Day 3 Bible Reading

Genesis 5 & 6, Matthew 3, Psalm 3

Genesis 5: 28-29 (ESV)

“When Lamech had lived 182 years, he fathered a son and called his name Noah, saying, “Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.””

This passage from Genesis 5 stood out to me today because I think it means that God will use ordinary people to do his work. Noah came from cursed ground. He wasn’t great or special in any way. In Genesis 6, all we know of Noah is “was a righteous man, blameless in his generation”. He followed God’s law, but he was a sinner like anyone else. Lamech was also prophesying when he said Noah will bring relief from the painful toil of our hands. The toil of our hands I believe is referring to sin. God chose Noah and he made a covenant with Noah to protect him and his family from the flood waters. The arc that Noah built I think can also be seen as a symbol for the coming of Jesus Christ. Christ will be the one to save us from our sins, protecting us from the flood of the sins that have the ability to destroy not only our world but our life itself.

 Day 2 Bible Reading – Getting Caught Up

Genesis 3 and 4, Matthew 2, Psalm 2

Genesis 3: 1 (ESV)

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?””

This first line from Genesis 3 struck me. I have read this line many times but after watching a commentary on YouTube on Genesis 3, I now see this line as the beginning of sin. And how does sin begin? Sin begins with doubt. Doubt that what God has told is true. I reflected back on my life when I started down a dark path, and I believe it did start with doubt. I doubted whether my life was on track, whether I was doing the right thing in my life, doubt about everything and anything in my life. And when the seed of doubt is planted in your mind and you don’t put a stop to it, it grows. Doubt becomes like a rabbit hole that you fall down into, and it’s dark and disorienting. You become like Alice falling into Wonderland. You start to question everything and if you go too far, you must fight your way back to the light. I really need to read Alice in Wonderland and compare it to Genesis 3. I bet I’ll be able to find many similarities between how the Serpent framed his argument to Eve to eat the apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good an Evil. And yes it was Eve’s fault that she at the apple, but then Adam knew the rule and could have said something but he didn’t. And when God asked them what happened, Adam and Eve took no responsibility for their actions. Adam blamed Eve, and Eve blamed the Serpent. So in Genesis 3, sin is born.

Day 1 Bible Study

I messed up. I thought my new 2024 Bible Study was starting on January 4, but it started on January 3. The plan I am following is not a chronological reading of the Bible but consists of daily readings from the Old and New Testament and then switches back between Proverbs and Psalms. I like this way of reading the Bible because you start to see the prophecy of Christ in the Old Testament.

The Day 1 Bible Reading consists for Genesis 1-2, Mathew 1, and Psalms 1.  

Genesis 1: 3-5 (ESV)

“And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

This passage from Genesis 1 stood out for me because God in the Old Testament created the world in terms of duality. For example, light versus darkness, night versus day, and morning and evening. The newly created world is a world of opposites or good versus bad. It isn’t until the birth of Jesus in Mathew 1 that God adds a third part to his created world. With the birth of Christ, God newly recreates the world changing it from a duality to a trinity with the birth of Jesus. Jesus is balance point between the two opposites in the world, or the person that stops us from going into the darkness since he is in the middle. No longer is there this duality of life and then death. With Christ, we have the world as a trinity. You are born, you die, but with Christ you are born again and will live with him in heaven after you die. This idea of the Trinity strikes me as revolutionary and evolutionary. Instead of us living in a dualistic world of opposites with no chance of escaping the darkness, with Christ we now have the neutral point between the two opposites. We have the point of neutrality where we are allowed to choose which side to follow. We have Christ standing in the way so we don’t go into the darkness of death.

No Bible Reading for today. My third year of reading the Bible in a year starts tomorrow. This year I bought the ESV Study Bible to supplement my daily Bible readings. It will be interesting to hear what the “experts” have to say compared to my own interpretation. I’m also thinking about getting a Bible atlas, although with internet search I think may be able to just do a search on a region to learn about it. I was watching a documentary called Aerial Britian and I had no idea that the King Arthur stories took place in Wales. They even showed the lake where the sword was thrown into. I think I may have to plan a trip to Wales to check that lake out. I loved the King Arthur stories when I discovered them in high school. I even have a hankering to read the Canterbury Tales, which I think we read in freshman or sophomore year of high school. I remember liking them back then, which makes me wonder if I would like them now as an adult.

Maybe a fun project for me in 2024 will be read books I still remember from junior high / high school that I loved. I loved Eugene O’Neil’s Long Days Journey into Night, Flowers for Algernon, Greek and Roman mythology, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Those are the books off the top of my head. Then there’s Catch-22, Homer’s Odyssey, The Scarlett Letter, Mourning Becomes Electra, and Animal Farm.

Other new things I want to try doing for Bible reading in 2024 is highlighting. m going to highlight the passages I like in my Bible. I don’t like marking up my books, but I’m going to try it with my new Study Bible. I think it will be fun to look back a few years later to see if the Bible passage I highlighted still has meaning for me.

Another fun project would be to read a Samuel Beckett play and find the Bible refences. I really don’t remember the play we were studying when my college theatre arts professor went on that rant about how no one in the class could figure out the Biblical references or allusions. I love Waiting for Godot so it will probably be that play.