Tale #53 – No Quarrel

Bard & Bible

Between a planned trip out to New Jersey to see my family over the holiday weekend and an assortment of work and health (both mental and physical) issues, I had another instance of spending more time in a text than my original scheduling offered me. As usual, God has used that time to help me understand something about the text that I didn’t see the first time around.

Genesis 13 was originally going to be an easy skip over in this story-by-story run through of the book. It’s a transition chapter. It closes up what happened in Genesis 12 by returning our characters to exactly the place they left. It hints at the darkness and awful recounting of Genesis 14 by talking about how awful the people were and that these events happened before God burned it to the ground. So why are we here in a transition chapter besides the literary nerds talking about grammatical structure?

We’re bringing back the “middle people” audience here to talk about the way these literary structures turn the knife on their bad behavior, and how reflecting their divisions and complaints about how they had it better in Egypt points to how small a view we have of God – cuz if we believed He is big enough to fulfill his promises, maybe we’d spend less time complaining about how it looks like somebody is screwing us over and more time saying “God will do what God will do. Let us not quarrel about it.”

I reference a piece of a sermon video I saw from Derwin L. Gray. You can see that here.