Introduction and first story

Introduction: Here I Lay My Ebenezer

Okay, here’s one more blog among the perhaps millions of blogs that are out there these days. What makes mine different? Well, you’ll have to be the judge of whether or not this blog is worthy to stand out among the others. What I plan to do is tell Bible stories. I’m not going to be telling the ones like David and Goliath and Jonah and the Whale that you’ve heard all your life if you’ve grown up in church. I’m going to be telling stories you may have missed.

Now, I have to admit that I don’t really know what you’ve missed. I know that my imaginary target audience might not actually have any real people in it. I’m going to be telling Bible stories I only think large numbers of Christians may not be aware of, even if they, like me, believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God and that its stories are actual history—things that really happened, even if they are miraculous or unexplainable. The stories I end up choosing may be ones you are actually very familiar with, and I may skip ones you don’t have a clue exist.
I feel a need to add this disclaimer: I am not trying to show off or say, “Look how much Bible I know!” or “I know more about the Bible than you do!.” It is only that I love God’s Word and I want to share it.

I plan to tell these stories in the same conversational style I’m using in my introduction. I don’t want to sound like a stuffy theologian, because I’m not one. I have a B.A. in religion, with a concentration in Christian Education. I really don’t use my degree, though, not for a career. As for my career, most of it has been as a housewife and mother. But I do have a job these days as an alarm dispatcher. If you set off your burglary alarm in your house some weekend night, you never know, I may be calling you. That doesn’t have anything to do with theology, but it does give me time to do a blog, because most of the time that I’m on the clock, I’m sitting at my workstation and nobody is setting off any alarms. (By the way, I bring my own laptop to work with me.)

I’m not going to rely on my own memory to tell these stories, because I am not, as I said, a stuffy theologian. I will be looking carefully at the Bible to make sure I get the details right, and I am checking commentaries to see what others have said about these stories. I don’t understand all the stories, so sometimes I really need to see another perspective, just to make some sense of them. If something doesn’t make sense to me, I won’t be able to write about it in a way that makes any sense to anybody else, and that’s the last thing I want to do, to post a blog entry that leaves people scratching their heads and saying “What?” That’s not to say it will never happen. I only hope it doesn’t. What I am using for commentaries are the public domain commentaries available on crosswalk.com. And here I’m going to give an unsolicited recommendation for that web site. It’s probably one of the most awesome Christian web sites out there.

I met a lady on Crosswalk who may help me with some of the research for some of these stories, a grandma from Seattle who is very knowledgeable and who writes very well. Actually, I’ve never met her in real life—never been farther west than South Dakota— but I’ve conversed with her through Crosswalk. I’m looking forward to possibly working with her on this.

Some of the inspiration for this blog came from an article I once read about why we shouldn’t be singing certain songs in church. Most of what the author had to say had substance, and concerned various theological problems contained in the lyrics. But then the article went on to name the hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” as a problem song. Their beef: the obscure Bible reference in the line, “Here I lay my Ebenezer.”

Now I had a problem with the article, and it wasn’t just that it was now attacking one of my favorite hymns. Nor was it that the writer wasn’t correct that the average person in the pews wouldn’t have a clue what was meant by laying an Ebenezer. It was the solution offered: Don’t sing the song.

What? Deny people the opportunity of hearing and singing one of the most beautiful hymns of the church because they don’t understand something? Is this not grossly impoverishing? Are there no teachers in our churches? Would not perhaps a short explanation or even reading the few verses from 1Samuel to which the line refers be better? That way, people would be enriched in at least two ways. First and foremost, they would have learned something from God’s Word, and second, they could sing with understanding a rich and meaningful hymn.

Another source of inspiration is my late mother, Lois. When I was a child, she taught the Bible to my siblings and me. Her teaching went far beyond the “old standbys” of Noah’s Ark, David and Goliath, and Jonah and the Whale. While she did tell us those stories (without leaving out the part of Jonah where he went out to watch Nineveh be destroyed), she also made sure we knew about David’s wife Abigail, Elijah and the still, small voice, and Elisha’s double portion of power. I even remember as a child hearing the story of what happened when David longed for water from the well of his hometown, Bethlehem. She also encouraged us to read the Bible on our own, offering us as children five dollars for reading the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Five dollars was worth more in those days.

A third source of inspiration is a sermon I once heard about the Assyrian attack on Judah during the reign of King Hezekiah. I do not remember a lot about that sermon, but I do remember the minister saying that God must have really wanted us to know that story, because it is told in detail in the Bible three times. In thinking about that statement, I also realized that that story would also be considered to be obscure. But God put it in the Scripture three times. Another story that’s all over the Old Testament, referred to in Psalms several times, but hardly ever referred to in church, is the defeat of Og, King of Bashan and Sihon, King of the Amorites. Since God put it in the Scriptures, I think it would please Him if we took a look at what He gave us.
God gave us His Word and carefully preserved it for us over thousands of years of time, despite many attempts by man to rid ourselves of it. May this blog inspire you to pick up your Bible, wipe off the dust, and read for yourself the awesome things inside.


Story One: When the Honorable Becomes Temporarily Dishonorable

What do you do when someone you have loved and respected all your life, someone you know to be a better man than any you have ever met before, suddenly does something stupid? That will happen. No human being, other than Jesus Christ Himself, has ever gone through life without sinning, without doing something dishonorable at some point. So what do you do when you see somebody do that that you thought was above that? Do you continue to admire them, or do they lose your respect? My first story deals with that question, and when we look a little deeper, it will go far beyond it.

Beginning with Genesis, I looked, chapter by chapter to find the first story that I imagined a lot of people who didn’t know much about the Bible would not be familiar with. First there was Creation, then Adam and Eve, then Cain and Abel. Those are not obscure. Then you have some amazing genealogies; amazing because those people lived an incredibly long time, an average of about 807 years, not including Enoch, who lived 365 years before being taken to heaven without dying at all. Most of them lived longer than that average, but Lamech, the father of Noah, brought the average down by living only a paltry 777 years. This is fascinating, and I take it to be absolute fact because the world was new and sin hadn’t taken as much of a toll on humanity yet. But it doesn’t lend itself well to becoming a narrative, especially not my first narrative, when I’m hoping to get people’s attention so they’ll read more of them. On to the next chapter, where I found a story that would fit, and it’s very interesting. But it’s short and hard to understand. I may come back to it when I’ve had more practice telling these stories.

And next is Noah.

Of course, we all know about Noah, the guy who built the ark and who saved his family and all those animals from the worldwide flood God sent. He was the only righteous man left in the world, so God chose to save him.

We know about the 40 days’ and 40 nights’ storm, and about Noah sending out a dove to test and see if the floodwaters had gone down enough.

We know that eventually he came out of the ark, made a sacrifice to God, and that God put a rainbow in the sky as a promise that the earth would never again be destroyed by flood.
Yeah, a lot of us know that story. It’s a great story, and Noah was quite a hero. I even named one of my children after him. (My son got a little tired of Noah’s Ark jokes when he was little.).
But most of us who heard that story in Sunday School as children don’t realize that Noah’s story doesn’t end with the rainbow. There’s a little more after it.

As the years went by after the flood, Noah’s family began to grow. Apparently he himself didn’t have anymore children, he and Mrs. Noah being on up there in years, but his sons’ wives all became very busy having babies. And Noah got a hankering for growing some grapes, which he did. And he took those grapes, stomped them out, and made himself some wine. And then, having worked so hard, he took it upon himself to enjoy what he had produced.

He enjoyed it a little overmuch.

Okay, maybe he enjoyed it a lot overmuch.

Anyway, Noah, the man who at the command of God spent 120 years building an ark when nobody had ever seen rain before, who had come through this incredible disaster and saved not only himself but his family as well and every species of animal just because God had told him to do it and he believed God, was passed out drunk, lying naked in his tent.

A little later, Noah’s son Ham, by this time a father of several sons himself, went in the tent to see his dad. And then he got the shock of his life!

He went back out of the tent and found his brothers, Shem and Japheth. “Hey, guys, you’re never going to believe this!” And he told them what he’d discovered. I imagine, because most theologians imagine, that he was laughing the whole time he was telling them.

Shem and Japheth, however, were not amused.

One of them found an extra robe, and they headed for Noah’s tent. When they got to the door, instead of going directly inside, they turned toward the outside and held the robe up between them. They walked backward into Noah’s tent, carefully covering their father up without looking at him.

After a while, Noah woke up and sobered up enough to ask, “Where’d this robe come from?” And somebody told him the whole story.

Noah wasn’t amused by Ham’s behavior, either. He took it as a sign of extreme disrespect, and what Shem and Jacob did as good and proper respect for their aging father. Noah then uttered a horrible prophecy, a curse on Ham’s son Canaan, and blessings on Shem and Japheth. Shem would be faithful to God, and Japheth would have a lot of territory. Canaan, however, would be the lowest kind of servant.

Those who heard this prophecy understood that Noah wasn’t really talking about Shem and Japheth and their poor nephew, who hadn’t even been a part of the story. Noah was talking about their descendants.

Thousands of years later, Europeans read this part of the Bible and concluded that since Ham was the father of the Black race—and he was—that justified their enslaving of Black people. This was a false teaching, a twisting of Scripture to attempt to justify an unjustifiable thing. But this idea persisted and has troubled race relations to this day. The book of Joshua details exactly how this prophecy, in regards to Canaan, was fulfilled, and it has nothing to do with the people of Africa. I know, you’re probably thinking, “Oh, now I get it. The Canaanites were wiped out in Joshua.” Well, not quite all of them. Noah’s prophecy wasn’t that Canaan’s descendants would be wiped out, but that they’d become the lowliest of servants. I’ll tell that story another time. I’ve always liked it. I remember my mother telling it when I was a child, and it was a terrific story about a very ingenious group of people most people have never heard of. They were definitely clever, and I can’t help but like them. And, in researching for this blog, I was amazed to learn that the curse eventually became an incredible blessing. I’ll explain when I tell that story.
But people misapplying the Scripture aside, this story begs the question—why was Canaan punished at all? Why did he and his descendants have to bear the punishment for something his father did? Those descendants of Canaan may not have been disrespectful to Noah, but they weren’t innocent. Nobody is innocent. We’re all sinful, and we all deserve God’s wrath. He has mercy on us because He chooses to, and not because we deserve it. God doesn’t owe anyone continued life. He doesn’t owe us anything. All of us have sinned against Him and He’d be perfectly justified in wiping all of us out. Instead of wiping us out He sent His Son to take His wrath instead of us, so that we can be justified before Him. Why did God do that? I don’t know. I mean, I know it’s because He loves us, but why does He love us? It must be because He is love, because it certainly isn’t because we are loveable in His eyes. I know that isn’t popular these days, but it’s the Gospel Truth.

My next post won't be quite so long. I was doing two things at once in this post. Next time will just be one story. Hope you liked this one. See you next time (if I can remember how to get into this blog.):)