Mar 8

Reference links:

Numbers 10:1-11:23 Mark 14:1-21 Psalm 51:1-19 Proverbs 10:31-32

Overview of the Book of Numbers Overview of the Gospel of Mark Overview of the Psalms Overview of the book of Proverbs

Old Testament

Ack! It's late.

God tells Moses to make some trumpets that can be used to signal the Israelites to resume their wanderings. The Israelites set out on the march again. The Israelites complain about their wandering. God gets angry, and reacts unreasonably:

Soon the people began to complain about their hardship, and the Lord heard everything they said. Then the Lord’s anger blazed against them, and he sent a fire to rage among them, and he destroyed some of the people in the outskirts of the camp. Then the people screamed to Moses for help, and when he prayed to the Lord, the fire stopped

Remember, they are screaming to death because God is burning them to death. I cannot help but imagine it, and it is sickening.

Despite God's anger, the Israelites keep whining. They whine about how they have nothing to eat but manna. Moses calls out to God in frustration asking why he was put in charge of such stubborn people. God responds by helping Moses to find some assistants and promising the Israelites meat

Now the Lord will give you meat, and you will have to eat it. And it won’t be for just a day or two, or for five or ten or even twenty. You will eat it for a whole month until you gag and are sick of it.

God sure comes across as angry, cruel, and spiteful today, doesn't he?

New Testament

Oh, such disappointment! I misread today's reading in a way that I knew was immediately wrong, but my misreading was so much more awesome than the original.

While he was eating, a woman came in with a beautiful alabaster jar of expensive perfume made from essence of nerd nard. She broke open the jar and poured the perfume over his head.

If only it Jesus had been anointed with essence of nerd!

Also, Judas agrees to betray Jesus, and Jesus and the disciples partake in the Last Supper.

Psalms and Proverbs

Today's psalm sounds very Christian, by which I mean that it is all about God's forgiveness and mercy and man's sinful nature. A small sample (the rest goes on in the same vein):

Have mercy on me, O God,
because of your unfailing love.
Because of your great compassion,
blot out the stain of my sins.
Wash me clean from my guilt.
Purify me from my sin.
For I recognize my rebellion;
it haunts me day and night.

In fact, out of what we have read so far, it is only in the psalms (and only in some of them) where we seem to get a glimpse of what seem to be presented as the core messages of modern mainstream Christianity. You can overlay such messages on the gospels (most of the time), but it is just an overlay, they do not, at least to me, seem to contain the message on the surface. As for the Old Testament readings, well, not so much.

We continue with the proverbs of the form, "The godly do X, the wicked do Y". Since the proverbs seem to split the world along the lines of godly or ungodly, the proverbs just come across as annoying. Of course, if they split the world along the lines of good and wicked, they would just come across as tautological. That's life, I suppose.