The Bible is Funny

The Bible is funny.  

I am serious…read it sometime.  I recently started a plan to read the Bible in a year and it has me starting in Genesis.  The boring part about Genesis is that Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah, Tower of Babel, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Lot, etc, are the stories that we have grown up with since we were two…been there heard that.

 

The interesting part is that we have heard and not read.  I have only within the last month started a regular devotional and Scripture reading habit and I am the twenty-two year old son of a pastor that went to a Christian college.  I have heard the stories my entire life but never read them for myself.  Here are some examples:

What I heard:  God made His covenant with Abraham by having all the males circumcised.

What I read:  How do you explain to all your adult sons and slaves that they have to take a sharp rock to their unmentionables?  You want me to do what to my what?  Ch 17

What I heard:  Sodom was a bad place.

What I read:  The men of the city wanted Lot bring out his two male guests, who happened to be angels, so they could rape them…what happens if you try to rape an angel? (Ch 19)

What I heard:  Lot was an idiot.

What I read:  Lot and his two daughters were hiding out in a cave…just the three of them…in the middle of nowhere…no one else around, and yet he gets drunk enough that he sleeps with both of them on separate occasions (Ch 19).

In Chapter 22 verse 2, God tells Abraham to take and sacrifice his son, Isaac, to Him.  Verse 3 goes like this, “So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey,”.  No questions…he just does it.  The list of incredible things in just the first part of Genesis is incredible.  Here is one for you…Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are the patriarchs of Israel, God’s Chosen People.  A people that were described five times from Chapters 14-30 as either as numerous as the stars or the sand on the beach, not including other forms.  This was the bloodline through which God was going to change the world by sending His son.  The three main wives of these great men, Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel, were ALL BARREN.  God built and saved His people through three barren women.  Granted there were other wives, concubines, and maids but three barren women.  I knew about Sarah but Rebecca and Rachel were also unable to have children until God opened the wombs.  God can do whatever He wants to accomplish whatever He wants.  There is no such thing as the unusables.

This is the novice insights of an uneducated young adult on a fraction of one book of the Bible.  How much are we missing out on in life, in love, in God…because we have already HEARD IT.  If the Bible was meant to be purely heard, it would be not have been written down.  READ IT.  It is the LIVING WORD of the ALMIGHTY MASTER of the UNIVERSE.  Do not settle for what you have HEARD.  There is so much more waiting for you.  As a new reader, I challenge you to find a time (5 minutes), a place (your bathroom), a section (a chapter a day), and start living for yourself rather than getting it second hand from someone else.  I am not saying that preachers are not important (what do you think I am doing?) but the comparison is equivalent to riding a roller coaster and having the experience described to you.

Strap yourself in.  READ.