I really enjoyed today's reading, perhaps because it was a sort of Biblical soap opera. You had Abrahm feeling sorry for himself and sorta complaining to God about not having any kids. SO his wife tells him to sleep with her MAID Hagar (and you can only imagine with a name like that what she looked like). When she found out she was preggers she got really super mad and left. But the Angel of the Lord found her (any time I read or hear about the Angel of the Lord I think about the children's book The Worst Christmas Pageant Ever, if you've never read it, you should. It is a GREAT book)......anyway the Angel talk her through it and told her to go back. The Angel told her to give him the name Ishmael.
Now let me say this, who wouldn't believe in God when you have him talking to you everyday. Sending angels down to help you work out your problems, telling you what to name your child. Of course they are faithful, and obedient.
Then God comes back down and tells Abrahm that if he is a good guy he will give him all of these great things. In return, he asks but one small thing, he asks that every man among him shall be circumcised??? Where did THAT come from, can you say RANDOM?!
God tell Abraham that Sarah shall also have a son, and Abraham laughs and laughs because he is 100 yrs old and Sarah is 90.....Sarah also laughs because they don't sleep together anymore. SO how could she get pregnant. To this He says "is there anything too hard or too wonderful for the Lord" I'm going to guess that this is a pretty important statement. I can see the importance but can't help wondering why then, innocent children must suffer. By suffer I mean the unimaginable suffering that goes on. If nothing is too hard for him then whats up with that. I understand free will, but I mean can't he step in when its really really bad?
....... low and behold they do and they name him Issac just as He told them to.
I'm not going to get much into Sodom because its such a common story. All I will say is there sure is a lot of sex going on in these chapters. I'm not sure if I see the connection clearly enough between whats going on in Sodom and gay sex. In all other part when they talk about sex they say "lay with" or "be with". in this story they say bring out the men so that we may "know" them.
However that's not the craziest thing that has happened to Lot. Not even seeing his wife turn into a pillar of salt for disobedience. No the craziest thing happens when he runs away with his two daughters to live in a cave.
The girls realize that because everyone died in Sodom, there are no men to continue their family with. The girls devise a plan to get their dad drunk and sleep with him?! Whatever! They both do it and both get pregnant, thanks be to God that they don't have to do it again. What does that make their kids? 1st cousin/brothers.
It was a wild and crazy ride today folks...From this I guess I see that sometimes you have to do some really wacky stuff to please the Lord.
1 comment:
Ok, I can see that Crystal is starting to love the drama; and there's a lot of it. God didn't always talk to these people in person, sometimes these "talks" happened while they were sleeping. But anywho, I agree we could probably convince a lot more people if He communicated the old fashioned way. Maybe it's just becuz we have such small faith nowadays. Maybe he gradually stopped doing that. I don't know. Even after He said he'd limit mankinds lifespan to 120 yrs. max. He did it gradually, not in one generation.
And depending on the translation, the "send them out so we can 'know' them" is have sex with, or know them intimately. Sort of where we got the word sodomy. Remember, homosexuality wasn't that uncommon in antiquity....i.e. Alexander the Great(homo).
I'm not sure why God chose circumcision as a sign of His covenant with Abraham, but I'm (and a lot of women) are sure glad He did; cuz it's kind of stuck around. Funny how a lot of Biblical traditions have. Coincidence or endurance of truth? Afterall, even when they compare the Dead Sea Scrolls with today's Bible, there's less than a 5% difference in the whole texts; and most is due to obvious misspellings and typos. No other text in history has been so enduring, impacting, or copied so accurately as the Bible. No one disputes that, not even the atheists.
Lastly, as a point of interest in today's world. This is where the Bible (and Torah) and the Koran begin to diverge. The Koran says that Ishmael was the son of Abraham's "main" wife, and that he was blessed, not Isaac. Crazy how they know they're both from Abraham, but hate each other so much now.
Last year on the Discovery Channel they reported that archeologists had just found an area where the Bible said Sodom and Gomorrah were that had clear signs of (not only salt, but) large sulphur type deposits, which is what the Bible describes rained down from the heavens destroying that entire valley. Although they mentioned the Biblical version, they attempted to explain it away by attributing it to a meteor or volcano or something. Again, it's odd how everytime they find some kind of archeological stuff it supports the Bible.
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