Tag Archives: Christianity

Daily Bible Study

March 15, 2021 Bible Study There Is Still Work To Be Done Serving God, Sometimes Even At 85

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Today, I am reading and commenting on  Joshua 12-14.

Having conquered the largest military forces in the land, Joshua began the process of allocating the land to the various tribes. God reminded him to include the land which He had promised to Israel which they had yet to conquer in the allotments being given out.  I believe this was included here as a reminder to those reading the passage that just because great men of God such as Joshua have passed on that does not mean there is not more work to be done serving God.  It also provides a transition to tell the story about Caleb claiming his share of the land.

One thing I find interesting is the contrast between God telling Joshua at the beginning of Chapter 13 “You are now very old,” and Caleb declaring that at eighty-five years of age he was just as strong as when he spied out the land over 40 years earlier.  Everything we read about Joshua and Caleb suggests that they wee contemporaries.  Yet Joshua was ready to wind down his life while Caleb was ready for another round of the fight.  Let us learn from Joshua and Caleb.  They were the same age, but neither felt obligated to live their life according to what the other felt up for.  No matter what your age, live your life according the what God has planned for you.

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

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March 14, 2021 Bible Study

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Today, I am reading and commenting on  Joshua 10-11.

The Israelites only entered into an alliance with the Gibeonites because of deception on the part of the Gibeonites.  Nevertheless, when the Gibeonites were attacked and called on the Israelites for aid, the Israelite army conducted a forced march at night to relieve the siege on Gibeon.  The Israelites honored their commitment even though they were tricked into making that commitment.  Joshua could have just marched the army to Gibeon at normal pace.  He did not have to rush to their defense with a forced march.  The Israelites gained advantages because they did so, but there were great risks.  If the Gibeonite messengers who brought word of the attack had understated the size of the attacking army, or made any of numerous other misrepresentations of the situation, Joshua could have found his army in a vulnerable situation when they arrived tired after a night’s forced march with an enemy who was fresh.

When I read this passage I always feel a little bad for the five kings who hid in a cave.  It sounds very scary to experience what they experienced, and it is.  However, my sympathy for them diminished this year as I read it and pictured the stories of Sadam Hussein’s capture after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.  If you do not remember, he was on the run for s few weeks after the fall of his government until he was pulled from a hole in the ground where he was hiding.  I will not go into a lot of details, but the reason he was hiding in a non-descript hole was because he had terrorized his people for many years while he was in power.  That meant that there was no one he could trust once he was removed from power.  It seems to me that perhaps these five kings were in a similar situation.

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

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March 13, 2021 Bible Study Forgetting To Ask God For Guidance

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

Following their victory over Jericho the Israelites became cocky.  As described in yesterday’s passage, they scouted out the city of Ai and initially sent a small force to conquer it.  Then in today’s passage, emissaries from the Gibeonites came to them to make a treaty. The Israelites interrogated the emissaries and carefully examined their equipment and supplies.  They reached the conclusion that the Gibeonites were from a distant land and swore oaths with them.  While their failure in the first assault against Ai was complicated by the sin of Achan, in both cases the leaders made the same mistake.  They acted upon their own judgement without first consulting God.  They felt that the circumstances were such that they did not need to consult God.  They knew His will and thought they knew the facts that applied.  In both cases they had done their due diligence and thought that was sufficient.  Consulting God is not a substitute for doing our due diligence, but we should ask God for His guidance as we do our due diligence.

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

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March 12, 2021 Bible Study The Mystery Of The Battle Of Jericho

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

The beginning of this passage describes an event which I have trouble understanding: Joshua had all of the men who had been born since the Israelites left Egypt circumcised because none of them had been circumcised while the Israelites were in the wilderness.  When I first read and comprehended this I went “Huh, what?” I still do not understand what to make of that.

Then we come to the story of the Battle of Jericho.  I was hoping that having spotted in the story of Rahab and the spies that there was something more than we normally talk about in that story that I would see something today that completed the thought.  Unfortunately, I did not.  Actually, that is not quite true.  The account tells us that the wall of Jericho collapsed so that the Israelite army could just rush straight in from wherever they were.  BUT, we were also told that Rahab’s house was part of the wall of Jericho.  And Rahab and her family were sheltering in her house, along with possibly others, the passage tells us that the spies went in and brought Rahab, her father and mother, her brothers and sisters, and everyone who belonged to her (we don’t really know what was meant by “everyone who belonged to her”).  Yet, I still do not have a clear understanding of what happened here.  I think there is another clue in what happened with Achan keeping some of the plunder for himself.  Not enough that we can really figure it out, but a clue nonetheless.  There is really some other important lessons to be taken from these stories, but this mystery caught my attention.

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

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March 11, 2021 Bible Study Be Strong And Courageous

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

The passage begins with God’s message to Joshua as he took over leadership upon Moses’ death.  Three times God tells Joshua to be strong and courageous.  After the final time, God also tells him not to be afraid or discouraged.  We should take this message to heart.  Just as God promised to be with Joshua, He has promised to be with us.  If we keep God’s Word in our hearts and meditate on it day and night, we will have confidence that God is with us.  God’s message was not just for Joshua.  He tells us also to be strong and courageous.  God will be with us, so we need not be afraid or discouraged.  As long as we follow God’s direction, whatever we do will be successful.  Maybe not the way we define success, but God’s purpose will be served, even if that which we thought was the end goal does not come to be.

The passage continues with the story of Rahab and the spies in Jericho.  Most of the time we focus on how Rahab was promised that she and her family would be protected from the destruction about to be visited on Jericho, or on how Rahab is one of King David’s ancestors.  Those are both great examples of how an outsider was welcomed in among God’s people through their faith.  However, my attention was caught by something today.  The spies insisted that their oath of protection to Rahab was only binding if she did not tell anyone what they were doing.  In the past, I always read that as not revealing them so that they could escape.  But that makes no sense, if they failed to escape, they could not pass the word to the Israelite army to not harm Rahab or her family.  So, that cannot be what they meant.  Clearly, the spies had either done something, or discovered something, which would allow the Israelites to conquer Jericho more easily.  Which suggests that Rahab’s cooperation was about more than gaining protection from the inevitable fall of Jericho, that perhaps Rahab preferred to become a foreigner among the Israelites to remaining a prostitute among her own people.

 

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

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March 10, 2021 Bible Study Vengeance Belongs To God, He Will Repay

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Today, I am reading and commenting on  Deuteronomy 32-34.

In order to understand the beginning of today’s passage we need to go back and read the last two verses of chapter 31:

“For I know that after my death you are sure to become utterly corrupt and to turn from the way I have commanded you. In days to come, disaster will fall on you because you will do evil in the sight of the Lord and arouse his anger by what your hands have made. And Moses recited the words of this song from beginning to end in the hearing of the whole assembly of Israel:”

With this introduction, we see that Moses is warning about what happens when people turn away from God.  While Moses’ song here applies mostly to the Jewish people and makes sense of their history, it has application to all people who have come to know Him.  We learn here that God has not allowed, and will not allow, the Jewish people to be wiped out because He will not allow His enemies to believe that they have done it.  The continued existence of the Jewish people is a reminder to the world that the troubles they face result  from God’s punishment upon them.  However, for those who think that statement justifies antisemitism, Moses warns us that God will avenge His people against those who persecute them.

Perhaps that is the most important thing for us to take out of this passage.  Vengeance belongs to God.  It is His prerogative to avenge those who have been wronged.  He will repay.  When we have been wronged, or think we have been wronged, let us not seek vengeance ourselves.  Let us leave that to God.  There are two reasons we should do so.  First, God claims vengeance as His alone.  We do not have the right to seek our own vengeance.  Second, God’s justice always fits the crime in full. We cannot hope to obtain revenge as fitting as that which God will inflict.

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

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March 9, 2021 Bible Study Knowing God’s Commands Does Not Require Great Effort On Our Part

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Today, I am reading and commenting on  Deuteronomy 29-31.

Moses told the Israelites that the command he was giving them in his final address to them was not too difficult for them, and the commands which God has given us are not too difficult for us.  We do not need to commission someone to go to some far away place which requires special skills to get there.  God has placed His word in our hearts and in our minds. I was going to go a different direction with this, but as I typed that I was reminded of two stories I read many years ago.  The first was about a man in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.  He was placed in a “re-education camp” by his government and tortured in many ways because he was more educated than they wished him to be.  He was constantly bombarded with ideas promoting how wonderful the government which was torturing him was.  He desperately desired  reading material, but it was denied to him.  He cried out to God for something (although as I recall the story he did not know God) to read.  One of his tortures was to be required to clean out the latrines by hand.  While cleaning the latrines, he found pages which his captors had torn from a book and used as toilet paper.  He carefully cleaned those pages and read them, hiding them in his cell.  Those pages had been torn from a Bible and provided him hope and inspiration.  If I remember the story correctly, it was in this way that he became a Christian.

The other story was about a group of anthropologists who went to the most remote part of the world they could imagine to record a society “uncorrupted” by Western Civilization.  They went to a remote spot in the jungles of Burma, which  had no recorded contact with civilization. The people there spoke a language which the anthropologists did not understand.  While there they recorded the songs sung by these people.  Upon their return, they spoke of their experiences among these people and played their recordings.  Imagine their surprise when the listening audience called in and said they knew the songs being sung.  They were old hymns they remembered from their childhood.  It turns out that in 1949-50 a group of missionaries in China had fled across the border into Burma.  Those missionaries died there in remote Burma, but not before planting the Gospel among this remote tribe.

The point of both of these stories is that God is not remote from us, those who seek Him will find Him., even those who do not know Who it is that they seek.  We do not need to go to some remote part of the world to find God’s will for us, but if we do go there, we will find God is already there waiting for us.

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

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March 8, 2021 Bible Study Blessings For Those Who Obey God, Curses For Those Who Rebel

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Today, I am reading and commenting on  Deuteronomy 27-28.

This passage contains blessings and curses for the people of Israel: blessings if they obey the Laws God gave them through Moses, curses if they do not.  While I believe the specific blessings and curses contained in this passage specifically apply to the Israelites, I believe the general principle of them applies to all people.  If we follow God’s commands and desires, we will be blessed.  If we violate God’s commands and desires, we will be cursed.  Moses instructed the people to divide into two parts, one half of the people to stand on Mt Gerizim to pronounce the blessings, one half to stand on Mt Ebal to pronounce the curses.  The purpose of this exercise was to reinforce the laws to the people and to give them a feeling of unity.  If you have ever been part of a large group which has done such a responsive reading you will understand how powerful such a thing is.

I really get two things out of this passage.  First, the closer a society keeps God’s commands, the more powerful and wealthy they will be.  To me this means that the majority holds to values which reflect God’s will (even when many of those people may not actually worship God) and that those who rebel against God’s will are ostracized to one degree or another, such that they hide their rebellion from general knowledge.  On the other hand, a society which openly embraces rebelling against God will become progressively weaker and poorer and will experience ever increasing suffering.  To the greatest extent I believe this results from natural forces.  I also believe that if we as individuals follow God’s will, we will be blessed, although not necessarily in ways which the world at large will recognize.

Every time I write about a passage like this, I come away feeling like I have failed to adequately communicate what it says to me.  Today is no different.

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

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March 7, 2021 Bible Study Be Willing To “Leave Money On The Table”

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Today, I am reading and commenting on  Deuteronomy 24-26.

There are a lot of miscellaneous laws given in today’s passage which are not exactly connected.  However, many of them do contain a common theme: do not take advantage of the poor, needy, foreigner, orphan. or widow.  Some of these laws go further than that by instructing us to have business practices which leave room for the above to provide for themselves.  Things like, do not take someone’s tools as a pledge against a loan (if you do, how are they going to make the money to pay you back?).  Things like, do not enter your poor neighbor’s house to collect his pledge against a loan, wait for him to bring it out to you.  Things like, if you miss some of the crops in your first pass of harvesting, don’t go back to get them, leave them for those less fortunate than yourself.

From the different commands contained in this passage, I think we can extend the principles involved.  If you own a business, don’t milk it for every penny you can make.  Leave “money on the table”.  The principles of God’s Laws says that if you follow them, society will be better off, and you will be better off.

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

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March 6, 2021 Bible Study God Demands That We Respect Human Life

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Today, I am reading and commenting on  Deuteronomy 21-23.

The first portion of this passage makes an assumption which we easily overlook.  It assumes that only a murder committed in the countryside would remain unsolved.  It also indicates that the elders of a town would seek to solve any murders within their area of authority.  It makes me wonder if the first sign of the downfall of a society comes when they start having large numbers of unsolved, unpunished murders.  As I read through the laws which Moses gave to the people of Israel I see respect for human life emphasized.  When a society becomes complacent about identifying and punishing those who have murdered another human being that society is losing the respect for human life which God demands.  Most, if not all, sins result from failing to respect the lives of those around us, of beginning to consider other people as mere objects whose purpose is to give us pleasure.

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