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Gen. 7
There are several very specific numbers in this story. I continue to wonder who kept the records. Of course, God knows all the details; He knew them even before they happened. But it seems we just have to take it on trust that the details are accurate. After having that thought, I remembered my comment at the beginning of Genesis about the details not being the point. That, of course, made me wonder why these details were included. That prompted me to look up the time that the floodwaters started – the seventeenth day of the second month.
What I discovered from that brief search is that, according to recorded Jewish oral tradition, several other tragic events occurred on that same date. Presumably, Moses broke the stone tablets of the law, the Jews ran out of sacrificial sheep during the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem, Apostomos burned the holy Torah, an idol was placed in the Holy Temple, and the walls of Jerusalem were breached, leading to the destruction of the temple, both by the Romans with the second Temple and possibly also by the Babylonians with the first. Add that together with the flood and I see a day marking the broken relationship between God and man. Interesting.
Matt. 7
At the end of His sermon, Jesus gave a mini parable about the wise and foolish builders. He started by saying, “Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock.” (Matt. 7:24). This is a clear call to action. But what, specifically, is the action? Sure, Jesus gave a lot of do’s and don’ts. I think He filled the greater part of His sermon, though, with concepts. You act on concepts not by following a specific list, but by applying them to your ways of thinking and acting.
In that regard, I think you can boil Jesus’ sermon down to a simple truth and a call to respond to that truth. The truth is that God’s ways are not like ours. The call, then, is to abandon our ways and live out God’s character according to His perfect and holy nature. Thus, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is a call to repentance with a lengthy explanation as to why we need it.
Ezra 7
The level of trust King Artaxerxes placed in Ezra impresses me. The king gave Ezra a lot of freedom to operate under an authority that was not his own. From what I can tell, he willingly did that because he somehow understood that allowing Ezra to pursue his service to God would do far more good for the king’s rule than would enforcing himself as Ezra’s sole authority. It seems Ezra had proven to him the truth we all need to understand. When we live our lives in wholehearted obedience to God, our lives serve the best interests of others.