Author: Bryan Richardson

Re: Verse reading–Genesis 46-50 (day three)
“Israel reached out his right hand and put it on Ephraim’s head, though he was the younger.”  Over Joseph’s protestations, Israel went against the custom of his people.  He had not forgotten his own deceptively-obtained blessing of the firstborn.  That deception had come with a high price: Life on the lam, a wife he was deceived into marrying, family turmoil, and the terror of encountering his older brother many years later.  Yet God shaped Israel into the father of twelve tribes as he wrestled with God through that turmoil.  As Israel crossed his hands to break with custom, he did so as one who had come to know something true about life.  Israel knew that custom gives order and place to a people, but wisdom, which comes from God, sees a future that custom cannot.

Re: Verse reading–Numbers 13:1-2, 17-33; Joshua 14:6-10 (day three)
“You know what the Lord said to Moses the man of God at Kadesh Barnea about you and me.”  It only takes one moment of clarity to save your life.  When something true gets revealed, and you pay attention to that revelation, and you believe it, nothing will ever rob you of hope.  Not forty-five years of wandering, not growing old, not enemies.  And these things will surely present themselves, and they will threaten you, and they will show you no mercy.  The revelation you once heard–that no one who hopes in the Lord will ever be put to shame, the promise that no one but the Lord will ever make to you, that revelation–will save your life, too, if you pay attention to it, and believe it.

Re: Verse reading–Genesis 41:25-57, 45:4-8 (day two)
“It was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you.” Was everything that unfolded between Joseph and his brothers merely a divine drama, a providential play? If “all the men and women [are] merely players”, where’s the realness of life? Lest we think that Joseph’s life with his brothers functioned as a cosmic end justifying cosmic means, we would do well to consider this: The Joseph story isn’t a nation rescue protocol with a plotline attached to give it pizzazz. No. It’s all real, not a front for a hidden agenda. The cruelty of the brothers wasn’t some strange way of doing God’s will. Cruelty is cruelty, and evil is evil. But God is stronger. Even in impossible circumstances. The story doesn’t get told in order to make the point. The story is the point.

Re: Verse reading–Ruth 1-4 (day three)
“And they named him Obed.  He was the father of Jesse, the father of David.”  If you reckon that a matter will end the way it began, you will be far more than disappointed; you will be correct.  You will stop working for what could be if you’ve already resigned yourself to the way things are.  When you begin to understand that the universe doesn’t run on a clock but instead on a mind, you will seek to think God’s thoughts after him.  It is arrogance that says things can only proceed the way they first appear.  It is hope that says with God, all things are possible.

RE Verse reading–1 Samuel 1:1-20 (day three)
“I will give him to the Lord for all the days of his life.” Reading this story through present-dayeyes will invite us to interpret Hannah’s grief through our current sensibilities: Babies give us the status of mommy-hood and daddy-hood that we highly value; babies give us an opportunity to breathe into them our own sense of how the world ought to be; the way we raise babies establishes our “brand identity” among our peer group. Such values, though, are part of a shift in modern thinking about families in our society—a shift that sees children as a statement we make to the world about ourselves.  We would do well to learn from Hannah: She desired that her son live as the Lord’s statement to the world about the Lord himself.

Re: Verse reading–Genesis 24 (day three)
“He will send his angel before you so that you can get a wife for my son from there.”  Too a great degree, “romance” is a modern notion which sees desire as the component of humanity which must be satisfied–else marriage, employment, or life in general leave a person “unfulfilled.”  Whatever their flaws–and they had them–Abraham, Isaac, the servant, Rebekah, and her father Bethuel understood the concept of a people.  They knew much more rested on this impending marriage than the couple’s happiness.  They were building families, a people, and a nation in the midst of a hostile world whose only light was the Lord.  Personal desire was simply too untrustworthy to pilot such a large enterprise.  When a society knows that, its best days lie ahead.

Re: Verse reading–Genesis 37-39 (day three)
“When he told [the dream] to his brothers, they hated him all the more.”  It’s easy to expect too much of Joseph.  He is, after all, in the Bible.  But here, he is a seventeen-year-old kid.  To be foolish and seventeen is not the same as to be foolish and thirty.  Life’s hostilities can set the stage for the transformation of the heart.  It doesn’t always happen that way, but in Joseph’s story, we see that not all is lost when dreams fade.  If God shows a little bit of what the future could hold, he also stands ready to help the heart do the hard work of growing to make that dream a reality.  As Joseph discovered, paying attention to the life that is will help get a long-neglected dream ready for the real world.

Re: Verse reading–Judges 16:4-30 (day three)
“She prodded him day after day until he was sick to death of it.”  At some point, Samson began to cherish his own desire above all else.  He knew what was right.  He understood the parameters of human interaction.  He comprehended that God had called him to champion Israel.  But none of that shaped his character.  Something else received his allegiance: desire.  Samson’s life gives us a picture of a life shaped by desire: He wanted food, and he flouted ritual dietary law to obtain it; he wanted sex, and no parental authority or moral code stood in his way; he was “sick to death” of conflict, and no trust proved too sacred to violate.  Woody Allen once observed: “The heart wants what it wants.”  When that becomes the extent of the heart’s moral reasoning, it never, ever, ever finds what it wants.

Re: Verse reading–Daniel 1 (day three)
“[Daniel] asked the chief official for permission not to defile himself this way.”  The scriptures tell us that “Daniel resolved not to defile himself.”  As undesirable as the circumstances appeared to Daniel, his first inclination was not to rail against his surroundings, but to please the Lord within his surroundings.  There was a voice in Daniel’s life–from the Lord, from his upbringing, from wise counsel, from somewhere–that expressed this thought to him: “You’re here; what are you going to do about it?”  It’s the same thing Paul knew later on: “I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well-fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.”  Early on, Daniel, like Paul after him, decided that his priority, wherever he found himself, was to live with God.  Here.  Now.  Security followed.