125- 2 Chronicles 1 and my triumphant return

  Things have been very busy the last few months, with drastically, rapidly changing plans and developments in various ministries and what have you, but those are all stories for other blogs.  I'm going to try to get back into a regular posting schedule here and someday maybe even finish this giant book that's been keeping both my soul and my coffee table so stable all these years.

  There will be a few changes from the last round of posts though.  For starters, no more of this trying to post every day.  The reading schedule is doable, but trying to summarize and comment on another passage every day can quickly get really shallow or really sloppy, and sometimes both.  With everything else I'm working on, I think it will be very doable to shoot for one post per week, maybe two when I'm overcome with the spirit.
  Posting less often means that my system of numbering posts according to how many days it's been from the begining almost completely meaningless, so that's going to have to change.  Call me obsessive, but I just like it when things are numbered, so I'm still going to keep posting a number before each post, but they're not going to mean quite the same thing.  Actually I guess the only difference is that I'm just not going to write the word day in front of them anymore.  That should be pretty easy to get used to.


  In the first chapter of 2 Chronicles, David is dead and Solomon is the new king of Israel.  He goes to the tent of meeting and makes a huge sacrifice to the Lord.  When God appears to him that night and asks him what he wants, Solomon requests the knowledge and wisdom to  rule well.  God considers this a very classy request since Solomon could have used this opportunity to increase his own holdings, which is the sort of request we've seen from most people to date.  God grants Solomon's wish and also grants him all the riches and power that he could have asked for but didn't.  Afterword, Solomon had a lot of nice things imported from other places and the economy of Jerusalem thrived.

  This is more or less unrelated, but bear with me.  We always write the titles of books like 1 and 2 Kings and Chronicals and John and so forth with numerals in the titles, but when we say them out loud, we say first and second.  So how would these books be alphabetized?  Is 1 Kings under F or in that weird section off to the side where you find books that start with numbers and symbols?  Most lists of Bible books just omit the numbers and treat the sets as complete books just broken into parts, like the last two Harry Potter Movies, which I suppose is exactly what they are.  I suppose it doesn't matter much either way, but this is just a warm-up question anyway.  We'll get into some more controversial stuff later.  Promise.

A short break

  Obviously I haven't been updating this blog regularly.  I've had some other projects demanding my attention and I just am not able to maintain a regular posting schedule.  Even though this is supposed to run over the course of a year, I would like to simply pause for a while until I can get back on track and then pick up where I left off, starting 2 Chronicles.  Maybe in the fall.

Day 100 1 Kings 1-2

            David is really old now and one of his sons, Adonijah start setting himself up as the new king.  Once he hears about what’s happening though, David quickly makes his other son Solomon king before Adonijah gets back to Jerusalem.  That goes pretty well, with Adonijah stepping down and immediately recognizing his younger brother’s rule.  All he asks is that Solomon not kill him and Solomon says that he will be just fine as long as he’s a helpful part of the kingdom and doesn’t try to do sneaky political stuff.

            David dies around this time, but he gives Solomon some peculiar advise.  David’s rule was marked by astounding forgiveness and grace.  Every time something aweful happened, as soon as they got it sorted out, David’s men would want to go kill everyone who had stood against them and David would say something like “No way, we’ve won.  This is a time for celebration.” And let everyone go about their business for the most part.  Apparently he’s been taking good notes though because now he tells Solomon to start off his kingship by killing a bunch of these guys that David spared before.  All those times he swore not to kill somebody, he just filed it away so he could have his successor kill them decades later, which is kind of like what a sociopath would do.  David’s really old and near death now though so maybe he’s just getting jaded.

            Amidst Solomon having all these guys killed, Adonijah shows up again trying to marry the concubine assigned to keep David warm at night.  That’s not a euphemism, she was just supposed to lay down with him and keep the bed warm because he was too frail to keep himself warm anymore.  They never had sex so it isn’t taboo for David’s son to marry her, just a little bit weird.

            Solomon sees this as a political move though, which it probably was to be fair, and has Adonijah killed.

            This seems like a rocky start to Solomon’s rule, but I guess everyone knows he means business now.

            This is the 100^th passage which means I’m almost a third of the way through the Bible.  I had no idea what a commitment writing this was going to be, but I’m glad to have some accountability at least.  I don’t think I ever would have made it through Numbers if I didn’t feel obligated to post something about it online.  I’m feeling very thankful for those four or five guys in India, Russia and Washington who are regularly reading my entries.  Thanks guys.

Day 58 Deuteronomy 3-4

            The Israelites have been fighting different little kingdoms for over forty years now, but it’s always been merely for passage or in self-defense.  Now that they’re getting ready to move into Canaan and settle down, they’re fighting to take over land.

            Still east of the Jordan river, they defeat a series of semi-pronounceable kings and kingdoms and split the land up for the Gadites, Ruebenites and half tribe of Manasseh, because they all said they wanted the good pastureland here.  They’re told they may leave their women and livestock behind in their new cities, but their fighting men have to lead the attack once they get across the river into Canaan.

            Now, with that brief bit of action out of the way, the entire rest of this book is God telling the Israelites some last minute things in preparation for crossing the Jordan river.  First though Moses pleads with God to see the promised land.  Since God forbade Moses from entering himself after he got kind of uppity in the desert, kind of claiming responsibility for bringing forth water from a stone, Moses was hoping he might just climb up to a high place and at least see where the people were going.  That seemed to kind of irritate God, who did let him go, but only after commanding him not to speak of that matter any further.  Afterwards, God reiterated that Moses was not to cross the Jordan with the rest of the camp, but to commission Joshua as his successor.

            And speaking of God reiterating things, God, via Moses, sit the camp down to tell them they need to keep following the laws given to them after they settle down in Canaan.  The covenant is not over, it’s just getting started.  Follow the laws and teach them to your children.  It seems like the Israelites have been just barely able to keep the laws while they’ve have this big cookie hanging over their heads in the form of the promised land.  Once they actually get it, I have a suspicion they’re going to do even worse.

            I mean, I know they do eventually because I know that Canaan under Israelite rule gets conquered a bunch, by Alexander the great, the Romans, and even a few little local punks.  Even not knowing much about the history of early Israel though, I have a feeling their problems are going to start pretty much right away.

            The section headings in my Bible for the rest of this chapter run like so: Idolatry Forbidden, The Lord Is God, Cities of Refuge, Introduction to the Law.  I know Idolatry is a really big deal, but it’s interesting that that comes before the part about God being awesome.  I mean, I probably would have led with that, but I guess pedagogy was different back then than it is now.  Or maybe Moses just wasn’t working from an outline.

            The passage at 4:28-29 really speaks to me personally though.  Moses is still talking about the consequences of idolatry and he says “There you will worship man-made gods of wood and stone, which cannot see or hear or eat or smell.  But if from there you seek the Lord, you will find him if you look for him with all your heart and with all your soul.”  I have a habit, when I see some Buddhist kid, to think that, well, at least they’re thinking about spiritual things.  I feel like that’s better than a complacent agnostic and sometimes better even than a docile self-identifying Christian.  God says that even if we’re way off base, as long as we’re truly searching for the truth, we’ll find Him.  Speaking as someone who grew up as a Buddhist and eventually found my way to Christ, this promise carries a lot of weight for me since, without it, I probably wouldn’t be here writing this.  Now that’s not to say that we should be indulging every little existential foray that crosses anyone’s mind.  There’s a big fat difference between following Buddhism or Hinduism or Taoism or Islam because you’re searching for meaning in the universe, and following them because you want to piss of your parents.  And I think it’s okay to give someone some counterpoints to chew on when they’re saying something stupid.

            As a general rule though, I think some conflict is healthy and keeps us from getting too comfortable.  A famous Spanish priest Miguel de Unamuno said that “Faith without any doubt is a dead faith.”

Mind the gap

  Sorry for the big fat break in my updates.  My lady-friend and I had a pretty crazy week out of town, and now that we're back home our internet is down until, hopefully, tomorrow.  Once we're back online I'll start posting two a day until I'm caught back up again.  You don't want to read a week and a half worth of entries all at once and I don't want to post them, so that seems the best fix to me.
  Thanks for your patience.


  Interesting trivia: my stats seem to hold about the same whether I post or not.

One month check-in

  I've got to start writing shorter posts.  I'm already through most of the advance posts I wrote before I started and I need to stay at least a week a head before I go out of town at the end of February.  I got a gift card for some Google ads in January so I went ahead and made a couple.  They were under review for something like two weeks before anything actually went online, which is really weird.  According to the Google AdWords website it should only take a day or two.  Maybe they're extra careful when they see ads with religious content.
  I certainly would be.
  Since the ads went up though I've seen a huge spike in traffic.  I had basically given up on AdWords, but then a couple days ago I noticed that suddenly as many people had clicked through the blog in one night as had the entire previous lifetime of this project.  I'm certainly not going to keep putting ads up once it ceases to be free, but it looks like I'm getting myself a nice little reader base.  This is good news.  Hopefully I'll continue to see some regular traffic after the ads are gone.  Tell your friends.

  I seem to be getting a surprising amount of traffic from India.  I back-tracked some links to a blog about the aggression of Christian missionaries in India.  It seems to focus on rebroadcasting news items that expose people making a bad name for the Christian Church, of whom there never tends to be a shortage.
  I'm glad there's a connection between our sites though.  Obviously I don't agree with their view that Christianity is a cancer on the face of India, but I think that the best thing for Christians to do when faced with these opinions is not to yell and argue, but to simply do our best to not be assholes.  The mainstream media is great at giving a little slice of air time to every nut job who hates his neighbor and wants to try to legitimize his problems by calling them Christian values.  We can't compete with that.  If we model our lives off of Jesus's ministry then honestly, I don't think we should be trying to compete with it.
  "Love the Lord your God...Love you're neighbor as yourself.  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments" Mathew 22:37-40 Pardon the paraphrasing.

Site traffic and why I need to buy a calender

  I just had to go through and change a bunch of the dates on several of my last few posts.  Apparently I just can't keep track of what day it is so I got off track.  This is a bad sign.  It's still Janaury; the days in the titles of my posts still line up with the actual date.  I might be in trouble come July or August.
  I've been really bad about writing posts regularly too.  I started in December so I would have plenty of head start to keep posting one section every day.  By January 1st I had nearly a three week head start.  Now I have less than half that.  Things are coming around though.  I'm just working on slipping into a rhythm.

  Traffic is way up on the site.  I got a gift card in the mail for some free Google Ads so I set up an account with them.  My ads have been under review for several days though so I haven't seen any traffic from that.  I think maybe they get a little nervous about ads with religious claims in them.  I would.
  Even without them however, I usually get a couple unique hits per day, usually from one of the two sites that link to me.  I'm not connected to them at all, I think they just posted a couple random blogs.  One is a site about getting an online degree, possibly a scam, and the other is a pinging tool.  In any case, I've made $5.80 from Google ads on my blog, which means I'm officially a professional writer :)