Tuesday 15 March

Numbers 2:10-3:51

Lots of skim reading today and some super-crazy arithmetic switchy-swatchying the Levites for the first-borns.  I find that a fascinating idea, although the inspiration is not hitting and my tired brain is struggling to grapple with it properly. I suspect it should be crying out to me about God’s willingness to redeem people from death by providing something of his own as a substitute for them.  I should probably also be amazed by the generosity of God that he would allow the redemption money paid to him to be enjoyed by the Levites rather than burnt up or destroyed in some particular way.  It does seem to be quite an interesting picture of God working out the tension between his demand for justice and his desire to generously bestow his riches upon his people.  Even when God is placing exacting requests upon his people he is finding a way to turn those obligations into a blessing for others.  It seems that this is the economy of God; as we give what we owe others richly benefit.  How much more must God spread the love when we choose to go beyond our obligations and give simply out of the gratitude of our hearts.

Luke 1:39-56

I love the way Mary breaks into a Glee-style musical number in the midst of a ante-natal conversation with Elizabeth.  I suspect this is another one of those things that makes us feel that Mary’s experience is grossly detached from our own.  But, as we said yesterday, that would be a terrible shame.  This time round of reading Luke I’m really striving to ground every single verse in my everyday life.  I want to imagine myself meeting a friend or a relative and seeing all that God is doing in them and calling it out and celebrating it.  I want to think of myself spontaneously thanking God for how good he has been to me and reveling in the gloriousness of his character.  And, most of all, I want to recognise and drub into the core of my soul the deep conviction that God is close, that God is working out his purposes, that God is ambushing person after person to capture them up into his will and that he is doing that in me and through me, morning after morning, lunch-break after lunch-break, KFC after KFC...

Psalm 34:1-10

I think this is the only time I have ever seen “when he pretended to be insane” in the credits to a worship song.  I just can’t believe the sheer audacity of David, that he would dare to claim “those who seek the Lord are radiant, their faces are never covered with shame” while, at that very moment, he is gibbering around pretending to have less sense than a chimp dressed in underpants.  Maybe he has a different definition of shame from us?