THIS WEEK’S READINGS

Jan 25: Gen 38-40
Jan 26: Gen 41-42
Jan 27: Gen 43-45
Jan 28: Gen 46-47
Jan 29: Gen 48-50
Jan 30: Ex 1-3
Jan 31: Ex 4-6
Feb 1: Ex 7-9

NOTES ON GENESIS 38-50

·         My advice if you fall behind more than a few days in your Bible reading: do NOT try to catch up.  Instead, just skip what you missed and make a note of it.  Read what you missed when you have some time.  Pick up with the current reading.  If you keep thinking you’ll “catch up,” you may get further behind and give up all together.

·         This week’s reading offers some of my favorite parts of the Bible – the end of Genesis and beginning of Exodus.  What incredible, faith-building, life-challenging stories!

·         The end of Genesis offers compelling emotion.  Weep with Joseph in chapter 45 as he reveals himself to his brothers and then assures them, “God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.  So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God.”

·         But it’s one thing to be nice to the brothers who had hated him and sold him – when their father was alive.  They were terrified when Jacob died, but Joseph once again displays his faith and his willingness to forgive in chapter 50.

·         With the end of Joseph’s story, we’re to the end of the beginning – that’s what “Genesis” means.  What significant themes have you noticed in the beginning of the story about how God deals with people?

NOTES ON EXODUS 1-6

·         Hundreds of years (200-400, depending on who you read) have passed from the close of Genesis to the beginning of Exodus.  The story has moved from a high (the rise of Joseph and the preservation from the famine) to a low (slavery and infanticide) for the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Things are very bleak.

·         Exodus 3-4 are among my favorite chapters in all the Bible.  Look for Moses’ five “excuses.”

·         We tend to assume that when things start to look up, there will be a steady improvement.  Not so.  Things for the children of Israel get worse before they get better.  Moses alone has to hang in there, doing what he didn’t want to do in the first place, answering the first of many complaints and challenges to his leadership.

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHTS

Exodus 4 offers one of the strangest twists in any biblical story.  God has just convinced a reluctant Moses that he is to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt.  Moses has unknowingly spent 80 years of life being prepared by God for this moment – 40 years in Pharaoh’s palace and 40 more in the desert.  All of that would be practical if not essential for Moses as he led  the exodus itself and the years of wandering in the desert.  It is hard to imagine another person could ever replace Moses.

Yet God meets Moses on his way from the desert back to Egypt and “was about to kill him.”  Read between the lines, and you find out why.  Circumcision had been commanded by God from the time of Abraham, and Moses knew that well.  But his wife, a non-Jew, had resisted circumcising her sons.  I would guess Moses and Zipporah had argued repeatedly and heatedly over the matter.

But God was not about to send Moses into the most critical role of leadership in Jewish history without obedience on such an important matter. 

A prominent role among God’s people raises the standard.  Those who seek to lead should expect to be held to higher standards – no excuses.  There is always grace, and restoration may be possible – but leaders should anticipate scrutiny by others and especially by God.  How many times have we heard stories of leaders who believe they are somehow less responsible for being, as the Scouts say, “morally straight”?

The Christian life is not a cafeteria line where we pick and choose areas of faithfulness.  Nor is it like grading on the curve, where all we need is to score better than most.  Every believer, but especially those entrusted with responsibility, should seek to obey God fully as best we understand his standards.