Church Hopping

This passage is always confusing for me. I don’t really understand the correlation between the three men in Genesis 18 and God. It says the Lord appeared and then the three men, so it seems that these three men were separate from the Lord. I think that this is just a form that the Lord took to speak to Abraham. Maybe this is similar to the other times God has talked to Abraham, but it just never told us how God did it before. I imagine that this has to be something similar to the Angel of the Lord, except in the form of three men. Although the passage says that it is the Lord speaking, I think we are led to believe that the Lord is speaking through these three men.

Apparently Abraham did not mistake them for any one else, as evident by his generosity. I have heard it said that this was just basic common courtesy in this time period, but I find it hard to believe that Abraham, who had hundreds of servants, would single out a random group of men walking down the road. There must have been something about them or maybe there was just something about Abraham that let him recognize God. They were truly in the form of men since they ate the food.

Abraham then starts to taking a very noble, yet annoying attitude. I do admire his love for his fellow man, but I feel like he could have gotten to the bottom line a little faster. Do you really have to go down in increments of ten or can you just ask what is the minimum?

You should get a nice chuckle from this story. Apparently a 33-foot statue of Jesus was struck by lightening last weekend. The lightening broke off one of Jesus’ arms and damaged one of his feet. According to one of the nuns, there were pilgrims on the hill when it happened, so I am sure they are trying to interpret what this means, though Sister Ilaria swears it was just a freak accident. Fortunately the Ghostbusters were on hand and able to bring the statue back to life in an effort to save New York City.

God is going to address in more detail the covenant that He made with Abram a while back. In Genesis 17, God changes Abram to Abraham. A man’s name had quite a bit more significance it seems, especially if he is willing to change it at age 99. That might be hard to get used to. Today we change names more for publicity (see Ocho Cinco) and we generally name our kids for what sounds cute. I think it would be neat if we waited a few weeks to see the kid’s personality and then name them according to that. But that is unlikely to become a popular idea, I guess unless God speaks directly to you. In this chapter he also changes Sarai to Sarah, which makes her the only women in the Bible whose name God changes.

I think I underestimate the value of having a multitude of nations come from me. Generally when we think blessing, we think about what benefits us right now and in monetary value. But if you consider the fact that you are infact going to die and none of your valued stuff will matter to you, then having your name remembered as the father of a multitude of nations sounds good. We still talk about Abraham and he died thousands of years ago. How long until people stop talking about you? A generation or two?

There are a lot of things that God ordered the Israelites to do that might seem weird, but a lot of them were so that they could flourish and avoid being decimated by disease or other natural things. I think the circumcision is definitely one of those since we do it today even for hygiene. Of course at 99 years old I can’t really imagine that experience. And it says every male in the household was circumcised that day. How did that announcement go over? I think I might resist a little if I was a servant. They must have all looked back and laughed at collectively the most miserable day in their lives.

I wonder at what point do you commune so often directly with God that you feel comfortable laughing at one of His statements? God has been promising these offspring for a few years now and I guess Abraham just assumed that it would be through Ishmael. But God once again shows us that He will choose to work through whomever He wants, regardless of convenience.

Bible maps have come a long way from just the ones in the back of your Bible. The last couple of days I have been playing around with the maps over at OpenBible. You can download a Google Earth file that pinpoints every identifiable location mentioned in the Bible. All you have to do is:

1. Download Google Earth
2. Download the kmz file from OpenBible
3. Open the kmz file and Google Earth will automatically fly you over to the Middle East where you will see a bunch of green dots.

Each of these dots is a location from the Bible and clicking on the dot will give you the name and Scripture reference. The entire Bible overlay may be a little too comprehensive, so you can also download a kmz file for each book of the Bible or just view it in Google Maps. For an example, click here to see all the locations mentioned in the Book of Acts on Google Maps. If you are too lazy to download Google Earth you might also want to check out BibleMap.org which is all web-based.

If you are finding it too hard to tear yourself away from the map of the temple in the back of your ESV, then you can also download copies of those which OpenBible overlays onto Google Earth. Basically what I am trying to say is that Sunday School just got a lot cooler.