Day 032 - Exodus 1-4

Exodus follows on directly from the end of Genesis reminding us of where we're at in the development of the Israelite people. The story is a familiar one with many passages being Sunday School favourites, Moses in the bullrushes, the burning bush and God turning Moses' stick into a snake. The wider narrative was somewhat lost on me as a kid and it's was only later that I was able to see some of the bigger picture of what God was doing.

One of the interesting things that leaped out from this passage was the story of Moses' time in Midian. He meets his future wife and her sisters and through helping them effectively wins her hand in marriage. Given God's commands later on about not intermarrying it's somewhat strange that this first great leader of the Israelites was married to a foreigner albeit one who many generations back came from Abraham's family.

The passage that we never read as kids was the one where God comes to kill Moses and Zipporah his wife averts this by circumcising their son. My immediate thought when I read this was to wonder what God was up to, but then I remembered that the covenant of circumcision had been established with Abraham and Moses would have known about it. As I said before this book is a direct continuation of the previous one and just in case you thought God had changed or forgotten the past, this pops up to remind you that this is the same guy. It's also reassuring too because this means that the covenant promises that God made to Abraham are still in place.

Day 023-031 - The Rest of Job

It's been a while since I wrote on this blog and even now having finished Job I'm not going to write about each section. Job is a tricky book to read devotionally as it really needs good study to glean what is useful and what is not as most of the book is four fallible humans trying to figure stuff out. This leads to them misrepresenting God and he affirms this at the end of the book when he turns up. Often I'd read something from Job or one of friends and be impressed by the wisdom of it and then wonder whether it was in fact Godly wisdom. What we have in Job is a book that is the Biblical equivalent of a bunch of blokes talking in a pub and therefore a lot of nonsense is spouted on all sides.

What has struck me most through reading Job is the assumption of God in the midst of suffering which is a marked contrast to the way our modern western society views things. Suffering seems to be one of the main things that lead people to reject belief in God completely, the argument goes something like, "How can God exist if x, y and z are happening." Job and his friends on the other hand are quite happy with the fact of God's existence and couch their debate in terms of Job's perceived righteousness to try to explain why he is suffering.

In Romans 1 we read that:

"For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."

The Biblical picture is consistent with this and yet we now live in a world where this is denied by so many. The book of Job is therefore a refreshing antidote and a glimpse of a world where God is recognised if not always understood.