Monday, January 09, 2006

Day 2: Genesis 17-28

Oh dear...not too much to commend in the general behaviour today either. Lot's daughters so desperate to conceive that they sleep with their own father (and not a word of censure in the text). Abraham once again passes his wife off as his sister (why does she let him??), and God comes perilously close to punishing Abimelech for a sin he almost committed through ignorance, - while still honouring his covenant with shoddy 0ld Abraham. And what about the mindless obedience he, God ,demands of Abraham on the mountainside? For a twenty-first century woman, that is decidedly hard to swallow! And so it goes on…Abimelech deceived again, this time about Rebekah, poor old Esau, cheated out of his inheritance by his scheming brother and mother…and God, inexplicably, favouring Jacob with a vision of angels and the covenant repeated.
I suppose the thing to hang onto is that though these are not the sort of ancestors to be hugely proud of, they are the sort of people we all are, and God works with and through them.
He doesn’t demand a sanitised reality…and that’s the best of news for us, isnt it?

3 Comments:

At 1/09/2006 3:09 PM, Blogger ~Jennifer said...

Yes, that's really the up side, isn't it? As I read through Genesis I wonder why a just God would reward behavior that seems so wrong, but I guess God isn't necessarily rewarding the behavior, but bestowing His blessings in spite of bad behavior, and that is VERY good news for me, indeed.

 
At 1/09/2006 5:34 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well said! I was just wishing that God had qualified (for my edification!) why He was so jolly fond of Abraham and building a huge nation on him and so forth. He wouldn't have been my pick, but of course I'm not God. :)

 
At 1/09/2006 10:57 PM, Blogger Unknown Preacher said...

Perhaps even here we see the grace and mercy of God

Mercy is not recieving what we deserve. Grace is recieving what we don't deserve.

 

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