Tag: Old versus New Testament

• Amos 7:1-3: Locusts

  
  

  Saturday, September 19, 2020

  

  Amos 7:1-3

  Locusts

  This is what the Lord God showed me: He was forming a locust swarm when the late growth began to come up [the late growth after the king’s mowing]. While they were eating all the grass in the land, I said: Forgive me, O Lord God! How will Jacob stand? He is so small!  And the Lord repented of this. “It shall not be,” said the lord God.

  We have read through the words and woes that Amos offers us so that we might examine our lives to see how we deal with those who suffer oppression.  We have asked ourselves if we are victim or bully, one with a great deal or one with little. Today Amos presents us with the first of several visions. What can these locusts mean?

  God says: The king has taken his first cutting of the harvest and has left the second growth for his people but locusts arrive and devour all that gives sustenance. Calamity strikes. Fear grips everyone and yet remember . . . I will tend to the faithful. They shall not perish.  It shall not be. Even amidst the swarm of locusts that devours all in its path.

  In some parts of the world the threat of swarming locusts is a very real hazard but although for us the threat of total devastation is a distant threat we know the unease that comes with impending doom. Natural disasters, acts of criminal violence, medical aberrations are all present dangers to our comfortable living. In Old Testament thinking we would assume that these calamities tell us that we have somehow angered God. New Testament thinking tells us that although catastrophes occur we are likely not to blame . . . and it reminds us that we can rely on God to say: It shall not be. 

  In this time of pandemic and social unrest, we lean on the prophets of old for guidance.

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  To read news about a locust invasion in the Middle East in the spring of 2013, click on the image above or visit: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/06/israel-braces-for-locust-invasion-ahead-of-passover_n_2816136.html

  To read more about the locust, go to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/life/Desert_locust

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  September 19, 2020

  Old versus New Testament

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• Joshua 12: Conquered Kings

  
  

  Joshua 12: Conquered Kings

  Thursday, April 4, 2019. 

  A re-post from Holy Week 2012. 

  

  I sometimes wonder what life was really like for leaders in the ancient world.  It was such a violent and predatory place and much time and energy were spent merely surviving.  This is still true for many in our modern world in which focus on survival is necessary in order to see the next day’s dawning.  In today’s Noontime we read a roll call of the vanquished along with a description of the division of conquered lands.  Conquest is marked by neat categories; there is no evidence of the horrific jumbled chaos that is war. These verses make the telling of this list so orderly and so tidy that we might think that Joshua and his men performed this work without much personal cost or effort.  We would be wrong.

  This territory had belonged to the Hittites, the Amorites, Canaanites and others.  A series of city-states falls, their kings are vanquished: Jericho, Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmuth, and more.  With a quick reading it might appear the subjugated are nameless, faceless peoples.  If this is our impression, again we would be wrong.

  This kind of struggle never comes without a cost, and it comes as part of the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abram in Genesis 15.  He was to have descendants that numbered as stars in the night sky, and these descendants were to inhabit a land that would be delivered with the help of God.

  The twelve tribes use violence as they take over the mountains and foothills, deserts, slopes and rivers of this promised place.  Several thousand years later, Jesus arrives to tell his people that this way of violence is over, that now they are to deliver another cheek to an attacker rather than another blow.  He brings the strange message that rather than pray for our friends alone, we are to intercede for our enemies.  We can see how bizarre this thinking must have seemed to a people who had won what they had through the spilling of blood.  We can see how the message will seem strange to us today.

  Our question on this Holy Wednesday is this . . . As we go through our days, moving toward the promises made to us by God, do we take care with how we move and why . . . and do we use Old Testament ways or New Testament thinking . . . do we resort to the weapons of violence, or do we use the tools of peace?

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  For more information on the many tribes cited in Genesis and Joshua, go to:http://biblos.com/ and search the dictionary, encyclopedia, atlas or other resources on this site.  

  Image from: http://heavenawaits.wordpress.com 

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  April 4, 2019

  12 tribes, chaos of war, Jesus, Old versus New Testament, promises, violence

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