Today, I am reading and commenting on  Exodus 13-15.

I have a Youtube video of me reading the Scripture passage and my comments. Please check it out and let me know your thoughts.

It occurred to me yesterday that when we celebrate Communion, or Eucharist, or the Lord’s Supper (whichever term you prefer for this celebration of Christ’s sacrifice for our sins), we should also be remembering the things for which the Passover feast, also known as the Feast of Unleavened Bread, served as a reminder.  In today’s passage, God tells Moses that they should celebrate this feast as a remembrance that God brought the people of Israel out of Egypt with a strong hand.  The Feast of Unleavened Bread was intended to remind the Israelites of the Ten Plagues which God brought down on Egypt in order to compel the Egyptians to let them go free, culminating in the death of all of their firstborn sons.  However, it also commemorated the way in which God further used His strong arm to rescue them from Pharaoh’s army.  When we celebrate Communion (the term I grew up using) we should remember these as well.  The Eucharist is a celebration of Jesus sacrificing Himself as the ultimate Passover Lamb.  As such, we should remember the song which Moses and the people of Israel sang the morning after crossing the sea:
I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;
    the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.
 The Lord is my strength and my song,
    and he has become my salvation;
this is my God, and I will praise him,
    my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
 The Lord is a man of war;
    the Lord is his name.

The Lord is indeed my strength and my song and He has become my salvation.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Exodus 10-12.

I have a Youtube video of me reading the Scripture passage and my comments. Please check it out and let me know your thoughts.

During the earlier plagues the passages tell us either that Pharaoh hardened his heart, or that Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, but beginning today with the eighth plague it tells us that the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart.  Initially, Pharaoh chose not to accept what God put before him, or allowed other things convince him not to believe.  But eventually Pharaoh lost the ability to choose to avoid further suffering from the plagues.  In order to explain my point I need to go back to something I chose not to mention yesterday.  Each of the plagues was a “refutation” of the power of the gods of Egypt.  Each plague was demonstration that God has power over an area which was supposedly under the domain of one or more of the gods of Egypt.  So, when Pharaoh hardened his heart, or had his heart hardened, he was denying the evidence that the God of the Hebrews existed and was more powerful than the gods of Egypt.  In the same way you will see today people who argue against Christianity will present arguments for rejecting Christianity, but when one of their arguments is refuted will turn to another argument without acknowledging that their argument failed.  Eventually, they become emotionally invested in their arguments and unable to reason about them at all.  In this passage we see that Pharaoh became overcome by his anger such that he stopped thinking rationally.  The end result being that the Egyptians plundered themselves of great wealth to get the Israelites to leave.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Exodus 7-9.

I have a Youtube video of me reading the Scripture passage and my comments.

When Aaron’s staff turned into a serpent, Pharaoh’s advisor’s did the same thing to their staffs.  When Aaron stretched out his staff over the Nile and the water turned to blood, Pharaoh’s advisor’s also turned water to blood.  When Aaron stretched out his staff and summoned frogs come up and cover the land, Pharaoh’s advisors also summoned frogs.  When Aaron stretched out his staff and struck the ground bringing forth gnats to the point where everyone was covered with them, Pharaoh’s advisors were unable to duplicate his actions.  However, by that point Pharaoh had become so convinced that Aaron and Moses were tricksters that he was sure that what they were doing was just tricks his advisors did not know.  Pharaoh had failed to pay attention to the fact that from the beginning there was something different about what Moses and Aaron were doing.  When all of the staffs turned into serpents, Aaron’s staff swallowed up the staffs of Pharaoh’s advisors.  When Aaron turned the water in the Nile to blood, Pharaoh’s advisors did it on a smaller scale.  When Aaron and Pharaoh’s advisors summoned frogs, it wasn’t Pharaoh’s advisors who ended the infestation.  It was Moses asking God which ended the infestation of frogs.  So, even when Pharaoh’s advisors were able to duplicate the signs which Aaron performed on behalf of Moses, God demonstrated that there was something different about what He was doing.  In the same way, when God gives us signs today, they may appear to be coincidence, or something which could be attributable to something else, but if we look closely we will see that the staff displaying God’s will swallows up those which try to dismiss it.  The people of Egypt suffered a lot because Pharaoh refused to listen.

There is a second way in which Pharaoh and the people of Egypt suffered because Pharaoh refused to listen when God first spoke to him.  Initially, all God asked of Pharaoh was that he allow the people of Israel to take a short trip into the wilderness to make a sacrifice to Him, returning after they were done.  Now God knew that Pharaoh would refuse that offer, but He made it nonetheless.  My point being that if Pharaoh had been the sort to allow the Israelites to take a three day journey into the wilderness to make sacrifices to God, who was not part of the pantheon from which Pharaoh’s power derived, the Israelites would not have been slaves in Egypt.  Since Pharaoh was the sort of fellow he was, God used him to demonstrate His power to the Israelites so that they would become His people.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Exodus 4-6.

Today, I tried recording my reading of the passage before I began writing.  Previously, I had recorded my reading of the passage after I finished writing down my thoughts.  I decided to change it up because on several days I had additional thoughts about the passage while I was reading it with no time to put them into this.  Oh, I just realized that I had not announced on here that I have started recording my daily reading and thoughts and publishing those videos on Youtube.  So, feel free to check it out and tell me what you think.

This passage illustrates something which I heard a speaker say some years back, “If you think that you have the skills to accomplish the ministry to which God has called you, that is NOT the ministry to which God has called you.”  Moses felt like he was unqualified to do what God that to which God was calling him.  His attempts to convince God that he was the wrong person began in yesterday’s passage when he asked, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?”  In today’s passage, Moses brings objections to being the one to undertake this task for God.  First, he says that the people of Israel will not believe that God has sent him.  I am sure that he was harkening back to the Israelite who asked him, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us?”  In any case, God answered that objection by giving Moses signs which he was commanded to perform to illustrate to the people of Israel that God had sent him.  Then Moses brought out what he thought was the key objection to God sending him, his lack of public speaking ability, or even ability to speak eloquently one-on-one.  We often have similar objections when God calls us to a ministry.  Our objection being, “I don’t have the skills/gifts to do that.”  Here is God’s answer to Moses when he said that he did not have the oratorical skills necessary for the ministry to which God was calling him, “Who has made man’s mouth? …Is it not I, the Lord? Now there go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak!”  God did not call Moses to lead His people out of Israel because Moses had the skills to do that to which God was calling him.  God was going to give Moses the ability to do what He was calling him to do.  God called Moses in order to demonstrate His power to Pharaoh, and to the Israelites.  In the same way, God does not call us to a ministry, to a task, which WE can accomplish by our own ability and power.  He calls us to do things which will demonstrate His power to us and to those to whom He has sent us.

As a final note, after God dismissed Moses’ final objection, Moses said what was really bothering him.  He didn’t want to do it and asked God to send someone else.  This made God angry.  But I want to note something we often miss.  God was already sending Aaron to meet Moses.  God had already started Aaron on his way to meet with Moses (check the verb tense in chapter 4 verse 14, “Behold, he is coming out to meet you,…”).  So, when God calls us to a task, he will provide us with the support we need to accomplish the task.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Exodus 1-3.

I thought about writing about how the Egyptians enslaved the Israelites because they feared them and parallels with other instances of slavery in history.  Then I thought about writing about how Pharaoh’s daughter almost certainly knew that the wet nurse she hired for the baby whom she named Moses was his mother.  I thought about other themes as well, but then I came to the account about the burning bush.  The reason I decided to focus there is because it starts out in a way which follows on from what I wrote about yesterday.  The account begins by saying that the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a flame of fire.  Moses saw the bush burning, but not being consumed.  So he went to look closer, and when he did the passage tells us that God spoke to him.  So, is it an angel or is it God?  I know.  I already talked about this yesterday.  The word translated as angel in the Old Testament means messenger.  Once again, we have the messenger of God, who is God, appear.    In the New Testament, and, to a degree, later in the Old Testament, the Spirit of God often brings messages from God.  Further, the “angel of God” appears in a flame of fire.  This reminds me of Pentecost, where the Holy Spirit came down upon the disciples in tongues of fire.  I believe that that comparison is not an accident.  It seems to me that God purposefully used tongues of fire to remind His disciples of when He appeared to Moses.  So, what we have here is the Old Testament portraying the Holy Spirit.  The point I want to make is that the New Testament portrayal of God as a Trinity is not foreign to the Old Testament Scripture.  Even before the birth of Jesus, God’s people understood that there were different aspects to Him.  I will try to show how the prophets expanded on this as we go through the Bible this year (I will note that I have had similar ideas about a theme I would touch on throughout the year where God has had other ideas…or, perhaps I just lost focus).

I was going to stop there, but then I was struck by the way in which Moses asked, “Who am I, that I should go?”  In much the same way, Jesus’ disciples had to wonder who they were to be sent with God’s message of the new covenant.  They were not men of great learning.  They were not men with a gift for oratory.  They were not men of standing in their community.  But they WERE the men whom Jesus had chosen.  In the same way that Moses was the man God had chosen, in the same say that the people gathered in that place on Pentecost were the people God had chosen, we are the people God has chosen to speak His message.  I do not know to whom you have been called to speak, but I know that you have been called.  I do not know to whom I have been called to speak, but I know I have been called.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.