Thoughts on Genesis 16-17

I have often heard it taught/assumed that Abraham having Ishmael by Hagar was an act of unfaithfulness on his part, but I’m not so sure that’s the case.

The assumption is that Abram and Sarai didn’t trust in God’s ability to give them a son naturally, so they sought out a way to make it work on their own because they doubted God.

What first made me question this is that when God speaks to Abraham about having a son in chapter 17, Abraham brings up Ishmael and doesn’t seem at all ashamed about it. If Abraham knew he was doing something wrong in siring Ishmael, when God comes promising another son, would he want to draw attention to his rebellion? Maybe he would realize that God was more serious than he originally thought in promising a son, but I can’t imagine he would interrupt to say, “Let that son you’re promising be Ishmael,” if he truly believed he was being faithless in having him.

The Hagar thing still seemed odd to me though until I realized that it’s the same thing that Jacob’s wives do unabashedly. When Rachel isn’t able to bear any children, but wants to compete against her sister Leah who is bearing Jacob son after son, she gives him her servant to bear children on her behalf. Leah then does the same when she stops bearing children. I realized that I am approaching/considering this question from a modern western perspective that assumes monogamy, making the bearing of a child with your wife’s servant an act of adultery, but that was far from their assumption. It was completely normal (and maybe expected), especially for a patriarch of a large family, to have multiple wives and/or concubines. The fact that Jacob, in a couple generations from Abraham, had two wives and two concubines, and clearly didn’t see that as problematic, tells me that Sarai giving Hagar to Abram to bear a child on her behalf would likely have been culturally normative.

If this is culturally normative, then it completely changes the way we would need to consider this interaction.

The analogy that comes to my mind now is if my family was living in an apartment, wanting to move to a house, but struggling to afford what we needed in a house, and God showed up and promised that He would give us a house. Because God promised, my wife and I start looking with renewed determination and eventually find a house that would suit our needs and, seemingly miraculously, is in our price range with nobody outbidding us. So we buy the house and praise God for keeping his promise to give us a house. A decade later, then, as we are living in the house we believe God provided for us, God shows back up and says, “I’m going to give you a house.” What would our reaction be? Probably something like, “Wait, another one? You’ve already given us one house, and now you’re going to do it again?” Maybe then in another year someone would show up at our door and hand us the deed to the house that God was giving to us, but does that make our looking for and purchasing the house we did an act of disobedience or faithlessness? Not at all! We only continued looking and ultimately purchasing the house we did because we thought we understood what God was promising and we were trying to be faithful to that. Buying that house, while not what God was ultimately promising, was done in an attempt to be faithful to Him, not in an act of unbelief.

So if Abram and Sarai are living in a culture and time where it is normal (or even expected) for a man as rich and powerful as Abram to have more than one wife/concubine, and/or where bearing a child by your wife’s servant is considered as bearing a child to your wife, then might Ishmael not have been very similar to buying that house? Trusting that God promised He would give them a child, they began looking for how that could happen, and decided to take the totally normal and acceptable means to bear a son for Sarai through Hagar. So then when God showed up to renew His promise, clarifying that He means that Sarai will bear him a son, it makes sense for Abram to be confused by it because, hasn’t he already had a son by Sarai through Hagar?

This is why I question the assumption that Abraham having a son by Hagar was necessarily an act of faithlessness. In fact, it seems to me, though I admit I could be wrong about it, that Abram and Sarai decided on this course of action specifically seeking to be faithful to what the Lord had said. 

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Thoughts on Genesis 11-12

It was at Babel that humanity, as a whole, first stopped belonging to God.

This is something I had failed to recognize for a long time, partially because Genesis 11 doesn’t explicitly declare it. Genesis 11 sees God confusing the people’s language and scattering them from Babel, but what Deuteronomy 32 tells us is that He was, in this act, disinheriting humanity and giving the nations over to lesser elohim to be ruled/governed by them.

Remember the days of old;

consider the years of many generations;

ask your father, and he will show you,

your elders, and they will tell you.

When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,

when he divided mankind,

he fixed the borders of the peoples

according to the number of the sons of God.

But the Lord’s portion is his people,

Jacob his allotted heritage.

From the beginning, God created humanity to be His people, and the fall of Genesis 3 didn’t change that. Despite their rebellion, humanity continued to be God’s people. At Babel, though, God finally disowns humanity, dividing them up according to the “number of the sons of God.” This is also why Psalm 82 declares the judgement of the gods because they have not ruled justly, and the psalm finishes with declaring that Yahweh will instead inherit the nations that had formerly belonged to these lesser gods, members of Yahweh’s divine council.

What this means for Abram/Israel then is that when God disinherited the nations from being His people, He then immediately selected Abram out from those disinherited nations to create a new people for Himself, and specifically a people through whom all the nations of the earth will be blessed. In the context of the disinheritance of the nations then, this blessing of all the nations is their return to inheritance. Through Abram God will provide a means for all the nations of the earth to come back into His family and once again be His people.

I believe this is also what Paul is referring to when he declared before the Areopagus in Acts 30, in reference to idols, “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” The Gentile nations were not expected to worship Yahweh because they were not Yahweh’s people. They could still be judged for their sin and violation of their own consciences (Romans 2), but God did not have the same expectations of the nations that He did of his own people. In Christ, though, the blessing God promised to Abram has come, and all peoples can be brought back into the people and family of God. So while He overlooked their ignorance in the past, there is now an expectation that they will avail themselves of the opportunity to turn from the lesser gods to which they have been subject and return to Yahweh Himself. 

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Thoughts on Genesis 4-7

These four chapters all flow together in what I was thinking about with them this morning, but I want to specifically call out thoughts on chapters 4 and 7.

Thoughts on Genesis 4

In Genesis 4, what was standing out to me this morning was the varied and highly skilled nature of the work of Lamech's sons.

This is something I've noticed before and thought was a little odd, both for it's inclusion and for it's disparity, but then I never really gave it much consideration. When we are introduced to Lamech we are told:

And Lamech took two wives. The name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. Adah bore Jabal; he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. Zillah also bore Tubal-cain; he was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron. The sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah.

As I said, on the one hand, this always struck me as odd because the point of the story seems to be Lamech's murder and pride, so why are we being introduced to his sons who we will never see come up in the story again? But then the question on the other side of that is, where do Lamech's sons learn these incredibly varied skills? We are only a few generations out from Adam and Eve, and yet we already have the development of musical instruments/music and metalworking. Plus, given that these sons all do different things, it's not as though Lamech was doing these things and passed them on, especially because the language implies that these things started with Lamech's sons.

So why are we introduced to his sons at all, and how did they develop such a varied skillset? I think the answer is in Genesis 6.

Genesis 6 sees the "sons of God" seeking out human women and having children with them. In Dr. Michael Heiser's The Unseen Realm he points out that the Biblical account is not the only place we see stories of heavenly beings coming to earth and bearing children with human women. This is the exact story of the Mesopotamian Apkallu as well. The Apkallu were gods who descended, bore children with human women (those children being great heroes and warriors like Gilgamesh), and then imparted secret, heavenly knowledge to humanity, teaching them things like metal working, advanced agriculture, cosmetics, war, music, etc. There are also Jewish stories, outside of the bible, that expand on Genesis 6 along the same lines, claiming that the angels who sired these children also imparted divine knowledge to humanity (the book of Enoch was a popular one in Jesus' day). The interesting distinction between the two accounts however is that the Mesopotamian literature praises the imparting of such knowledge to humanity, while the Bible (and other Jewish writing) condemns it as corrupting, hastening humanity's descent into sin and rebellion against God.

I think this is what is happening in Genesis 4. On the one hand, yes, we are seeing the corruption in Cain's city/descendants such that Lamech is boasting of murder and declaring that Yahweh will protect him for it, but on the other hand, we see, with his sons, how much further the corruption goes. While those stories might not be fresh in our minds, for Israel and her neighbors, people who have stories of these very areas of knowledge having been illicitly handed down by divine beings, to read about Lamech's sons would scream to them that Cain's line was involved with these being and were therefore a major part of the corruption of humanity. This would mean it was not just Cain's sin of murder that continued on down through the generations to Lamech, but also that his sin opened the door for his descendants embracing greater forms of rebellion against Yahweh.

I may be wrong about this, but it really does seem to make sense of both the inclusion of Lamech's sons and of their highly varied and highly specialized skillsets. 

Thoughts on Genesis 7

In terms of Genesis 7, I mostly just want to share an interesting video on a potential mechanism behind the flood.

For a little context, I came to faith in Christ through a church that generally takes a pretty low view of the idea of a global flood and instead focuses a lot more on how the language in Genesis allows for a local flood and/or makes a global flood nonsensical (e.g. how much water would be required to cover Mt. Everest). They also tend to take a pretty disparaging view of a young earth understanding of the bible as foolish and unscientific.

Well, a few years back I came across this video, and found it absolutely fascinating:

The lecture is long, but worth the watch if you're at all curious about this topic. They present the idea of what they refer to as Catastrophic Plate Tectonics. In short, the idea is that the continents were in the Pangea formation as a single landmass before the flood, and that a plate subduction event triggered the flood and caused the rapid movement of the continents to their current positions, moving with enough momentum to cause/create mountain ranges when land masses collided with one another. There is a lot more to it than that, and the explanation also includes the global layering of sediment with varied flora and fauna being captured/fossilized in the process, changes to global weather patterns, etc.

I obviously can't say for sure whether or not their model is the correct one, but it has a lot of explanatory power and definitely changed the way I think about the flood account and it's scale. 

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Thoughts on Genesis 1-3

The last few years have led me to view the first chapters of Genesis very differently than I have in the past.

In the past, the creation accounts, and especially Genesis 1, were always framed to me in terms of academic debate. People talked about, debated, and taught one view or another of whether Genesis 1 is recounting literal days, longer periods of time, or something different. It was a critical part of the debate over whether the earth is millions or merely thousands of years old. And as a result, any time I would approach Genesis 1-3, I would always think about the chapters in terms of these debates and issues.

Two things have changed this for me relatively recently. The first was reading Dr. Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm where he brought a lot of contemporary religious context into the conversation about Genesis. All of Israel’s neighbors had creation stories of their own, and in those stories, the world and humanity came about by violent conflict; gods at war, killing one another, and the earth and/or humans being born out of that conflict. On top of that, among those other peoples, the king was generally considered divine. In contrast to this context, Genesis paints a picture of the world and humanity coming about, not as a result of conflict or random happenstance, but as an intentional act by a God with authority over all things. Yahweh didn’t need to join his power to other gods to bring forth the world, nor did He need to slay another god like Himself to build upon in creating, but when He speaks creation springs forth. Along with this, God caps off His creation by creating humanity in His own image. It is not a merely a single king who stands in His image or bearing His authority, but it all of humanity who exists as His imagers and who bears His authority to rule over creation.

The second thing that changed how I have been thinking about Genesis lately is a question my friend asked about The Fall in Genesis 3. He texted a number of us and asked if we thought the curses resulting from The Fall are static or progressive (i.e. were things cursed and stayed that way, or does the curse take increasing effect over time). I had never really considered that question before, but it took me back to the creation accounts with a different eye for them. What that brought out to me was how much the creation is framed as the pulling back of chaos to create a space for humanity to thrive. Genesis 1 starts with the world as formless and void (or “wild and waste” as Tim Mackie translates it); not a place at all conducive to human life or flourishing. But from the wild and waste, God brings forth order, creating days, ordaining seasons and times, bringing forth land, and then flora and fauna to populate that land. Then, having created a world in which humans could live and flourish, God creates a space of even greater order, planting a cultivated garden, and placing humanity in the midst of that garden. From there, humanity’s task was to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. God had started the subduing by making the Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve were to have children and expand the garden until it encompassed the entire world over which they ruled.

I point all this out because, at The Fall, the commission to fill the earth and subdue it is what gets more difficult. Eve will experience pain in child bearing and Adam will have to fight the ground to bring forth food. So whereas God had pushed back the chaos to the point where humanity would spread and flourish joyfully, I think He allows a bit of that chaos back in to stand against their efforts to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. Add to that humanity’s new-found propensity for sin, directing the subduing of the world according to their own desires rather than the Lord’s, and you have a recipe for the continuous spiritual degradation of humanity and the world it stewards over time.

But whether that understanding of The Fall is exactly right or not, this is the picture of creation put forth in Genesis, that God is pushing back chaos to create a space for His image bearers to live and flourish, and that effects how you read and interpret the events flowing forth through the rest of the book. 

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Thoughts on the 2023-2024 Reading Plan

Today’s reading: 2 Chronicles 36; Revelation 22

We made it to the end! Two years going through this reading plan together, and 500 posts later, we’ve reached the end of our reading.

I haven’t been posting often lately because much of what we are reading in Chronicles we have already discussed when reading through Kings and/or the prophets, and I haven’t felt like there was much more to add beyond what has already been said, and similarly, this is our fourth time through Revelation, so I haven’t had anything to add there either. 

I’m going to be starting a new reading plan tomorrow, but I’m not planning on keeping up with these posts throughout the year now that we have already worked through the whole Bible together. I may still add posts on occasion, but the hope of this blog was to help add context and connection around what people are reading to try to lower the barrier of entry to understanding the Scriptures if and where I can, and I think that’s largely done (at least to my current understanding). Plus, to be honest, writing these posts is a significant time commitment, and I’m ready to take a break from that.

That said, I do plan to add posts for likely the next month or so. I started this blog when we got to Exodus in the reading plan, so we have never walked through Genesis on here. So as I’m reading through Genesis over the next few weeks I’ll be adding some posts, but past that they will be much less frequent.

Thank you to all of you who have joined me on this journey, and especially to those of you who have commented, countered, and encouraged me along the way!

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Thoughts on 2 Chronicles 24

Today’s reading: 2 Chronicles 24; Revelation 9

One person’s choice to be faithful to the Lord can have much a much broader impact than we tend to give it credit for.

It’s easy to excuse sin and unfaithfulness in our lives as being not all that important or impactful. We tell ourselves, “This only affects me, and sure, maybe it’ll make me feel a little less close to God, but it’s really not that big of a deal,” and so we excuse our sin and choose to indulge in it. On the one hand, we don’t honestly know how even our “small sins” may/will impact other people, but on the other hand, we don’t know how broad of an impact our choice to stay faithful to the Lord might have.

In 2 Chronicles 24, Jehoiada stands as a bulwark, protecting the faith of an entire nation of people, as long as he is alive. What’s worth noting though is that Jehoiada doesn’t keep people anchored in faithfulness to God by preaching moving sermons on a weekly basis that keep people running on a continual spiritual high, nor does he do it by force, but seemingly by the influence of a faithful life. Jehoiada put his faith into practice when he protected Joash and ultimately raised him to the throne, and that exercise of his faith gave him influence with the king. The result was that, even though Jehoiada didn’t always live perfectly faithfully himself, he kept the king, and thus the people, faithfully serving Yahweh until his death at 130 years old.

It might be easy to write off Jehoiada’s influence as superficial because, as soon as he died, Joash was influenced by others and led the people after other gods, meaning Jehoiada clearly was unable to instill sufficient personal conviction in Joash to continue in faithfulness on his own, but that misses an important point. The Chronicler even says directly that, “Joash did what was right in the eyes of the Lord all the days of Jehoiada the priest.” While Joash’s faith may not have been sufficiently anchored to keep him moving in the right direction without Jehoiada, his faith was by no means false.

Could Jehoiada have done a better job instilling personal conviction about his faith in Joash? Maybe. That is probably a great question and line of reasoning for another day, but it also betrays a very individualistic view of following the Lord.

Christians today, especially in Evangelical circles, tend to focus a lot on “personal faith.” I think a lot of Christians today would dismiss Joash’s initial faith as invalid or insufficient because it didn’t stay strong without the external force of Jehoiada keeping it in check. But since when did faith in Yahweh become an individual sport? Faith was a community effort in the Old Testament, and the church Jesus instated was a community effort as well. How many times do we read, in the New Testament, about how essential the Body of Christ is, with its individual members performing various individual functions? But if our faith is supposed to be lived out in community, why would that same faith wavering in isolation from that community lead us to question the genuineness of that faith?

Now, let’s be clear, we should certainly be seeking to grow in personal faith and love such that we can be these kinds of influences for others, but not being at that point in no way means that our personal faith is invalid. I remember, earlier on in my Christian life, meeting a young woman from another country who was trying to start a house church movement in her city, and who really had no consistent community around her at the time. I remember thinking how impossible it would be for me to follow God in that context. Without the support of people to challenge me, encourage me, guide me, help me, and a thousand other things, I would not have continued to follow the Lord for very long. But that doesn't mean the faith I had at the time was illegitimate, just younger and less mature (though, if I'm being honest, I would struggle in that situation even now...). The life of faith is intended to be a communal effort.

Ultimately, we don't know whether God wants to use us as a Jehoiada for someone (or someones) else. Jehoiada was a priest, yes, but he was just a normal guy. He was no one special that the faith of the nation of Judah should ebb and flow by his influence, but, special or not, that's exactly how God used him. And God may very well desire to use us in the same ways. So you're not in a position of leadership in the church? Neither was Jehoiada the leader of the nation, but he could strengthen and encourage the leader who kept things moving in the right direction. How many leaders, pastors, teachers, missionaries, etc. are keeping the course and leading their people well because they have someone, or a couple someones, in their lives, playing the role of Jehoiada, helping them to keep moving in the right direction?

I guess my overall point is that you may see your own spiritual life as relatively insignificant, and/or your choices to remain faithful as having little real impact, but you have no way of know how God may be using, or wanting to use, your faithfulness as an anchor that protects, strengthens, and emboldens the faith of many many others.

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Thoughts on 2 Chronicles 16

Today’s reading: 2 Chronicles 16-17; Revelation 1

It doesn’t matter how faithful you’ve been in the past, if you don’t continuously choose to remain faithful, sin will creep in and lead you astray from the Lord.

King Asa started out so well. 2 Chronicles 14 tells us that, “Asa did what was good and right in the eyes of the Lord his God.” As a result, God gave him and his kingdom peace for 10 years. Then, when the army of Ethiopia came against Judah, Asa tuned to the Lord and He delivered them from the massive and powerful army that had come against them. After this, a prophet came and reminded Asa to stay faithful, and Asa’s response was to pursue even greater faithfulness to Yahweh. As a result, God gave them peace for another 25 years.

But then, in chapter 16, when Baasha, king of Israel, started moving against Judah, rather than trusting in the Lord as he had previously, Asa turned to the king of Syria for help. In fact, more than just seeking help from Syria, Asa took money out of the temple to pay for their help. This means it wasn’t just a thoughtless reaction, but an intentional choice to trust Syria over Yahweh, taking what had been dedicated to Yahweh and giving it instead to the Syrians.

This could have been considered a simple lapse in judgement, but then when God sends a prophet to confront Asa about his breach of faith, rather than admitting his wrong and repenting, Asa throws the prophet in prison and lashes out against his people as well. Then, to show us where his heart remained, when Asa fell sick, a sickness that was evidently severe enough to lead to death, even in that he did not seek help from the Lord.

Asa is an important warning to the faithful Christian, expressly because he started out so well. Not only did Asa do what was right before the Lord when establishing his kingdom and when it was easy, but he also made the difficult decision to trust in the Lord in the face of overwhelming odds, setting him and his people on a course of faithfulness for decades to come. But, evidently, his heart started to drift over those decades. Asa never overtly rejected the Lord during those years, but when he is again confronted with an opportunity to trust in the Lord (and in a lesser way than he had in the past), he didn’t hesitate to trust instead in his own resources, wisdom, and connections. And his response to being confronted about that choice shows us further the disposition of his heart at that point.

We can’t hang our hats on past faithfulness to the Lord and expect we will stay faithful and finish well. The faithful life is one of continued, daily choices toward faithfulness, in the big things as well as the small, that keep our faith rooted and anchored in the Lord, not drifting slowly and gradually from that anchor. 

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