on themselves.

That's what happened to the Israelites, and that's what I read in the first chapter of Lamentations. I stopped after one chapter; this year, because my study environment is still not particularly conducive to long periods of study, I'm not going to push myself. If I get a nice quiet block of time to read, that's wonderful, but I'm happy with as little as one chapter a day if that's all I can get. I'm going to try to be diligent to get that chapter in. One chapter a day won't take me to the end of the Bible by the end of the year, I don't think (I haven't crunched the numbers), but it will get me on track again. Some days I expect to get in more chapters anyway, so I may yet make it by the end of this year. But 2012 or not, I'll make it eventually. And I know that even a little bit of the Word most every day will make a difference.

Read it! You'll be glad you did!

Cover Versions

In 1983, I sat in a movie theater and wondered something. I looked at the space station on the screen and wondered why the Empire would think that their design was so great that, even though the Rebellion had destroyed the first version, they should try to build another one. Didn't they have any other ideas? Didn't the guy who wrote the story have any other ideas?

I wonder how many times "Big Yellow Taxi" has been recorded. Never mind, Google, don't tell me... I don't want to know. I'm afraid I can't count that high! I personally can think of at least three or four versions off the top of my head, and I know there have got to be dozens more. What about "Heard It Through The Grapevine"? Of course, everybody knows the old Gladys Knight version and the CCR version, but what about the California Raisins' version? What about that one, huh? Hey, what about "Knockin' On Heavens Door?" Bob Dylan, Guns 'N' Roses, and tons more. A few months ago I learned to my surprise that Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" was a rework of an older song by Big Mama Thornton. When someone else records an already-recorded song, the new recording is called a "cover" of the original. Often, these are not very different from the original versions. But sometimes they become more well-known than the originals (like "Hound Dog"), and sometimes both the original and the cover become ridiculously well-known (like "With A Little Help From My Friends", which was originally recorded by The Beatles and then covered with a completely different arrangement at Woodstock by Joe Cocker). Sometimes an artist even reworks his own song (Eric Clapton's two radically different takes on "Layla"). We just finished watching a movie whose soundtrack, for no apparent reason, consisted largely of cover versions of Beatles songs. Too strange.

I never realized how many cover songs there are in the Bible until I got into my "read the Bible in a year" project this year. Psalm 53, for example, is a revision of Psalm 14. The Psalm that David sang in 2 Samuel 22 is presented in a slightly modified form in Psalm 18. The song in 1 Chronicles 16:8–36 is reworked from pieces of Psalm 105, Psalm 96, and Psalm 106. And Psalm 136 has the earmarks of being a heavily reworked version of Psalm 135. There are many other examples of repetition of individual verses or verse clusters in the Psalms.

There are lots of Death Star-style examples of narrative being repeated, too. Take The Ten Commandments, for example: they appear in Exodus 20, and they appear again in Deuteronomy 5. Of course, a lot of the book of Deuteronomy is a repetition of material from Leviticus. Most of 1 and 2 Chronicles is derived from 1 and 2 Kings, and anyone who has spent any amount of time in the Gospels knows that some of the stories about Jesus appear as many as four times, once in each Gospel account. In a few spots in the Bible, whole passages are repeated: take, for example, 2 Kings 18-20 and Isaiah 36-38.

Why all the repetition? There's no one answer for all of the examples. I've been learning some of the reasons, though; Deuteronomy repeats Leviticus to teach a new generation of Israelites about God's law. The Chronicles are a retelling of the Kings for a different audience: the books of Kings were written before Israel had been taken into captivity in Babylon, and the Chronicles were written after they had returned. Some of the Psalms seem to have been repeated because different versions were intended for different uses. But it's fun to think that maybe years after Psalm 14 was written, some guy picked up his psaltery and recorded his cover version, which hit the charts as Psalm 53. Hey, why not? And if the writer of 1 Chronicles can piece together several existing Psalms to create a new one, then it's OK for me to use Bible language and thoughts in my own songs.

Pentateuch

Last night my Read the Bible in a Year reading took me through the last chapters of Deuteronomy, which means that for the first time in my life, I have now read all the way straight through the first five books of the Bible! I can't say there was anything there that I wasn't aware of already... decades of reading the books in pieces and sitting through church services and Sunday school classes took care of that... but I can say I did take away some valuable things from the experience.

• I gained an understanding of and new appreciation for the structure and artistry of the Pentateuch. I already knew that the first five books of the Bible were considered sort of a unit or collection, and I already knew that scholars generally consider them to have been written almost entirely by Moses (it's unlikely, for example, that Moses penned the sentence "So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord", but he probably wrote almost all of the rest of it!), but I never understood just how important the five books are to each other. Basically, they are the story of the birth of the nation of Israel; all five of them relate to that.
  
  Genesis is like a prequel; it tells not only how humans got here in the first place, but why a "set apart" nation was required (rampant sin which kept messing everything up), how that nation got started (one guy, Abram/Abraham, who trusted God), and how they wound up in Egypt in slavery when God had promised them their own land (the story of Joseph).
  
  Exodus is where the rubber meets the road; Moses is born in the initial chapters (I learned something quite interesting when reading this part!) and we see the new displaced nation of Israel, born in slavery (just like every member of the human race is born in slavery) freed from bondage to Egypt and released by God to travel to their own country. It's an epic story that has inspired people throughout history. It is also the book where Moses first finds out how to build the tent version of the Tabernacle, which later was built in a permanent form as the Jerusalem Temple.
  
  Leviticus is where God first gives the new nation of Israel the bulk of its laws. The Ten Commandments have already been given for the first time in Exodus 20, but the bulk of the laws about sacrifices, feasts, and basic human conduct are given here. This makes for dry reading at times, but it is critical to the overall story.
  
  Numbers starts out with a census right after Israel leaves Egypt, tells the story of how they did not make it into the Promised Land because they did not trust God, tells us about their wandering in the wilderness, and ends with another census, right before the second generation enters the Promised Land. A perfect demonstration of how distrusting what God says, what His Word says, can leave you spinning your wheels for a lifetime.
  
  Deuteronomy is largely Moses' final address of Israel before he dies and they enter the Promised Land without him (I had some interesting thoughts about this part, too). Interestingly, a big hunk of what Moses told them was the same laws that were already detailed in Leviticus! Some of them have a slightly different nuance in this version, but it's a lot of the same stuff. Lesson learned: we need to hear God's Word over and over, and each generation needs to hear from God for themselves.
  
  
• I gained a much greater respect for the person Moses. I don't think I ever truly grasped how amazing a man he really was. How would you like to try to lead two million griping, complaining people around a desert for forty years? The guy must have been made of some good stuff! He has got to be one of the most influential figures in history; the laws he received from God and recorded, and his story, are known just about everywhere, because he somehow made the time, in the middle of leading all of those people, to write the whole thing down. Amazing!
  
  
• I learned how important these five books are to Jewish culture. Almost everything they did and still do from a ceremonial standpoint comes from these books. The major festivals, the sacrifices, even the construction of the temple and their eventual geographical locations within the Promised Land all comes back to these books. Without them, the Old Testament doesn't even make sense. With them, sometimes you understand things in the Old Testament that didn't make sense before... an easy example would be that until you understand the Mosaic laws they were operating under, the situation between Ruth and Boaz in the book of Ruth doesn't make any sense. I ran across several moments like that during my read-through. For example, Gideon sending home men in his army who were afraid makes a lot more sense when you realize that God had codified this as standard practice in the book of Deuteronomy.
  
  
• I realized how important the Pentateuch is to the New Testament. If you know your New Testament well (or if you have a good commentary or study Bible) you will recognize many, many times where the Pentateuch is quoted in the New Testament. In particular I was struck with how many times Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy, but there are references to it all over the New Testament, and I'm not only talking about the obvious ones like the discussion about Abraham in Romans 4. These five books form the bedrock of the Jewish religion, and thus of Christianity as well.

I was actually quite surprised at how much I got out of reading the Pentateuch. I learned, I was often entertained - sometimes even laughing out loud at the funny parts - and yes, occasionally I came across parts that left me collossally bored. Would I recommend reading this to any adult Christian? Yes. There are some parts that are frankly a little bit racy for very young children (!), but Christians need to have the knowledge they can gain from these books. If you don't have a good commentary or reference book or software, may I recommend the ESV Study Bible? It can help you get through the weird parts, and it will help you spot things that you might not notice on your own. You can get a pretty good deal on one at ChristianBook.com, or check at your favorite Bible store.

I wouldn't trade this trip through the Bible for anything!

Angel Visitations

I was reading the first chapter of Luke in a sample of The ESV Study Bible that I picked up at Mardel this weekend, and I noticed something that I hadn't noticed before. Zechariah and Mary both had visitations from an angel with very similar circumstances surrounding it, but their reactions and the result were quite different:

Both were visited by the angel Gabriel.
Both were "troubled" by the visitation, but while Zecharaiah was fearful, Mary sought understanding (although it could be argued that Mary was afraid also.)
Gabriel told them not to be afraid.
Gabriel told them they would "bear a son, and you shall call his name..."
Those sons would "be great" and do amazing things.
Zechariah responded by asking for a sign (which he then received, to his chagrin). On the other hand, Mary asked for details of what would happen, but then she accepted the Lord's assignment without resistance.

Why was a priest surprised by or afraid of an angel appearing in the temple where the Presence of God was expected to be, when a little girl in her house seemed to take the appearance of the same angel almost as a matter of course? Maybe Zechariah was thinking about how priests could face death for entering God's presence unworthily (although he was not actually in the "Holy Place inside the veil" but on the other side of the veil where incense was burned) and that sometimes angels were sent to kill people. Why was the priest struck mute (and probably deaf as well) for asking for a sign? Maybe it's because he doubted the clear word of the Lord ("How shall I know this?" Because GOD said it, fool! Don't you see the angel??) Mary did not doubt, but did ask for clarification. Even then, she did not demand an answer, although she did receive one.

People in ministry are sometimes held to higher standards by God than the rank and file, and that may have been part of it, but I think Zechariah reacted to the word of the Lord in fear and doubt, while Mary reacted in submission. I think that's why Zechariah spent the next nine months in silence, while Mary got to spend it glorifying God!