Thoughts on Exodus 5 and 1 Corinthians 11

Today's reading: Exodus 5; 1 Corinthians 11

Thoughts on Exodus 5

My thoughts on Exodus though are mostly just how quickly and easily we get discouraged and give up.

Moses and Aaron finally go in before Pharaoh, but they don't go the way God told them to, they don't say what God told them to say, and they completely ignore what God said would be the result!

God told Moses to take the elders of the people with them when they went to speak to Pharaoh, and while the text doesn't say explicitly that the elders were not there, the conversations afterward seem to pretty strongly imply it was just Moses and Aaron. God also told Moses what to say to Pharaoh, but instead, Moses and Aaron claim if they don't go, Yahweh is a threat against his own people. Then, after not taking the elders God said to take, and not declaring what God told them to declare, Moses gets into a huff before God about it not working even though God told Moses from the beginning at Sinai that Pharaoh was going to deny the request so that God's power might be demonstrated!

It is so easy for us to be so short-sighted in our work for the Lord. We pursue his work so imperfectly and are too often ready to give up at the first sign of resistance, calling it a failure, despite all the wealth of scripture giving us a heads up that it will happen this way and that there will be opposition.

I don't know about you, but I often need a much more resilient heart before the Lord.

Thoughts on 1 Corinthians 11

If you had asked me in the past, I don't think I ever would have guessed that reading about head coverings in 1 Cor. 11 would cause me to start tearing up...

To be fair though, my thoughts on 1 Cor. 11 today aren't so much on the passage itself.

For context, a year or so ago I was listening to episode 86 of Dr. Michael Heiser's The Naked Bible Podcast which is on head coverings in 1 Cor. 11. I linked it above, but I will warn you ahead of time if you go listen to it, it's a bit of a wild ride. He cites what is maybe the most entertaining set of scholarly journal articles I've ever read, arguing that medical understanding at the time Paul wrote this chapter was that your hair was part of your genitals, and for a woman to have short hair made her infertile (he cites a bunch of texts to show this understanding and it's a fun read). The conclusion of the article though is essentially that Paul is saying a woman should have her long hair covered while praying or prophesying because you shouldn't be "exposing yourself" in that context.

Then, a few months ago, Mike Winger posted a 6-hour long video on the head coverings topic as part of his women in ministry series (the whole series has been really good, btw, I highly suggest it so far). He has a different take than the papers Heiser cites, and near the end of his video addresses those papers specifically and essentially lands on not thinking that they make nearly as persuasive of a case as Heiser thinks they do, and there are better ways to understand 1 Cor. 11's talk of head coverings.

All that, while super interesting (to me at least) doesn't actually matter to my point in this today...

Dr. Heiser died earlier this week. He was diagnosed in January with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and had no real treatment options.

So anyway, I was thinking about how these two guys I deeply appreciate and respect from a biblical standpoint disagree on how best to understand this funky passage, and it struck me that Dr. Heiser knows the answer now. A man who has spent his entire professional career seeking to know God in His word more deeply and lead others to the same, is now in His very presence and all those questions, a lifetime of curiosity and study, are answered, and I can’t wait for that day that I get to stand before God, knowing fully as I have been fully known, not for the sake of having all the answers, but for the sake of knowing God that much more fully.

Knowing that day is coming, whether sooner or later, when I will get to stand in the presence of my creator and fully know the joy of his presence for eternity to come, was just made a little more visceral for me as I was thinking about this, and I don't think there are words to express how excited I am for that day.