Exodus chapter 19 is a very important chapter.
Many of us know well the story of the Passover, the Exodus and the crossing of the Red Sea.
Exodus 19 tells us where this was heading - the ultimate plan. God says, in verse 4, "I brought you to myself". God brought them out of Egypt, so that they could gather around God's presence at Mount Sinai.
This morning, at our 8 am service, we had two readings. They weren't picked because they belonged together. We had Exodus 14 because we've resting the whole Bible as a church and this is where we've got to in the Old Testament. We had Matthew 8 because this is the BCP gospel reading for the 4th Sunday after Epiphany.
Yet they shed some very interesting light on each other.
Many Christians struggle with the conquest of Canaan in the Old Testament. We don't get there until the book of Joshua, but to the modern mind it can seem like barbaric genocide. The people of Israel were told to conquer the land of Canaan, which was already occupied.
Genesis 2:18 describes God making Eve as a "helper" (
This particular word occurs 19 times in the Old Testament, and it pays to notice carefully what it does and does not mean elsewhere.
What was the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and why was it a sin to eat its fruit?
Bruce Waltke is very helpful, on page 86 of his Genesis commentary:
One of the values of having a blog, is it gives me somewhere to put notes that will almost certainly not make it into the next sermon, but may interest some people. "If you're interested, for further reading,..."
Here's Bruce Waltke on Genesis 2:
What's the whole of Genesis about?
Jason Hood, over at the SAET blog, has some very sensible things to say about how the whole book speaks a message that needs to be heard by NT Christians, and what's more speaks it with great clarity:
His full post is not long and is well worth a read: http://www.saet-online.org/why-moses-wrote-genesis/09/
Here's a small extract to whet the appetite and send you to the full thing:
Waltke again:
Scientifically, the fire and cataclysmic destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah may be explained by an earthquake. Heat, gases, sulphur, and bitumen would have been spewed into the air through the fissures formed during a violent earthquake (14:10). The lightning that frequently accompanies an earthquake would have ignited the gases and bitumen.
I like this description of the irony of Lot's role in Genesis 19, taken from page 274 of Waltke's commentary:
Reading Bruce Waltke's commentary on Genesis, he has a fine couple of paragraphs on page 264 where he explores how the sign of circumcision relates to baptism today. I agree with nearly everything he says, and it's so helpful that I thought I'd put it here in case it's helpful for some:
