Daily Bread, Bible in a Year — Day 7

Today is Saturday, October 24th, and this is Daily Bread, Bible in a Year, thanks for tuning in.

Welcome to Daily Bread, Bible in a Year. It's Saturday, day 7, and it's time to look back on the week.

Ben: Grace, one week in, and we've already gone from 'In the beginning' all the way to a mountainside where Jesus says 'Blessed are the poor in spirit.' That's quite a distance.

Grace: It really is. When I step back, Genesis feels like this huge sweep. God makes everything good, then it unravels. Adam and Eve hide, Cain kills Abel, violence fills the earth, there's the flood, and then Babel, where people try to build their way up to heaven.

Ben: And it keeps scattering outward. Then suddenly the camera zooms in on one man. Abram. God says go, and I will bless you, and through you all the families of the earth will be blessed.

Grace: That shift surprised me. After all that cosmic drama, it narrows to one elderly couple with no children.

Ben: So what stuck with you this week?

Grace: Honestly, Hagar. She's a servant, she's mistreated, she runs into the desert. And God finds her there. She's the one who names him 'the God who sees me.' Nobody else in that household really sees her, but he does.

Ben: That's beautiful. For me it was the covenant ceremony. Animals cut in half, and normally both parties walk between the pieces, as if to say, may this happen to me if I break my word. But Abram falls into a deep sleep, and only God passes through, as a smoking firepot and a flaming torch.

Grace: So God takes the whole weight of the promise on himself.

Ben: Exactly. Keep that in mind, because it comes back.

Grace: Can we talk about the hard parts, though? The flood is not an easy read. And Abram, the man of faith, passes his wife off as his sister. Twice I wanted to say, Abram, what are you doing?

Ben: And Sarah laughs when she hears she'll have a son.

Grace: Which I kind of understand. She's ninety.

Ben: Right. But I think that's the point. Genesis doesn't polish its heroes. The flood shows how seriously God takes evil, and then he hangs his bow in the sky and promises never to do it again. Abram shows that the promise doesn't rest on how good the people are. It rests on God.

Grace: And God's answer to Sarah's laugh is the question 'Is anything too hard for the Lord?'

Ben: Which is a great bridge into Matthew.

Grace: Okay, walk me through it. Because Matthew opens with a genealogy, and I'll be honest, my eyes started to glaze over.

Ben: Fair! But listen to the first line. 'The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.' In Greek, 'genealogy' is genesis. Matthew is basically saying, here's a new Genesis.

Grace: Oh, I love that. And the son of Abraham, so this is the promised blessing showing up.

Ben: And who comes to worship him first? Magi from the east. People from the nations. At Babel the nations scattered, and here they're being drawn back toward one child.

Grace: And the genealogy has women in it, doesn't it? Tamar, Rahab, Ruth. Outsiders. It's like Hagar all over again, God seeing the people on the edges.

Ben: Yes. Then Jesus' baptism. He comes up out of the water, and the Spirit descends like a dove. In Genesis the Spirit hovers over the waters at creation, and after the flood Noah sends out a dove to find new ground.

Grace: So it's a new creation moment.

Ben: A new beginning standing in the water. And then the temptation. Adam was in a lush garden and doubted what God had said. Jesus is in a barren wilderness, hungry, and he answers every temptation with God's word.

Grace: He succeeds right where Adam failed.

Ben: And remember God walking alone through the pieces? In Jesus, God keeps the covenant from our side as well as his own.

Grace: So when he sits down and starts saying 'blessed, blessed, blessed'...

Ben: It's the blessing promised to Abraham, finally being handed out. And not to the impressive. To the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek. 'The meek shall inherit the earth.' That's land promise language.

Grace: That moves me, because those are exactly the kind of people Genesis kept showing us. Barren Sarah. Runaway Hagar. People who couldn't fix things themselves.

Ben: Which is all of us, really.

Grace: So here's a question to carry into the new week. Where are you trying to build your own Babel, reaching up on your own strength, when God is already offering you blessing as a gift?

That's the week in review. Tomorrow we'll preview the week ahead. See you then.

Thanks for listening. Please subscribe to this podcast if you find it helpful, and please tell your friends. This reading plan repeats every two weeks so anyone can start on their own timeline, for all shows and plans, please check the show notes.