Sunday, January 24

Good evening, friends. A nice, relaxing Sunday I had today. We got to visit our friend Jess to celebrate her engagement, and plus I had McDonalds for dinner. Yes!

Reading for January 24
Genesis 48:1-49:33
Again in this section, there is a lot of words, but not a lot of things going on. Three main things happen here:

1) Jacob blesses Jospeh's sons, and implies that the younger of his two sons will carry on the great lineage of Abraham.
2) Jacob blesses all of his sons and predicts (or tells them) where they will end up and what kind of people they will have in their respective towns. This effectively creates the 12 tribes of Israel.
3) Jacob dies.

Matthew 15:29-16:12
Here again there are three main things that happen:

1) Jesus heals a huge group of people
2) He feeds four thousand men with seven loaves of bread
3) He calls out the Pharisees and Saducees again.

As I'm reading this every day, I'm seeing that in almost every chapter Jesus has some harsh words for the Pharisees and Saducees. These, again, were the religious leaders of the day, obsessed with upholding the law, but neglecting to get the real message: Love God and love people. One thing I've learned is that the more often something happens in the Bible, the more important it is. Especially if Jesus is the one doing it. That's not to say we should be going out and finding people like this and yelling "Hypocrites!" in their face, rather to avoid that type of behavior - to actually focus on our relationship with God and setting our hearts on helping people. Yeah...

Psalm 20:1-9
This psalm is yet another praising type psalm. Beautiful imagery, but at the end its revealed that David is praying specifically for a king.

 ⁹ Give victory to our king, O Lord!
      Answer our cry for help.

Now that I look at it, its a little sketchy...There is a lot of language about how God will answer all of 'your' prayers and that he will give us anything 'you' desire.  I suppose, 'you' being the reader of the psalm. So hes kind of convincing himself, it seems like, that God will answer this specific prayer.

I know that God doesn't give us the desires of our heart if that's not what he wants for us. We have such limited sight and what we want may or may not be good for us. Context, son. All in context.

Proverbs 4:20-27
emo.

 ²³ Guard your heart above all else,
      for it determines the course of your life.

Alright, duders. Bedtime once again. I've been talking to a few people about this project recently and they have said that they enjoy reading my entries because its like a Cliffs Notes version of the Bible. I think thats great that you're reading this, but just remember that my interpretations are coming from a VERY uneducated standpoint, Biblically speaking. I would encourage all of you to read on your own. But, in the mean time, please use the comment fields below each entry to ask any questions or debate me on any points.

Love you, friends.
Brandon