PSA Bible Reading Challenge 2023-2024

You can’t really understand what is happening here in Deuteronomy without at least a map to track all the people that the Israelites slaughtered.  Remember, that when it speaks about Mount  Hermon it is located in the northernmost portion of the map, so right up above to where the kingdom of Bashan is located.  I hope that as you read these accounts you are able to track and trace where the  Israelites under Moses are going. 

Notice that Moses went as far as the Jabbok River, or the Jabbok crossing and from there had to stop for the Lord promised that Joshua would enter no matter how much Moses beseeched the Lord to be able to cross over, he did not allow him.  That Jabbok river crossing we went to and we find that it is the actual border between Jordan and Israel.  This year, unlike past years, the Jordan was flooded and was quite wide at that point, where in past years it would take not much to cross, just a few strides.  

I love the detail of the iron bed of King Og which must have been quite a site.  The bed according to the measurements given was 13 feet long and close to 6 feet wide.  Now that is quite a bed!

As I walked by the welcome desk one of you who was following the 90 Day Challenge said to me: “Boy, there sure is a lot of killing in the Bible.”  I responded: “Good thing Jesus came along.”  There is a lot of killing in the Bible including as vs. 34 states: “we utterly destroyed men, women and children.  We left not a single survivor.”  This is incredibly thorough and a very tough read.

So when I hear that Islam is a religion of violence and that Muslims only have one purpose and that is to hurt and kill and take over, I have to pause and ask: “Have you read Deuteronomy lately?”  Our own Scripture contains passages that are really hard to read.  So how do we come to terms with this?  As I said before: “Good thing Jesus came along.”  Jesus showed us a new way of life which is counter-intuitive and counter-cultural.  We are to turn the other cheek.  We are to give our jacket to the one who is looking to rob us.  We are to return good for evil.  Not exactly the words of a politician, but very much the words of a Savior.

I found it interesting that the first few places God told Moses: “Do not attack these people, don’t take  their land.”  That is until he gets to the Amorites when he allows Moses to battle with them and take their land.  But then one of the people that Moses was going to pass by, didn’t let him pass by, so Moses had to destroy them with the Lord’s approval.  I have a feeling this is going to be a long book of the Bible to get through.  

Welcome to  Deuteronomy.  We begin the book of Deuteronomy with Moses who gives an account of what has already taken place in Exodus.  There is a common  misconception that Moses was  the author of the first five books of the Bible, what we call the Pentateuch.  The first verse of Deuteronomy tells us that these are the words of Moses.  He picks the story up about the Israelites from the time that the people asked for leaders who could decide disputes among them.  We find in Exodus that it was Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro, who made the suggestion, but here Moses gives credit to the people for coming up with that idea.  You can see that scene play itself out in Exodus 18.

Moses also retells the story of how they sent spies into the land and they came back with stories of plenty, but the people were terrified of the “giants” who lived in the land.  As a result they refused to follow God’s command to go into the land and take it over.  So God punished them and only chose Joshua, all the children, and Caleb who was faithful to the Lord, to be the ones to enter the promised land after 40 years.  

It is interesting how in this account Moses is depicted as being punished not for his own sin, a sin which he did commit as we find in Numbers 20:9-13 where God tells Moses that he will not bring the people into the land because he embellished the commands of the Lord.  Moses here in Deuteronomy presents himself as a bit of a martyr who is being punished as a direct result of the sins of Israel, not his own.  You see in vs.37 where Moses after recounting the sins of the people of Israel says: “even with me the Lord was angry”.  Basically, on account of your sin, I somehow inherited your sin and I was punished by osmosis.  Okay, those are my words, but that is pretty much what he said.  

Dear FPC family and friends,

So we begin again another 90 Day Challenge as we find ourselves smack dab in the middle of Easter season.  It may not seem like a time to launch ourselves into some of the historical books of the Bible as well as a few minor prophets, but that is exactly what we are doing next.  Over this study we will be seeing the books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges,  and the prophets Joel, Nahum, Habakkuk, and Haggai.  Each one takes place in a specific time and place and so some history will be needed to supplement the readings.

My prayer is that Scripture will come alive for us as Jesus is alive and resurrected.  While the person of Jesus may seem very far removed from a Joel, you will find in this prophet a call that one day our sons and our daughters will be filled with the Holy Spirit.  This harbinger of Pentecost will bring us to today where we see the Holy Spirit alive and well  in the church.

I pray that you will be enriched by your time in Scripture and that it will edify your walk with our resurrected Jesus.

Your servant in Christ,

Pastor Bob

Israel Day 9

“לשנה הבאה בירושלים”

“Next year Jerusalem!

Day 8.  Last Day in Israel and What a Day it was.  

Hezekiah’s tunnel.  

701 BC.  Having 20 years earlier overrun and ended the Northern Kingdom of Israel forever, Sennacherib, King of Assyria, now threatened Judah’s existence.   In order to survive a siege, King Hezekiah had to plan for a reliable water supply.  So he had an underground aqueduct built a quarter mile long and our group walked through it to the pool of Siloam (John 9)! Pretty cool. . . And wet!

The Western Wall (wailing wall) 

We joined other pilgrims from around the world praying at this 2000 plus year old foundation of the Jerusalem temple. This writer wrote prayers for his wife, each of his children, their spouses,  their children, prayed those prayers, then left those written prayers in the wall, following that up with prayers for others.  It was a special and powerful experience leaving that wall with the deep sense that God is answering those prayers.   It was emotional for each of us to realize that the Lord of the universe notices and cares about and acts on behalf of each of us in the most personal of ways. 

A Road that Jesus walked!

Of all the sights we visited there was one where archaeologists are 100 percent certain that Jesus walked and we walked there.  Almost too big to take in.   

The Garden Tomb

Visited one of the two possible sites of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial.  An Iraqi Jewish Christian woman was our guide and she could not have explained the Gospel, (God’s coming to earth to die for our sins because we are incapable of ridding ourselves of them) any more clearly!

Right after that we had communion.  

Think about that for a moment.  For most of us American citizenship is about our promise to remain loyal to America, expressed in the Pledge of Allegiance.  For a Christian, citizenship in the Kingdom of God is about God’s commitment to us as expressed in bread and wine symbolizing God’s giving his life for us.   Now what Kingdom that ever existed on planet earth has ever had a king like that?  God in Jesus is a King who has won the loyalty of his followers not by the sword but by a cross. 

We watched a shepherd herd his sheep in the same shepherd field where King David tended sheep as a boy, just outside of Bethlehem.   That may be the same field where the shepherds would have heard the birth of Jesus announced.  Like wow!

Viewed the wall between Muslim Bethlehem and outer Jerusalem, site of the Intifada in 2000.   We must pray for “the peace of Jerusalem”

The Valley of Ellah 

This is where 11 year old David jumped to the front of the line and said I’ll go.  He ran down to the creek, got 5 smooth stones and did what he had practiced since he was 5. He used his sling to fell the Philistine’s chosen fighter, a man named Goliath.  Each of us is bringing a stone home from that same stream home with us, reminding us that none of us is exempt from the call of God, nor are we incapable of answering that when we simply say yes and trust God enough to go. 

Day 7. Talk About Intense!

The Temple Mount ! 
It is controlled by the Palestinian Authority with a huge Mosque and Giant Muslim Shrine of Gold on it!   Herod’s temple was twice as high as the Dome. Incredible!

Before Jesus showed up, individual people were valued only insofar as they were of value to the rich and powerful.  Think of all the miserable slave labor that went into Herod’s ego building.  The poor were nobodies. But Jesus introduced something completely new . . . . the intrinsic value of every person regardless of status, race, and ethnicity.  He “named” people by noticing them.  A paralytic, a blind man, a rich tax collector, an ostracized woman, the list goes on! Like wow!  That was brand new on scene of humanity on earth and it endures today as not only a Christian value but a western one as well. 

The Via Delarosa:  the path Jesus walked carrying at least part of the cross on which he would be crucified. It was a long walk! Jesus had chutzpah, guts, courage. It must have been beyond brutal.  As we walked where he walked, at least approximately, we were bombarded by bling, clothes, trinkets, souvenirs, soooo much stuff.  Trying to feel, think about, experience, contemplate God Himself, about to be crucified for us one minute while the next minute wondering what kind of gift to buy for a family member was awful.  But maybe it wasn’t.  Maybe that picture is exactly the picture we need to see. It is the picture of a humanity distracted by the idols of materialism which have enchanted and enslaved us, an enslavement that can only be broken by the agony of the cross.  

Church of the Holy Sepulcher:   Built at the instruction of Emperor Constantine’s mom in the 4th century right over top of both Golgotha and Jesus’ Burial tomb (exact locations are educated guesses). Some of us touched the stone on which Jesus may have been prepped for burial.  Sometimes acts of veneration can be spiritually legit without being idolatrous

Many groups sang from the altar of a 12th century church built by the crusaders we sang “lord prepare me to be a sanctuary”.  Other songs in many languages. Chills! Together yet-separate.  A Christian enclave in the midst of Muslim territory, real cool. 

Yad Vashem.  Isaiah 56:5. The Holocaust Museum. A magnificent attempt to remember every name of every one of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis.   Let no one ever fall victim to the sanctimony that allows one to think that one is not capable, in some way, shape or form, of the same horror that the Nazis perpetrated.  Mother Theresa said, “There’s a little Hitler in each of us”.  G.K. Chesterton in response to a newspaper asking what’s wrong with the world answered, “Dear Sirs, I am”.  The Christian who can give the same answer to the same question has come far in the a Christian life.  It’s the answer that explains the cross.  It’s the answer that elevates forgiveness as the Christian response to conflict, it’s the response that cuts through the death dealing pride that says I could never have been one of those Nazis.  Vad Yashem is more than Isaiah 56:5. It’s a monument to humanity’s incapacity to rescue ourselves. 

Revenge,retaliation, and violence, humanity’s default reactions to wrongs never bring peace.  I liked a quote from inside the museum that read,”Better to save a Jew than to kill a German”. It’s not all the way there, but it’s a start.

We were set loose in the Old City of Jerusalem for 2.5 hours today, and one of my wanderings took me to a Coptic Church. It was incredible to recognize Kyrie Elaison sung in an unfamiliar tune. The Church of Saint Helen is situated over an enormous cistern of water. The spot was marked in 329 AD (according to a Spanish guide I overheard). While I didn’t take pictures because a service was in progress, I found a picture of the sanctuary online. It was humbling to worship with other Christians who use unfamiliar traditions and read scripture in an unknown language, but praise the same God.

DAY 6. Judea.

God Forsaken. 

Those are the first words that came to my mind this morning as we entered the Judean wilderness/desert. 

We traveled south along the western shore of the Dead Sea and, wow, is that sea and its surroundings dead or what!   It’s barren!  Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness were no picnic!  

Why would God chose this place to be a homeland for his chosen people?  If this writer were God he would choose Fiji to form a chosen people. 

Masada. Oh my Gosh!  Please google what happened there in 70-72 AD.   It was horrific. Too unthinkable to contemplate.  Masada is the symbol of Jewish resilience.  It’s their cry, “Never again!”  The IDF trains there.  Air Force jets tip their wings to it!   Jewish resilience bolstered by God’s covenant mean’s Israel ain’t going away!

En Gedi.   A spring and small oasis in the Judan desert, complete with ibex!  David hid here from paranoid Saul!   More of the Bible becoming real!  If you’re a leader don’t be paranoid.  It looks really, really bad.

Swimming in the already dead but still dying Dead Sea!

As this writer was floating (impossible to sink in this Sea) on this gigantic lake he looked west to the mountains of Moab (enemies of the Israelites thousands of years ago & still today as property of Jordan), then to the south and west only to see desolate wasteland.  But then, looking north, the reminder came  that this water was once living water (meaning fresh and running and alive) flowing from snow on Mt Herman in the far north.  It is that living water which feeds the Sea of Galilee, which in turn becomes the Jordan river. It is that water where miracles happened, baptisms took place, across which the Israelites marched into the promised land and more!  And it ends up no longer living water but dead and lifeless in the Dead Sea

So there we all were, paradoxically being buoyed, being borne, by that from which no man can live.  The thought then came that this is indeed how God works perhaps even most of the time.  A believer is so frequently buoyed, borne by God’s Spirit, carried even in the deadest of life conditions, even carried BY those horrific life conditions when God uses those conditions for our good in ways that we could never hope nor imagine.  

No, this land is not God forsaken.  It’s rough, hard and not always amenable to life, but it’s not God forsaken.  It’s God Chosen, God inhabited, and God Blessed.  

Maybe it’s a reminder to each of us that God is sustaining the very places where we sometimes feel forsaken.  Maybe you sometimes feel like your life is like a big, salty, dead, cold, muddy lake, located at lowest point on planet earth but something’s keeping you afloat.  If you find yourself thanking that Something, God Himself, for his Grace when Grace is nigh impossible to see, then you have come far in the Christian life.

This is from Ursula Rice…

Quote of the day: “super chutzpah”