More geographic description including, oh joy! lists of city names. I have never been into textual descriptions of geography. For me, this may be the dullest days of reading so far.
The only thing that approaches remotely interesting is this,
Caleb said, “I will give my daughter Acsah in marriage to the one who attacks and captures Kiriath-sepher.” Othniel, the son of Caleb’s brother Kenaz, was the one who conquered it, so Acsah became Othniel’s wife.
When Acsah married Othniel, she urged him to ask her father for a field. As she got down off her donkey, Caleb asked her, “What’s the matter?”
She said, “Give me another gift. You have already given me land in the Negev; now please give me springs of water, too.” So Caleb gave her the upper and lower springs.Yes, the most exciting thing in today's reading is that a guy's daughter gets married, asks for something from her father, and gets it.
New Testament
Today we read a couple more stories, and we learn that the disciples were pretty dense.
The first story is the story of the rich man and Jesus. A rich man asks Jesus what he needs to do to get eternal life. Jesus tells him that he must be good and, if he already does that, he must give up all his possessions and follow Jesus. This makes the man sad. Jesus comments that it's hard for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God, but fortunately, God helps them.
The other story involves a blind man who persistently called out for Jesus to heal him. Jesus eventually did, and everyone praised God. I suppose you could read this as supporting the theme from one of yesterday's story that persistence gets results in matters of petition.
Between these two stories, we get the following episode,
Taking the twelve disciples aside, Jesus said, “Listen, we’re going up to Jerusalem, where all the predictions of the prophets concerning the Son of Man will come true. He will be handed over to the Romans, and he will be mocked, treated shamefully, and spit upon. They will flog him with a whip and kill him, but on the third day he will rise again.”
But they didn’t understand any of this. The significance of his words was hidden from them, and they failed to grasp what he was talking about.Now, Jesus is not being that mysterious this time, at least with respect to the facts of the situation. Thus it seems that either the disciples are dense not to understand any of this, "understand" is meant to imply "understand the significance of", or they were so use to not being able to take Jesus at his word that even something as straightforward as this is perplexing.
Psalms and Proverbs
Wow! A whole psalm that could be used as a modern prayer without having to cut out any awkward bits!
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