Wednesday, March 8 – Genesis 22:1-19

After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” ² He said, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” ³ So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. ⁴ On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. ⁵ Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.” ⁶ Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. ⁷ Isaac said to his father Abraham, “Father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” ⁸ Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So the two of them walked on together.

⁹ When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. ¹⁰ Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son. ¹¹ But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” ¹² He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” ¹³ And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. ¹⁴ So Abraham called that place “The Lord will provide”; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.”

¹⁵ The angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven, ¹⁶ and said, “By myself I have sworn, says the Lord: Because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, ¹⁷ I will indeed bless you, and I will make your offspring as numerous as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of their enemies, ¹⁸ and by your offspring shall all the nations of the earth gain blessing for themselves, because you have obeyed my voice.” ¹⁹ So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beer-sheba; and Abraham lived at Beer-sheba.

Points of Interest:

• A number of things have happened since we left off with Abram, Sarai, and their dysfunctional household. In response to their ongoing spiritual life and sense of destiny, they have both altered their names somewhat, and are now called Abraham and Sarah. Hagar’s child Ishmael is all grown up, and Abraham and Sarah have had a miracle baby of their own, a son they named Isaac.
• I once studied this passage with a rabbi who found dark humor in the dialogue. When Abraham tells Isaac, “God will provide the lamb, my son,” we hear him at first simply addressing his teeage son. This rabbi joked that Abraham might have been indicating that Isaac is in fact the lamb God provided. That would have put a damper on their hiking conversation! This same rabbi speculated that Abraham returned later to a different city because he couldn’t bear to see his wife afterwards. That would be an awkward conversation – “Honey, what did you and our boy do today?”
• In all seriousness, this is a harrowing story. In the Jewish tradition, it’s referred to as the “binding of Isaac.” This is a story about a man who thinks God’s telling him to kill his only son and who gets as close as tying him down to a homemade altar before stopping. We’ll present two very different interpretations of this passage, and then run with the second interpretation for the sake of our own efforts to engage in a God-soaked world.
• The most traditional interpretation of this passage takes it at face value. Abraham has left his home and inheritance based on a word from God, waited over ten years for the promised child to come, and then God tests his faith one more time. In this understanding, Abraham senses God speaking accurately. Then in faith that God will bring Isaac back to life, or provide him with a substitute heir, or make it work out in some other way, he brings Isaac and a pile of wood up to a mountaintop. Very close to the murder, Abraham has a strong impulse to stop and attributes this impulse to a messenger from God, or perhaps he physically sees a vision of a person telling him to stop. He then sees a lamb caught in a bush and realizes God still wants a sacrifice, but will take an animal sacrifice instead. So he unties his son, kills the lamb, praises God, senses God’s praise for him and reaffirming of God’s promise, then heads back down the mountain, and calls it a day. A particularly Christian spin on this interpretation is to see the lamb in the bush as a foreshadowing of the eventual death of Jesus, who has been called – amongst other things – the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.
• This traditional interpretation has some strengths but also a couple of major problems. It’s a pretty ugly and – for the Bible – very unusual view of God. Ancient Near Eastern residents understood their Canaanite fertility gods to demand child sacrifice to ensure further children and good harvests. But the Old Testament strongly condemns this practice and makes it clear that the God of Abraham, who people eventually believe to be the one, true God of the world, is not like this. Also, this scene is only mentioned twice in the New Testament, and never as a symbol for Jesus’ death.
• Since the Middle Ages, numerous other readings of this passage have been proposed. Here is one. Abraham may have thought that God was asking for a child sacrifice. After all, he’d experienced God speaking to him at sites of fertility-god worship, other gods in his region expected this, and perhaps his family god would require this sacrifice as well. Under this interpretation, Abraham is mistaken in his original sense of God speaking to him, but then accurately discerns God telling him to stop. In this understanding of the passage, Abraham is led by God’s spirit to a truer, healthier view of God – God who will bless Abraham and his descendants and would never demand the death of a human. Abraham is able to pass that knowledge on to his descendants, and child sacrifice is never again proposed by Abraham’s descendants, except when they disobey God to worship the false, destructive gods of neighboring cultures.

Spiritual Exercise: Name something you used to think about God that you no longer think is healthy or accurate. Ask God to continue to give you a true and accurate belief about and experience of God.

Prayer: Pray that your church will help you and many others develop a true picture of God. As you and others seek to hear God’s voice during this season, pray that you’ll listen well and discern wisely, sorting out false pictures of god from the true and good God revealed in the person of Jesus.

Tuesday, March 7 – Genesis 16:1-16

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian slave-girl whose name was Hagar, ² and Sarai said to Abram, “You see that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children; go in to my slave-girl; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. ³ So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her slave-girl, and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife. ⁴ He went in to Hagar, and she conceived; and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress. ⁵ Then Sarai said to Abram, “May the wrong done to me be on you! I gave my slave-girl to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me!” ⁶ But Abram said to Sarai, “Your slave-girl is in your power; do to her as you please.” Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she ran away from her.

⁷ The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. ⁸ And he said, “Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” She said, “I am running away from my mistress Sarai.” ⁹ The angel of the Lord said to her, “Return to your mistress, and submit to her.” ¹⁰ The angel of the Lord also said to her, “I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude.” ¹¹ And the angel of the Lord said to her,

“Now you have conceived and shall bear a son;
you shall call him Ishmael,
for the Lord has given heed to your affliction.
¹² He shall be a wild ass of a man,
with his hand against everyone,
and everyone’s hand against him;
and he shall live at odds with all his kin.”

¹³ So she named the Lord who spoke to her, “You are El-roi”; for she said, “Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?” ¹⁴ Therefore the well was called Beer-lahai-roi; it lies between Kadesh and Bered.

¹⁵ Hagar bore Abram a son; and Abram named his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael. ¹⁶ Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore him Ishmael.

Points of Interest:

• Ten years later, Abram and Sarai are no closer to the fulfillment of what they thought God promised when they first arrived in Canaan. Their solution to their barrenness was probably less shocking in their culture than it would be in ours. Slave women were the property of their owners, so using Hagar as a surrogate mother to produce an heir for Abram and Sarai may have seemed reasonable to the couple, regardless of what Hagar may have thought of the arrangement.
• Hagar’s pregnancy apparently creates its own problems. Hagar is of lower social class and is a cultural and perhaps racial outsider to this household. But now she has the honor of pregnancy that Sarai has never experienced. Perhaps she finds ways to rub this in Sarai’s face, or perhaps Sarai projects this behavior out of her own insecurity and jealousy. When Sarai blames Abram for her difficulty, he abdicates any responsibility and tells Sarai to solve her own problem. Perhaps she begins insulting Hagar, perhaps she works the pregnant servant harshly, or perhaps she has her beaten. We don’t know, but the family is a mess, and Hagar’s life in particular is miserable enough that she flees alone to the wilderness.
• Alone and on the run, Hagar has her first experience of a God-soaked world. The word angel means messenger, so Hagar may encounter what she believes to be a spiritual being, or she may talk with a person who meets her by the spring of water, asks her for her story, and then speaks for God.
• The messenger gives what sounds like mixed news. She’s supposed to return to her somewhat abusive household and her son is predicted to grow up to be a difficult man. That said, her dignity is elevated in that God sees and understands all the details of her seemingly insignificant life. Henceforth, she also won’t merely be a slave and surrogate, but the mother of an important person in the world.
• The Egyptian slave Hagar is the first person in the Bible to name God. She doesn’t know what god this messenger speaks for, but she calls this god the “God who sees,” since she knows God sees and knows and has taken an interest in her.

Spiritual Exercise: Hagar’s story tell us God sees and hears us fully, sees all the hard things in our lives, is glad to be with us in them, and can do something about them. Start with your current setting – the room you are in, the clothes you’re wearing, etc. – and say to yourself, “God sees this brown chair. God sees my blue sweater, etc.” Then name to God one challenge in your life. Naming the various aspects of this challenge, say to yourself that God sees and hears each one of them. Tell yourself God is glad to be with you in this. Then ask God how it is that God understands how big this is to you, and how God can help you.

Prayer: Name a large problem your city or country is facing. Practice the above exercise with that issue as well, telling yourself God sees and hears this and is glad to be with you and your community and nation in this. Ask God how God understands how big this is to the people involved and ask God to help them.

Monday, March 6 – Genesis 11:27-12:9

²⁷ Now these are the descendants of Terah. Terah was the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran was the father of Lot. ²⁸ Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldeans. ²⁹ Abram and Nahor took wives; the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife was Milcah. She was the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah. ³⁰ Now Sarai was barren; she had no child.

³¹ Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram’s wife, and they went out together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there. ³² The days of Terah were two hundred five years; and Terah died in Haran.

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. ² I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. ³ I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

⁴ So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. ⁵ Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, ⁶ Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. ⁷ Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. ⁸ From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. ⁹ And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.

Points of Interest:

• At the center of this passage is an experience a man named Abram is purported to have had some four thousand years ago. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all tell this story and take interest in this experience of Abram hearing God speak to him. But the experience isn’t reported in isolation. It’s described in the context of Abram’s family story and historical and cultural context.
• The exposition of Abram’s life draws us into a colorful and tragic family story. Abram’s brother Haran dies young, leaving Terah and the extended family to care for Haran’s family. Terah is a bold but grief-stricken man. He leaves his homeland of Ur with one of his surviving sons and a grandson and their families. He is headed to the land of Canaan, for reasons we don’t know, but perhaps due to age, perhaps due to grief, only makes it part way, where he settles and dies in the town of Haran. In Hebrew, this isn’t an identical name as his dead son’s, but is hauntingly (or maybe comfortingly) similar. Abram and Sarai are the one couple in the family unable to have children. In the ancient Near East barrenness was a tragedy. It meant no heir in times when generational inheritance was the closest thing people had to a sense of afterlife, or long-term significance. It also meant no help in one’s old age, in an agrarian culture with no cultural safety nets or means of retirement savings.
• In the midst of Abram’s disappointing middle age years, he senses God speaking to him. The Bible rarely describes the means by which people discern God speaking. Was this an audible voice? A dream? An internal voice experienced while praying to a moon god? (The ancient city of Haran had a temple to the Canaanite mood god, Sin.) A gut sense that came to him while herding sheep, or eating breakfast, or gazing into a fire? We have no idea. Any of these are possible.
• The content of Abram’s message from God is persevered, though. It’s a high risk, high reward message. This middle-aged man with no heirs and no help for his upcoming old age experiences God telling him to leave his community – to leave his family, and by extension, his inheritance. He’s to continue the journey his father began years ago, to a land he’s never been to. In exchange, God will give him protection, reputation, and somehow (without descendants at this point!) a long-term legacy that will impact world history for good. It’s an exchange of present security, identity, and land – everything he knew and that defined him – for much greater security, identity, and land that God promises, through at this point mysterious means.
• Abram trusts the voice and uproots his whole household to take a journey into the unknown. As a side note, I have no idea what to make of the ages in these early passages of Genesis. Some conservative readers think they refer to the unusual longevity of the spiritual forefathers of the faith, but there is no anthropological or scientific evidence that would suggest this. I tend to think the numbers were inflated over time in the oral tradition, and that they had numerological significance (largely lost to us) in their original context. Abram, though, was not a young man. This was at least a mid-life redirect.
• Once Abram reaches the land his father originally set out for, we read God appeared to him. Again, there’s lots of missing context. As with Abram’s first experience, we don’t know how this one occurred – a vision, a dream, an interior sense, some other means? We also don’t know which god Abram thought he was communicating with. Abram was not a mono-theist. Abram’s first spiritual experience happens near a temple to a Canaanite moon god, and this second one happens by a large Canaanite tree, which likely would have been a site of worship to fertility gods, connected with agriculture and offspring. The name used here – the Lord, in Hebrew “Yahweh” – was a name for God first known by Moses, hundreds of years later.
• Abram’s second spiritual experience builds upon the first. He senses a “where” and a “how” to God’s promise to him. Despite the odds, he’ll have offspring, and he’s found the land in which his descendants will become great. So he travels about building altars and making sacrifices to the god he sees as backing him. He’s using the spiritual practices of his time and culture to respond to his experience of God.

Spiritual Exercise: We don’t experience God in a vacuum, but in the context of our familial and cultural inheritance. Consider one of the following – an unfulfilled dream of your parents or any ancestor of yours, or a current challenge in your life story. Ask God if God has any promise for you in this context. Sit quietly for a few moments, and take note of whatever you experience.

Prayer: Ask that your six – whatever their spiritual context – would experience God speaking promise to them, whatever their experience of God has or hasn’t been to date.

Welcome to our annual Bible guide. Since our church’s inception, we’ve promoted regular, systematic Bible reading as part of a series of practices that help us follow Jesus and find increasing life, hope, joy, peace, and purpose as we do so. It’s not because the Bible is a perfect or easy book. In fact, it’s not really a book at all. It’s a collection of letters, prayers, ancient historical documents, memoirs, poems, and more written by dozens of people over several centuries.

As noted by writer Mike McHargue, the Bible is “at least a collection of books and writings assembled by the Church that chronicle a people group’s experiences with, and understanding of, God over thousands of years.” McHargue goes on to say, “Even if that is a comprehensive definition of the Bible, study of scripture is warranted to understand our culture and the way in which people come to know God.” (http://mikemchargue.com/blog/2015/3/24/axioms-about-faith)

Now neither Mike McHargue nor I are saying this is all the Bible is. The Bible is also our earliest and best witness to the person of Jesus of Nazareth. It’s the text by which God has seemed to speak again and again to so many historical communities and to so many of us as well. It’s been used to justify terrible acts and ideologies but it’s also been a source of enormous comfort and inspiration as well.

However, as a library of thoughts and experiences with God, the Bible is – in my opinion – unmatched. It’s a reservoir of stories and ideas about people’s experience of God with us. And in this year’s Bible guide, we’ll tap this reservoir to see what it has to offer to each of us.

Our church has produced these Bible guides annually for more than a dozen years. Most years we take a different, single section of the Bible and read it over six weeks. This year, we’ll survey the Bible as a whole, more or less from beginning to end, with a particular theme in mind – just how is it that people experience God present in the world, and how do they then engage with God?

One of the most radical assumptions of the Hebrew scriptures, known to Christians as the Old Testament, is that a transcendent, creator God takes a particular interest in human affairs and can be known personally by humans. In the New Testament, the portion of the Christian Bible written in the century following the life of Jesus, this claim is intensified. The writers all indicate that God is uniquely present in the person of Jesus and can be spiritually experienced and connected with even after Jesus’ life in Palestine ended.

This year’s Bible guide attempts a survey of these experiences and claims. We’ll take a quick tour through some of the Bible’s most famous and most interesting accounts of people’s interactions with God. And we’ll ask what seemed to happen in those moments, and what might they mean for us today? In a world where God seems more present and real at some times and not at others, what kind of connection with a living God can we expect? When some people report regular and powerful spiritual experiences and others few to none, how can all of us who want to experience a more personal and vital connection to a living God?

Our first two weeks of this guide will look at some experiences recorded in the Hebrew scriptures – moments when people experienced their world as suddenly God-soaked. In our third week, we’ll read a few psalms together. The psalms are the Bible’s ancient prayer book, which models engaging with God in all times and moods and circumstances.

In our fourth and fifth weeks, we’ll examine some stories and teachings from the life of Jesus. These will be interactions people witnessed Jesus having with God, or times when people’s interaction with Jesus forged a connection with God, or things Jesus had to say about knowing God. And in our final week, we’ll look at a few things that Jesus’ first century followers had to say about experiencing God with us, in the wake of the life and teachings of Jesus.

Each day we’ll present you with a different short passage, this year in the New Revised Standard Version, followed by three sections:

• Points of Interest—a handful of comments, which include literary or historical notes as well as impressions, thoughts, questions, and reactions. These aren’t meant to be exhaustive or authoritative, but simply to give you some more perspective to work with as you ponder the passage yourself.
• Spiritual Exercise—every day, there will a takeaway summary thought and a short exercise to try. These actions, meditations, and activities might be the most valuable part of the guide, where we see if God can soak into our experience through the day’s passage.
• Prayer Prompt – a suggested prayer. These invitations will focus on the prayers for others we encourage people to try during this season:
  • For your six: Consider six of your favorite people, people you interact with on a regular basis, who don’t seem to have much of a direct connection to God and for whom you are very much rooting. What does this passage have to say to them, or to you about them?
  • For our church: How can we apply the passage corporately as a faith community?
  • For our city: What does the passage say to or about our entire city?

The Daily Bible Guide, while it can certainly be a standalone product, is designed to be one component of a bigger package called 40 Days of Faith – a six-week faith experiment that includes sermons, community group discussions, further prayer exercises, and more. You can learn more about the full 40 Days of Faith in this year’s User’s Manual, available on the campus and at the website of Reservoir Church. And the Bible guide itself is available in various forms: paper, blog, and podcast. Look online at www.reservoirchurch.org.