Ugh. I hate the Bible. Reading this thing is more like a chore every time I do it. What had intended on being a one year project began on November 16th of last year, and at this rate will take me three years to complete. I guess I need to hunker down and get back at this or it’ll be one of those things I hate for not having completed.
Today’s reading, which banishes dirt to the land of wind and ghosts, comes from Hebrews 12, Exodus 16-17 and Proverbs 7.6-27. When last we met, Hebrews was just a strange combination of the author thinking he was proving Christ’s points and adding to them. Exodus had just seen the Jews escape from Egypt (with a bloody-soaked God slaughtering all in his path, and Proverbs was… well, badly proverbial.
Our Hebrews reading starts off with a lengthy discourse on how important it is for God to learn us up right, through pain and humiliation. I guess I see the analogy, but I just don’t agree with it. To the faithful, we are all children, and God teaches us lessons the way our parents would, by cuffing us upside the head. Still, I’d assume that a beneficent and loving creator would think up a better (and more easily understood, and more consistent) way.
The rest of Hebrews doesn’t intrigue me much until the last words of this passage: “Our God is like a destructive fire!” Eep. Nice image, oh God of Love…
Exodus 16 isn’t too much of interest either. It’s the whole manna-from-heaven thing, where God says, “I will hook you up with food and meat in the desert” and they are taken care of. It’s strange, because I believe that “manna” is actually “quail shit”, and all the Israelites had to eat throughout the next 40 years was quail shit and mystery meat. That can’t be healthy, and knowing what we do about the functioning of the human body, they must have spent 40 years in a state of perpetual Ketosis, which I really can’t imagine made for a very healthy chosen people.
In the next chapter, God first gives miracle water to the Jews, and then has them win a fight by propping up an old man’s arm with a stone. Seriously. He then commands Moses to write down the details of the battle because he wants the enemy, called Amalekites, to be forever stricken from memory. I guess writing it down is a bad way to accomplish that, and including it in a book that several thousand years later is still widely read (or at least widely owned) would definitely seem counterproductive.
Proverbs, once again, is a cautionary tale. This time, it’s about whore sluts. Whore sluts are a real problem in the Bible, women who want to have the sex with random strangers for the sole purpose of consigning the man’s soul to Hell for all eternity. It’s a hell of a thing, some woman who walks straight up to a man and says, “let’s do the pants off dance off” all sexy-like. No wonder the man is lost forever!
It’s passages like this that remind us just how unaccepting God is supposed to be. He’ll gladly take repentant murderers, but men who had sex with women? Ew. They could bring girl cooties to Heaven. No thanks. Remember, her house (which I assume means “cooter”) is a “one-way street leading straight down to the world of the dead”.
Well, that saves my soul for another day. Can’t wait till this is over.
Jim