Links from the bunny trail

These first three are from a new blog I stumbled upon and really enjoyed; the last is from an article I found when I was searching for some help in understanding difficult passages I was reading in Judges.  I hope they bless your mind and heart too.

The Corners of Life That Are Laden with Cobwebs 

Boy, she puts her finger on it when she says of the draw of social media, “These mediums are places without toilets.”  And the bottom line of dissatisfied envy:  “Wherever you are, you still have to clean the toilet.”

Believing Doesn’t Make It Real

You may assume about me, as about the author, that because I believe in Jesus, I have never asked hard questions; that I have never done wicked things; that I’ve never wondered if it was all a made-up story; that I’ve never investigated competing claims about the universe; that I’ve never suffered deep grief.  In both cases, you would be wrong.  Yes, the claims of Christians (Miracles? Rising from the dead?!) seem fanciful and laughable.  But I have wondered the same things you have, struggled with doubt and skepticism…and have landed in the same place as the author.  “I do believe this Christ business.”

Choice Cargo: Or, What Planned Parenthood and the Slave Trade Had in Common

Far be it from me to hold or blog any controversial positions, but really, I can’t see how anyone can argue with the logic of this comparison, which is grievously obvious.  We are all willfully blind when we need to be, aren’t we?  Though particular evils will come and go throughout the duration of this fallen world, let us take heart (and warning) that God’s definition of good and evil doesn’t fluctuate with the times, and in the end, His Kingdom will triumph.

Counting With God

This is actually academic enough to start with an abstract, but I particularly found interesting and helpful the sections beginning with “One Tribe Short of Twelve.”  Basically, numbers in the Bible are significant. For example, the repeated references to the number eleven in Judges indicates the ominous absence of a single tribe; Bejon argues, the tribe of Levi—the erstwhile religious leaders in Israel.  It is a man of Levi who hands over a woman to be treated horrifically in the most disturbing passage of Scripture I can think of (Judges 19).  This incident leads to civil war, and Bejon’s analysis is a recognition of the import of biblical numbers.  

Note first of all how many Israelites fall in the first two days’ battles.  The Benjaminites slay 40,000 out of the Israelites’ 400,000 men (Judges 20:17-26), which seems significant.  The Levites’ presence in Israel is supposed to cost Israel a tenth of their produce (Numbers 18:21-24), not a tenth of their men.  Something is very wrong in terms of the Levites’ effect on Israel.

In other words, there is a lot of meaning to be gleaned from lists of figures in the Bible, and Bejon encourages us to do the work to uncover it, rather than just letting our eyes glaze over these challenging sections.