Genesis 26-30

Ok again I had to find a visual because of all this reproducing that's going on.

I am so excited to be closing in on Joesph and his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I've heard: It was red and yellow and green and brown , and black and ochre and peach And ruby and olive and violet and fawn And lilac and gold and chocolate and mauve And cream and crimson and silver and rose And azure and lemon and russet and grey And purple and white and pink and orange.....AND BLUE!

so sorry for the brief lapse into my world of show tunes.

..................and now ladies and gentlemen my very serious and mature discussion of my Bible readings for today.

I think today's theme is deceit. Everybody's deceiving everybody in these chapters.

It all starts with Issac and the old "she's my wife not my sister" bit again. No ones seems to tire of this gag. The problem with it is, they seem to be assuming the worst of these people. Once they find out that the woman is indeed a wife and not a sister they usually say something like, "Man! Why didn't you JUST tell us that! Had we slept with her, we'd be in a heap of trouble!"

Issac moves around and digs some wells, and names some wells. Until one night God speaks to him and there Issac builds an altar, sets up his tent and digs a well. In that order which I see is important. Thanks to the Lord, home, then work.

and so the drama begins.

Apparently Issac, who is blind at this point, loves his smooth son Esau more than his hairy son Jacob. (and rightly so, some might say)

He asks his eel of a son to go hunting and once he's killed something, cook it the way he likes and bring it to him. When he does that he shall bless him.

Now Issac's wife Rebekah, favors the hairy beast of a son, Jacob?

She want him to get the blessing. So she devises a plan to trick the blind Issac into blessing Jacob. Jacob tells her that hes worried Issac will feel his hairiness and call him out as a cheat and impostor.

I feel like Jacob doesn't really want to do this but does as his mothers says.

The plan works and Jacob receives the blessing. We learn in a bit that it worked too. He has a butt load of sons.

But just as all plans which involve deceit, it sort of falls apart at the end. Esau brings his meat and when Issac realizes what he's done he tells Esau basically "I'm sorry, I've given my one blessing to your brother and now you must serve him"

Thus begins a feud among brothers. Rebekah (who actually caused all the problems, in my opinion) told Jacob to leave until his brother calmed down.

And now we get into Jacob. I just THOUGHT we had seen the worst with Abe and his maids and such. Jacob's sexcapaids make Abraham look like a monk.

In choosing a wife, I think Jacob is involved in a "what goes around, comes around" sort of thing. He is now the one who's deceived.

He works for seven years in order to get his wife Rachel and the very night he is to have her, her dad sends her older, duller sister in to sleep with Jacob. Thus, he is blindly deceived just as his father was. Now he's got this dull gal Leah and he has to work sever more years for Rachel, the one he truly loves.

So begins the great baby wars.

Leah is poppin boys out left and right. The Lord has made Rachel barren to make up for Leah's embarrassment of not being good enough. Therefore, Rachel has Jacob sleep with the maid, then Leah is barren and she has him sleep with her maid, then Rachel can have babies and FINALLY the star of one of my favorite shows is born.....JOSEPH.

After the love-fest something very strange happens that I did not understand at all and shall call on my my trusted friend Jamie for explanation. I didn't understand the division of animals and the rods of the trees and the wells??

I realize that I'm writing with a lot of humor, its something I can't help, it's how I see most things. However, I am reading seriously and thinking about it everyday. I feel like I may need to read it again, once I'm through. This first time I'm just so into the drama of it. I just so good, I get really into the stories....I guess what I'm saying is I hope I'm not disappointing you.

Genesis 1-9

To be honest I have read Genesis before. I've always been curious about religion. I live in the South, its all around. After a while you begin to think "what are the chances that ALL of these people have it wrong, and I have it right!" So from time to time, I have delved into the spiritual pool and taken a brief lap or two.


Every once in awhile I may need to explain a term or an argument or discussion that Jamie and I have coined. Such as "surface thinker" He had me read the book "Understanding the Times" (look it up for further explanation).


The first big issue the two of us tackled was moral relativism, be it time, place, or culture.


My argument being: right or wrong is relative to these things.


His argument being: right or wrong is not relative to anything.


In reading this book I found that his argument was right, which I sooo hate. I told him, when reading that book "I felt like I was trying to sink while wearing a life vest"


"Do you understand that?" I asked.


"Not really, please explain" he responded.


I said that when I try really, really hard to understand the argument in the book against things like moral relativism, I can "see" it. However, my mind wants to float back up to the ideas I've had in my mind for years.


Hence the term "surface thinking" came into our vernacular.


He will often say to me "you are surface thinking again" many times I dispute him, lots of times I agree and rethink my argument.


Surface thinking is simply much easier. It IS a life vest.


I tell you all of that so that I can say this, I will try not to surface think through my Bible readings. What I imagine is that, in the beginning, it will be difficult to sink into it with my life vest on. What I hope is that, as I read, the life vest will slowly become non-existent.


Genesis......Great creation story. Beautifully written. Entertaining. Similar to many, many creation stories I have read before. I have always heard that Christianity borrowed many things from the Pagans, as a way to baby step people into it. I imagine this is where many of these ideas came from.


Adam, Eve, the fruit, Eden


Basically God says:


I give you all of this, everything you could want. Ignorance is bliss, is the saying that comes to mind when I think of Adam and Eve. They should have been blissfully happy living in all their nakedness, there in paradise. But they weren't, at least Eve wasn't.


...and through this story we learn "temptation is bad".


But what I don't understand is, is He saying knowledge is bad?


He didn't want them to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, because in eating from this tree, they would then know good from evil. Why didn't he want them to know the difference between good and evil? What was the benefit of having these two people as basically blind fools alone on this Earth?


And more importantly....what if they had not eaten the fruit (and they never say apple, because they sew fig leaves together to cover themselves, why don't we assume it was a fig?)


How would mankind be different without original sin?


Then we get to dear Noah.


From Noah do we learn that God makes mistakes? Did I read that correctly? He regretted making man and putting him on Earth. To correct his mistake he planned on flooding the Earth and killing every single living thing on it. Everything that is except Noah, his fam and all the animals two by two...



Don't we all know this story? No need to get into this story is there?



The thing I did not know is that Noah was and old guy, and by old I mean he was like more than 500 when he started the ark. Did men live that long then, or were birthdays counted differently? Whats up with that?



Anyway I did find a little comfort in the fact God did say he would never do that whole thing again.



From Noah I think we are to be taught to listen to your intuition, God may not speak to us as he did to Noah. But don't most of us know when God is speaking to us. If we slow down every once in a while, we can hear the whisper, or maybe we can feel the tug. What our gut is telling us may not make sense, like Jamie and I, for example, but it may be part of something bigger.



Now I have to go and spell check this thing like 3 or 4 times!