Bible Read Thread

TheGirlOnFire said:

You sound like hugh hefner of CF lol

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I would be a more respectable version of the Hef if I owned Playboy and had all those ladies around me all day, though.

This Monday, Miss Scrap.

Nei, Miss Goodbook. Not until the early morning in U.S. central time. I will try to have up each day's reading before work every day with my own commentary if I can find any to start off with, somewhere around 8 in the morning each day.

Swan7 said:

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*Takes a deep breath*

IT'S FEBRUARY 1ST!

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So it is, Sheena.


All right, then. Incidentally, by this schedule today we start with the very beginning (Mondays will include the first five books of the Bible, or, "the Law"):

Genesis chapters 1 through 3.

So, the very beginning of creation, recounting how God made the vast space (by the term here "heavens" I assume it means just the skies over Earth or all of space) and the planet Earth.

It is odd but, the last two or three times I read through Genesis chapter 1 I felt a small surge of wonder and awe at how God literally did all of this on His own, forming light from darkness, giving stars to the night sky that people can find their way through some amount of light in the dark of night, creating every living species of thing on Earth, and at the end of it all, man and woman.

And one thing that continues to stand out to me as more Scriptural indication that God is not the endlessly angry and wrathful God that some present Him as to the unbelieving masses, is the repeating phrase in chapter 1, "And God saw that it was good." I can only think, then, that this means He did not create the world and all life in it just to have something to be forever mad at and kick around for the rest of the Earth's days. No, He finds value in it, ... enough to send us a Savior to make everything right one day even when things went sour in chapter 3 by Adam and Eve's listening to the serpent's lies and disobeying God in hopes of achieving His kind of knowledge, His divinity. The serpent lied saying that Adam and Eve would not die one day as God warned them would happen, but rather, they would be like Him, knowing good and evil. In knowing the difference between the two, innocence was lost.

But then, even then, God shows quite remarkable gentility here to me in His response to Adam and Eve's sin. He clothes them to cover their embarrassment over their nakedness (a symbolic gesture of a greater covering of sin to come in the far future with Christ, perhaps?) and, while stern a consequence in itself, does not even seem particularly wrathful but more saddened as He ushers them out of the garden before they can also take hold of the tree of life and make things even worse in their sinful state (Genesis 3:22-23). It would appear that the natural consequence of their sin in eating of the tree of knowledge is the general harshness of life itself - the labor pains of childbirth and daily work to be able to survive, the occurrence of sicknesses and death, the returning to dust that is guaranteed for all living humans and beasts, and so on - but perhaps God was letting it be known in Genesis 3:15 (what you might call His first sermon ever ) that one day all would be made right in the destruction of evil (represented here by the serpent) by Eve's seed, Jesus Christ, who would "crush the head" of the serpent, even as the serpent "struck His heel".

Just my personal thoughts on this segment.