October 25th

Exodus 35:1-36:38, Mark 7:31-8:13, Psalm 25:16-22

A quick break today to look at a couple of the things that we have seen a bit of recently but skipped over.

For starters, what on earth is a wave offering? It sounds like when we take the offering at church and then wave it around in front of everyone. Well, that is exactly what it is, usually the best cut of meat that confirmed a covenant between God and his people. It was often waved by the priest and a lot of the time (although the one in todays reading is to make the tabernacle) it then went to the priests for them to eat.

Then the tabernacle? This is the collective name for what we have seen described over the last few days with all the curtains and tents and lampstands put together. It is the dwelling place of God in the eyes of the Israelites. They would pack this up each time they moved and carry the whole thing around, then when they reached the next camp this would be the first thing that was set up. It might of looked a bit like this.

© Wikipedia

For me, the other thing that has cropped up throughout the gospels is the idea that Jesus told the people that he healed not to say a word to anyone – why on earth not? There are a number of theories on this, but throughout our reading so far we have seen that huge crowds followed him around. The more that people heard, the more that there would have been a crowd around and he wouldn’t have been able to preach the gospel. Added to that, if he had been labelled as the Messiah straight away, his ministry would have been very different. Jesus had a task to fulfil a ministry that would tell the whole world he was the Messiah and to a death that would save all people from sin. Too many people would have limited this ministry and so he needed a bit of space.

So a brief pause to look in detail at a couple of things that occur in our readings, we could spend hours on this each day but it does help us to understand the bigger picture of our reading of the whole Bible.