Moïse >>>>>>

Una de las historias más épicas y características de la biblia. Tan icónica que no ha sido replicable con justicia.

En esta secuela tenemos un protagonista más claro, Moisés. Aunque también tenemos uno lateral: la promesa de Dios a Abraham.

Acá venís el cumplimiento de la primera profecía y donde en Génesis se nos dio una pequeña muestra de un plan, en este segundo libro ya podemos ver una parte importante del rompecabezas: la formación de una nación escogida y reconocida salida literalmente del fango, pasado por las llamas. Un comienzo que no sería olvidado fácilmente: esclavos con un Dios que desafío al mayor imperio conocido y lo dejó en la ruina. El temor y reputación de todo el mundo sería innegable.

Luego se presentan leyes como fundación de esta nación, leyes que para nuestros tiempos suenan triviales, otras escandalosas (dado el contexto del tiempo entendibles), pero por sobre todo, muy pero muy adelantadas a su tiempo. Daban el fundamento de una nación disciplinada y orgánica, en medio de civilizaciones que surgían y caían como moscas. Eso es lo interesante de esta parte.

Quedo un tanto inconcluso pero con un final mémorable relatando las señales de protección de la nube de día y la columna de fuego de noche.

I read this as an ebook accompanied by David Cochran Heath's audiobook. I found this volume to be much easier to get through, now that I have gotten somewhat familiar with how biblical stories are told. Important stories of the Passover and Ten Commandments were detailed here, as well as the general establishment of Jewish traditions.

Sidenote: The reason for such vague and short and "eh" words on each of these books, is because I wasn't challenging the study of the Bible when I read these. I was challenging myself to read the whole Bible in a year because I knew it would be discipline to keep at it daily. I do, however, plan to pick up a book and study what it is saying. Those will be longer reads and more notes.

So here is my review from my "Read the Bible in a Year" challenge. Usually just snippets of thoughts and random things I liked about the book itself. Nothing in-depth.

So here is my review on Exodus.

Exodus means to leave, basically. With that being said, this book is all about the freeing of the Jews from slavery. The Egyptians enslaved them because they were scared they were all going to kill them since they had a lot more people than them.

Oh okay.

The story of Moses happens in this book; if you don’t know this story, you can watch on of my favorite childhood movies called Prince of Egypt and you’ll get the idea of what happened.

OR YOU COULD READ THIS BOOK THAT IS AN IDEA WORTH HAVING.

Moses was the worst. He couldn’t do anything himself. I don’t understand why he was so scared of everything and had to have his brother do all the confrontational things.

Even though he couldn’t do anything on his own, God still picked him to be His mouth to his chosen people. Isn’t that amazing? What do you think God could use you for?

The Plagues are LITERALLY THE SO SCARY. Just read chapters 07-12 and you’ll see that God isn’t all rainbows and daisies. He is literally an angry God while being a peaceful God. How is that possible? Well, He’s God so…

What I find questionable is that God loves all of his creation; so, why did he continue to harden the heart of Pharaoh? He created him. Did He condemn him hell just to show people He can do really cool things (because wow yes He can)?

It makes you wonder if He ended up saving the Pharaoh or if he just is collateral damage.

ANYWAY.

Then there’s the whole golden calve thing that the Israelites really just screwed over. Like “Oh we just saw God do all these cool things and save us from slavery, but let’s worship a god we saw Aaron make with all of our jewelry.”

Cool guys.

Then again, is that showing us how easily we stray from the path? I mean we can say that they are stupid all we want, but I bet we have some similar situations that we don’t even know about. We can worship different types of things and it not be a statue of a cow.

A lot of this book is about the strictness of the rules they have to follow. How they have to make things to the inch of what God wanted with specific material or it doesn’t count.

Imagine if we had to do all the churches in the world like they talk about in Exodus.

That would be SUPER crazy.

I’m glad we have the freedom we do.

I love the story of Moses, even if Moses kind of annoys me sometimes.
And Aaron. Joshua is my rock.

It's crazy how quickly the escape from slavery happens compared to how much space/detail is given over to the tabernacle design/construction... this is no airport paperback novel.

"God hardened Pharaoh's heart" - perhaps not as problematic as it's made out to be. It's a special historical circumstance, and Pharaoh is exceedingly cruel, having hardened his own heart several times prior to God's hardening it. If it were said of Hitler when his project of systematically exterminating the Jews was already well underway that God hardened his heart, we wouldn't make much of it - that heart was already pretty damn hard. So it's hard to pull a soteriology out of it, or make any broad statements about free will or lack thereof. The point, I think, is more to say that the farther you go down a path the harder it will be for you to turn back - and that God uses it to his advantage either way whether you're for or against him.

Also interesting to me is that God winds up in a position where he must choose the lesser of two evils - wiping out an unfaithful Israel who has broken covenant to worship the golden calf, or keeping his promise and curtailing his retributive justice - and that Moses arguing with him on this point is how God's character really comes to the fore.

And I suppose the length and detail of the tabernacle passages emphasizes for me that God's desire and ultimate design is to dwell with his people in the here-and-now - and the other things that "salvation" is typically reduced to miss this point. Nothing so far in the OT suggests a sort of spiritual/Platonic afterlife, or far-future paradise, that might typically come to mind. It's not about "going to heaven" or "being saved", or even "having faith" per se. Nor is it about an individual's spiritual well-being, being atoned for and having peace of mind or whatever. It's about being together again, reconciled right here, right now, even if the incompleteness of this reconciliation suggests there will be something more total later on.

Moses :D