God Sightings Week 12, Mar. 21st – 27th.
March 17, 2010 by adamraylawson
Filed under God Sightings
Old Testament: Numbers 30:1 – Deut. 6:25
- There is an interesting statement made by God in Deut. 2:9, “the LORD said to me: ‘Do not harass Moab or engage them in battle, for I will not give you any of its land as a possession, since I have given Ar as a possession to the descendants of Lot.’” (NRSV) Here we see God blessing the descendants of Lot, even though Lot never really shows himself to be much a godly man. (His story was found in Gen. 19.) However, he was related to Abraham which shows another level of fulfillment concerning Abraham’s offspring and those connected to him. God shows his faithfulness even to those that are far from “the Way.” Those that were not against Abraham had God’s blessing on their lives.
New Testament: Luke 4:1 – Luke 7:35
- In these first few versus of Luke 4 we have another story of the temptation of Jesus. The order of the tests are different than in Matthew; but the tests themselves are the same. One interesting point is that the entire episode took 40 days. Numerology is an interesting and important study in Scripture. One of the repeated numbers that shows itself is 40: 40 days of rain (in the J source of the flood, over a year in the P source, they are both intertwined together in Genesis. You have to read carefully to see it), Isaac and Esau married at 40, Moses’ life was divided into 40 year segments, according to the Koran a man gains his strength at 40 years of age, etc. Forty has the connotation of completeness and maturity. It is considered to be the age of a generation; hence the 40 years of wandering/testing of the Israelites in the wilderness, of which Jesus’ 40 days is probably meant to remind us of. These 40 days signify that Jesus has matured and is ready to start the next stage of his life/ministry which will be reaching out to others and doing the work of God. Because the number 40 occurs in so many places in the Bible; it should probably not be taken as a literal 40 days, but rather as a literary device that communicates to the reader (you) the importance of what is taking place in the story. While we don’t write that way in our culture; in the Near Eastern culture that the Bible was written in, it was quite common. Have you had your “40 days” with God? Have you reached a place of maturity in your relationship with Him that you can move out amongst the crowd and be a help and serve them? Some of us come to Christ so beaten down that He has to spend a lot of time helping us mature, and healing us, so that we can go out. This can happen multiple times in the course of our lives. But never forget that growth and maturity in God is never just for our own sakes. It is so that we can then come back from the desert and be a light to the world.