Tag Archives: Bible Study

Daily Bible Study

February 4, 2017 Bible Study — Serving The Lord, Even When We Suffer Loss

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

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

    Today’s passage begins with the deaths of two of Aaron’s sons, which must have happened shortly after their ordination because Moses had not yet finished giving the instructions regarding the priestly share of offerings. The part of this which strikes me the most is that Aaron and his two remaining sons were forbidden from showing their grief in public. Moses was even angry with them for not eating their share of the goat sin offering. They had a job to do as the intercessors between the people and God. They could not stop even though they had lost loved ones. In the same way, each one of us has a mission from God which we must perform even when we suffer loss. I want to be careful here, this does not mean that a pastor cannot take a day off when a loved one dies. It means that each and every one of us must continue to serve God and do His will, even when we lose a loved one or suffer some other loss.

Daily Bible Study

February 3, 2017 Bible Study –Ordaining the Priests

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Leviticus 8-9.

    Today’s passage describes the ordination of Aaron and his sons and the beginning of their ministry as priests. The ordination of Aaron and his sons involved a sin offering, a burnt offering, and an ordination offering. The ordination continued for seven days. It is not clear to me if the three offerings occurred on the first day, once each over the period of seven days, or once each on every day of the seven days. (The English translation supports any of these interpretations in my mind. Perhaps the Hebrew is clearer, but I suspect not.) In any case, on the eighth day, once the ordination was complete Aaron and his sons made another sin offering and burnt offering for themselves. Followed by a sin offering, burnt offering, and fellowship offering for the people. This was a complex ritual and my understanding is that something similar was followed every time a new priest was ordained (although I believe that they ordained priests in groups, just as they did here, in order to minimize this). It really makes me glad that we do not have to follow this today. On the other hand, it emphasizes the importance of making oneself right before God.

Daily Bible Study

February 2, 2017 Bible Study — Sinning Unintentionally Is Still Sinning

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Leviticus 5-7.

    Today’s passage continues the discussion about the types of offerings which the people of Israel were to offer and why. I am not very interested by the details regarding the offerings and the specifics of how they were to be made (despite the fact that I have heard and/or read several good messages about the lessons we can gain from those details). Nevertheless there are some things in this passage which are noteworthy. The first is right at the beginning. When authorities are investigating something we are obligated to tell them what we know about the situation. If we have information which will clear an individual, or information which will convict them, God instructs us to make that information known. God will hold us accountable if the innocent are punished, or the guilty go free because we did not speak up. I want to mention that this instruction is not limited to criminal cases but applies to any case where the authorities are seeking information (although I do not believe that it applies when the authorities are looking for information in order to commit an injustice).

    The other noteworthy item in this passage is that we can sin without being aware that we are doing so. The repeated references to unintentionally committing sin, or unknowingly committing sin tells us that just because we meant well does not mean that we will not be held accountable for our bad behavior. When we do wrong there are negative consequences even if we did not know we were doing wrong and even if we did not mean to do wrong.

Daily Bible Study

February 1, 2017 Bible Study — Offerings to the Lord

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Leviticus 1-4.

    Today’s passage describes four types of offerings which the people of Israel would sacrifice to God. Three of those four are animal offerings: burnt offering, fellowship offering, sin offering. This passage offers no explanation for why someone would offer a burnt offering instead of a fellowship offering, or vice versa. I am curious as to why the burnt offering, if it was not a bird, was to be a young bull or a young ram (either sheep or goat), while the fellowship offering could be either male or female(with no option for a bird of any kind). And then there is the sin offering for unintentional sin. The appropriate animal varied depending on who had sinned. Perhaps another time I will struggle my way through the significance of those differences.

Daily Bible Study

January 31, 2017 Bible Study — Setting Up the Tabernacle

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Exodus 39-40.

    Once all of the work on the Tabernacle, its furnishings, and the priestly outfits had been completed, Moses inspected them to see that they complied with the instructions he had received from God. Then Moses received specific instructions about the order for setting up and consecrating the Tabernacle and the priests (Aaron and hi sons). There is a distinct logic here. God instructs Moses to begin from the inside and work his way out. In the same way, as we strive to bring our lives in line with God’s will for us, we should start from the inside and work our way out.

    We need to allow the Holy Spirit to make changes to our heart (to our thoughts and attitudes), then allow those changes to be made manifest in our outward appearance and behavior. This is the opposite of what we too often encourage new believers to do. We ask them to change their outward appearance and behavior in the hope that it will make changes to their inward thoughts and attitudes. Change which reflects changes which God has made to our hearts, to our attitudes and beliefs, will show those around us God’s love in a way that a superficial change can never accomplish. It is too easy to change our outward behavior in a way that mimics godly behavior without actually changing our beliefs and attitudes. Unbelievers will quickly see through such a change and recognize us for the hypocrites we are.

Daily Bible Study

January 30, 2017 Bible Study — Building the Tabernacle

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Exodus 36-38.

    I am not sure why the Bible contains both the earlier description of the plans God gave Moses for building the Tabernacle and the somewhat more detailed description of what was actually built. I have never taken the time to compare the two in detail to see if there are elements of the plans which could have been interpreted differently when it came time to build, so it is possible that is the reason for the two descriptions. Every time I read this I am struck by the fact that the craftsmen who were building the Tabernacle had to ask Moses to tell the people to stop bringing donations of materials for the Tabernacle.

Daily Bible Study

January 29, 2017 Bible Study — God Will Personally Go With You

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Exodus 33-35.

    When After the incident with the golden calf, God instructed the people to stop wearing jewelry and fine clothes. As I read that I thought that it made a good point about how we should live our lives. I still do, but I am not sure how to put that point into words. The people of Israel accepted God’s judgment of their actions and changed their behavior to reflect their repentance. We should live our lives so that they reflect our repentance for our sins, reflect our desire to be different going forward.

    When Moses asked God whom He would send with them as He sent them to the Promised Land, God answered that He would personally go with Moses. To which Moses replied that God needed to personally go with the entire people. God acknowledged and accepted Moses’ clarification. I believe that God personally goes with each and everyone of us who has accepted Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. God looks favorably upon us and knows us by name. It is God’s personal presence with us which sets us apart as His people. Now, this should cause us to have great joy. However, it should also cause us to have great trepidation because it means that He is right there when we do wrong.
    I want to reiterate a little bit. We are not anonymous faces in the crowd. God knows who we are by name, more than that He knows us personally. So whatever we do impacts what God thinks of us. When we do something good, God is proud of us. When we do wrong, God is disappointed in us. I think we all know that someone who, when they notice us do something good, we get an extra warm feeling that makes us feel ten feet tall, and when they notice us do something of which they do not approve we shrink inside. That is how we should feel about God every moment of every day. He notices the good and the bad that we do.

Daily Bible Study

January 28, 2017 Bible Study –Why Did Aaron Choose a Calf?

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Exodus 30-32.

    The passage continues with further design instructions for the furnishings of the Tabernacle (including the recipe for the incense to be used and the anointing oil). Among those instructions is a tax to be levied whenever a census is taken of the men of Israel. I have heard some people state that failure to collect this tax was the sin which King David committed when he held his census. This tax was to be used for the care of the Tabernacle. It is my understanding that this passage was the basis for the Temple Tax mentioned in Matthew 17. What I find interesting about this passage is the combined facts that this tax was to pay for the upkeep of the Tabernacle, but no frequency was given for taking a census.

    There are a lot of elements to the story about the golden calf which Aaron had made which are worth some thought, but I want to take notice of the fact that Aaron chose a calf as the image of God. It was not a bull, nor was it a cow, it was a calf. It is worth noting that many years later when Jeroboam led the Northern Tribes in rebellion against Rehoboam, he set up two calf idols so that the people would not go to Jerusalem to worship. The Egyptians did not worship a god for which the representation was an idol in the form of a calf, nor did the peoples among whom the Israelites would later come to live. Many commentators I have read conflate the calf in this passage, and Jeroboam’s later ones, with the bulls representing gods worshiped by other peoples in the area. I think this is a mistake and that we can learn something about the early Israelite understanding of God from the fact that they represented Him with a calf from time to time (despite His explicit instructions to not represent Him with any physical object).

Daily Bible Study

January 27, 2017 Bible Study — Setting Aside The Priesthood

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Exodus 28-29.

    Today’s passage describes the outfits which were to be made for Aaron and his sons to wear as priests. These read as being as beautiful as the description of the Tabernacle (although, I think I would view them as a bit gaudy). They were designed to mark the priests as being different from the average people. I could be mistaken, but these articles of clothing strike me as being impractical to wear for anyone who was not a priest. Just like the Tabernacle (perhaps even more so), these clothes were designed with symbolism. There were multiple gemstones sewn into the garments designed to remind the priest, and the people, that the priest represented ALL of the people of Israel, not just some of them.

    Once the design of the priestly garments was fully described, instructions for their ordination and dedication as priests was given. The ordination procedure was designed to show that those who were called to be priests were ordinary men who needed to be set aside in order to fill the role of priest. They were not priests because they were better than other men. They were priests because God had chosen them, for reasons of His own. Before the ordination, they were nobody special. After the ordination, they were only special because God had set them aside for Himself. In the same way, we who follow Christ are not special because of anything about ourselves. Anything about us which is special is because God has set us apart as His. We have no way to know who else God will choose to set aside as His, so we should not think that what God has done makes us better than others.

Daily Bible Study

January 26, 2017 Bible Study — Using Beauty and Symbolism to Worship God

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Exodus 25-27.

    Today’s passage is a description of the plans for the Tabernacle and some of its furnishings. There are two elements to these plans. First, they describe something that would be beautiful and awe-inspiring. Second, they contain a lot of symbolism. The first part shows us that there is a place for creating a beautiful space for us to worship God. Beauty can help us to worship and admire the awesomeness of God. There is another aspect to this as well, making a place of beauty to worship God can be an act of worship in and of itself. This act of worship in building a place of worship was both in the giving of the materials and in using one’s skills.

    For me the symbolism is a little more difficult. When I look at the descriptions in this passage I can visualize how beautiful it would have all been. However, while I can see that there was symbolism in the instructions and the specifics of the design, I do not understand what that symbolism is. There is symbolism in the fact that the carrying poles for the Ark of the Covenant were never to be removed from the Ark, but I do not know what message that symbolism was supposed to convey. There is symbolism in the two cherubim who were part of, or attached to, the cover over the Ark. Again, I do not understand what that symbolism is, unless they are intended to symbolize witnesses to the covenant between God and the people of Israel, but I think there is more to it than that. The only part of the symbolism I do think I understand is that of the two stone tablets containing the terms of the covenant. They represent the conditions on the relationship between God and the people of Israel. In a similar manner, we need to put the Word of God in our hearts as our hearts play the role in the new covenant which the Ark played in the old.