[reaction to OYB’s Sep. 12-14 readings]
No title for today’s readings because there were really uninteresting to me. Isaiah is listing the various nations that are going to be destroyed after God’s anger with the people of Israel and Judah subsides. So far, it includes Assyria, Babylon, Philistia, Cush and (after peaking at the next reading) Egypt. Perhaps the slight variations at the calamity about to fall upon them was significant to ancient readers, but for me: snooze fest.
The best thing about Second Corinthians is that I finished it today. Paul takes up a tremendous amount of space passive-aggressively comparing himself to “super apostles.”
I did reach Galatians, which I preached on not to long ago and which contains some pretty salty talk from Paul. As is clear from the letter to the Corinthians, Paul’s is not the only view of the Gospel circulating. How does he feel about competing views? “Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse!” Gal. 1:7-8. Well, alright then.
2 replies on “Day 83”
Again with the old testament litany of who's going to get theirs when the lord comes. Their god really is a vengeful god. It's hard to read this with anything other than a view to how spiteful and angry the authors are.
It seems anger is a big motivation for the authorship of these passages.
shropu
Indeed. I don't think it should be controversial to recognize that those portions of the Bible written from the perspective of people experiencing the same things the reader is experiencing will be most powerful. Isaiah was commenting on a nation about to fall into the hands of foreign rule. What is more, it seems that the culture of Israel & Judah's soon-to-be conquerers had already infested his culture. So, yeah, he's pretty pissed off.
I don't really relate to that, and hence a lot of this is boring for me. Paul, traveling about trying to nurture new churches with new ideas to health, now that's something that I generally can relate to. In fact, even the bits I didn't write about because they seemed like mundane topics felt relevant to me personally.