Hello again!  It’s Veteran’s Day today, and I hope everyone out there has found a way to celebrate it well.

This morning we covered Genesis 26, which is actually a pretty full chapter.  There are a lot of things going on here and a lot of movement in Isaac’s life as he deals with famine and wealth and adversity and treaties and marriages.  The main big theme, though, is that the Lord had promised to take care of Isaac, and that’s exactly what the Lord did.  It didn’t mean that the Lord shielded Isaac from adversity.  In fact, it seems like the Lord used adversity in Isaac’s life to accomplish particular goals.

Did you know that the Lord has promised to take care of you too?  The Lord loved the whole world enough to send Jesus to die for it even though the world rejected Him, and that means you too.  What’s more, if you have accepted Christ, you have become a member of the family of God.  It’s true!  Read Romans and check it out for yourself.  If God loved you enough to die for you while you were still His enemy, how much more do you think He watches out for you now that you’re part of the family? Yes, we still have adversity.  The Lord uses it for specific reasons to get things done with us that need to be done, but it’s not our destiny.  If you get nothing else out of the podcast today, at least remember that.

Welcome back, Internet friends!  This morning I’m reading in Genesis 25 about the transition between the story of Abraham to the story if Isaac and his family.  There are a few interesting pieces of information here about the way Abraham finished his walk with God, and then the story shifts to his kids.  I think the way that Isaac and Ishmael were able to reconcile with each other to bury their dad is a nice moment.  They hadn’t gotten along earlier in life, but they can lay that aside for the sake of their family.

And speaking of family, this chapter also deals a bit with the root of the dysfunction in Isaac’s family about the treatment of their kids.  Jacob and Esau are going to have a rough time with each other for a while!  This brings up one of the great things about the Bible that I really appreciate, which is that the Bible doesn’t whitewash the characters and pretend that everyone is perfect. The Bible doesn’t hold back the fact that Abraham had concubines, and that Isaac and Rebekah didn’t treat their kids equally, and that Jacob and Esau could be really awful sometimes.  We need to know things like this, because we need to be able to relate to real people who were saved by God for their faith, not for their perfect lives.

That’s all for me this morning.  Check back tomorrow for another episode, and don’t forget to look me up on the iTunes store if that’s how you manage your podcasts.

Welcome back!   This morning we’re covering the chapter where Abraham sends his servant out to find a bride for his son Isaac.  Abraham is adamant that the girl come from his extended family, since he knows they are worshippers of God, and that his son stay in Canaan, since that is where God wanted the to be.  As it happens, everything works out for the servant, and he find exactly who he’s looking for in Rebekah, and he makes his way back to bring her to Isaac.

An interesting thing about this chapter that I didn’t get into in the recording is that it is also in a way talking about the church being the bride of Christ.  Just as Isaac is the son of the promise made to Abraham, Jesus is the son of God promised to the world to take away sin.  Just as Rebekah is pure and chaste, the church is purified by the blood of Christ and cleansed from sin.  Just as the servant gives Rebekah gifts to prove his good intentions, God gives us the Holy Spirit to prove His own intentions to one day bring the church into heaven.  There are certainly a lot of connections to be made.

So long for now.  I’ll have another episode up next Tuesday.  Please leave you comments here on this site and let me know what you think about the podcast or about the things going on in Genesis.  See you all again next week!

Well, today we’re covering a sad chapter in Abraham’s life.  His wife, Sarah, dies in this passage, and Abraham goes to bury her.  He arranges to buy a field with a grave, and that grave will later become the burial place for a number of Hebrew patriarchs.  I think the way the people who live with Abraham respond to his tragedy is really cool.  They all came out to support him, even though he wasn’t a part of their culture.  I think that says a lot about the way Abraham lived with his neighbors and the way we ought to live with our own.  Abraham was always seeking to resolve conflict, even when it meant that he would seem to loose something.  Is that how you live?  It’s something for us all to think about if living as a good representation of Christ is important to us.

Today’s post is a bit short, but there isn’t quite enough time for another chapter, so we’ll live with it.  Comment below about anything that stuck out in your mind in this chapter, and we’ll talk about it.

Happy Tuesday and welcome back.  For the first recording of the week we get to jump into Genesis 22, which is a really cool chapter.  That’s sort of a weird thing to say about an episode in someone’s life when they intend to sacrifice their own son, but there’s something going on in between the lines of the text that points over and over again to Christ that makes this a really interesting chapter.  Plus, spoiler, Isaac lives.

As I said, this chapter points to Christ in many ways.  It’s important to remember that really the whole Old Testament points to Christ in general.  Sure, there are things that aren’t specifically prophetic in the Old Testament, but the big undercurrent of the scriptures is about Christ.  He’s the thing that the whole collection of literature in the Old Testament is leading up to and anticipating.  Why is this important?  I think it’s important because if we want to understand what the Bible says about Jesus, there’s a lot more to the story than just the Gospels!  If Christ is woven all through the pages of the entire Bible, then the entire Bible is what we ought to be studying if we want to know Christ.

That’s it for me this morning. Leave some comments and thoughts wherever you find this podcast so we can talk about the Bible together.

Also, if you’d rather get this podcast in iTunes, here’s the link:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mikeblog-blog-morning-bible/id1052517888

Hello again everyone, and welcome back for the last podcast episode for the week.  This morning in Genesis 21 it looks like Abraham’s life is turning into a soap opera.  The mothers of his two children turn on each other, and one of the kids has to go!  Oh no!  How will God work things out?  You’ll just have to listen and see, or else read your Bible.  Abraham also makes an agreement to the kind go the land he’s living in that they will live peaceable and honestly with each other in this chapter, and that’s not a bad example.  Even among people who believe differently from us, we should live in such a way that people will say that Christians make good neighbors and friends.

Again in this chapter, like in many of the ones we’ve covered so far, we read of people having to learn to trust God.  I think the reason that this theme appears so many times in the Bible (we’re just in the first book!) is that it is something that people have to learn by iteration and repetition.  We have to go through difficulty with God’s help enough times that we learn to trust Him, and that’s not something we can just pick up by reading about it.

That’s all for me this week.  Have a good weekend and check back next week for another episode.

Happy Wednesday!  This morning we’re in Genesis chapter 20.  This chapter records an event that was a lot like the time Abraham went to Egypt and told everyone there that Sarah was his sister.  So, Abraham is up to his old tricks and naturally it goes badly because it’s always a bad idea to lie and to not trust God for provision.

The great thing about God though, is that when He promises something, He’s going to see it done no matter what, and He is happy to forgive mistakes when we repent.  There’s no one faithful like God, and so Abraham finds forgiveness even though the circumstance he was in was the result of his own foolishness.

That’s all for today.  Check back tomorrow for the next episode.

Whoa! Genesis 19 is a crazy chapter.  All kinds of strange things happen in this part of the Bible.  There’s angels, crazy mobs, fire raining from heaven, and even incest!  It’s a really wacky story that illustrates how crazy things can get when we choose to live for ourselves instead of living for God.  Make no mistake, even well raised people, like Lot in this chapter, are capable of really poor decisions if they allow their moral compass to drift.

But there are some really great high points to this chapter as well.  God doesn’t give up on Lot, even though Lot has more or less forgotten God.  God is faithful enough to save Lot, even though he doesn’t seem to want to be saved at times.  That’s a great lesson to remember.  Even when we aren’t faithful, God, the definer of faithfulness, will always be faithful.  I don’t know about you, but that’s good news to me.

Check back in tomorrow for another chapter.  Also, this podcast is now available through the iTunes store here:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mikeblog-blog-morning-bible/id1052517888

Hello again, and happy Day Before Friday Day!  In this chapter we have a repeat of God’s promise that Abraham will have a son, and we have some foreshadowing of what’s going to happen in Sodom and Gomorrah.  Yes, there is sort of a cliffhanger ending at the end of the chapter, but we all know what’s coming for those two cities.  There’s a point in there though, and it’s this: God is very merciful.  God is more merciful than we give Him credit for, but ultimately there must be justice, so that mercy can’t go on forever.

So when does God’s mercy end?  Well, we know God wants all people to be with Him, and we know God goes to extraordinary efforts to reach people no matter what their circumstances are, so I think God’s mercy goes as far as it possibly can until God knows that more mercy will do no good.  That’s my theory anyway.

See you all next week for the next episode!  Have a great weekend, and leave me lots of comments.

Hump Daaaaaay.  Yes, it’s Wednesday.  It’s that sad day when we all realize that we have half a week left before we hit the weekend, and we all mourn collectively on the way to work.  But look on the bright side!  There’s another podcast episode available!  Wooo!

Anyway, in this chapter God doubles down on His promise to Abraham (name change!) and Sarah (also name change!) to make their descendants into a nation, and He also restates His promise to give Ishmael a similar blessing as well.  So blessings are doled out all around.  Also, that circumcision thing is introduced into the Bible in this chapter.  I’m sure Abraham and Ishmael would have preferred that God choose funny hats instead of circumcision, but they go along with it anyway, because that’s what God had chosen to be the physical sign of being part of His covenant with Abraham.

Don’t forget to check back tomorrow for the next episode!  There’s some interesting stuff in the next chapter, and I’m not giving anything away here, so you’d just have to listen to tomorrow’s recording to find out what happens.  You could also just read your Bible.  In any case, see you tomorrow.