Friday, March 1, 2013

The Bible Challenge: Day 60

The scriptures read are Numbers 30-32, Psalm 50, and Luke 8.

Numbers 30. Women can get out of a vow made to God. That's one way to look at it.

Numbers 31. The war on the Midianites. Much of it is about dividing up the booty. Pretty horrific. It's important to realize that this does not apply to anything outside of theocratic Bronze Age Israel.

Numbers 32. 2 tribes want to settle in the land on their side of the Jordan. Moses says, "That's not fair. Your fellow Israelites will be dying conquering the Promised land and you'll be chilling here.God's not gonna like that." But they promise to fight with all the other tribes, provided they can leave their wives and kids in Gilead. Moses says if they do that, it's cool.

Psalm 50. This psalm gets to the heart of the matter. It corrects a mistake easy to make reading Leviticus and Numbers, that God needs the sacrifices. He's interested in people living righteously. Especially highlighted are sins of the tongue.

Luke 8. This is, I believe, the earliest Mary of Magdala shows up in any of the gospels. Usually she doesn't get mentioned until the resurrection. We meet some other ladies who financially support Jesus' ministry.

The parable of the sower. Or more to the point, the parable of the different soils. Which are you?

Jesus calms the sea and heals the madman in the cemetery. On the way to heal a little girl, a sick woman  touches the edge of Jesus' cloak and is healed. She doesn't want to tell him because she just made Jesus technically ritually unclean. Jesus is pleased at people who boldly trust him.

The girl is dead but not to Jesus' mind. He raises her up. And tells her folks to give her something to eat, already!

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