Scripture to Go

Okay. Show of hands. How many of you derive a secret pleasure from skipping over the “begats” in the Bible? You open your read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year plan and today’s assignment is five long chapters. As soon as you discover the first four contain nothing but genealogy, flip, flip, flip go the pages. Bingo! Presto! Your usual thirty minutes of reading only takes you ten.

I’ll confess, I do that most of the time as well. There are days, however, when I push myself to read every last biblical name in hopes of discovering a hidden treasure. After all, it was a tiny clip of Scripture buried under stacks of names that brought us that little gem called The Prayer of Jabez–a book that went viral before anyone knew what “viral” meant.

Tracking the “Begats”

Why did God make sure these genealogies survived in Scripture until now? I mean, why should we care anymore?

Maybe this inventory of names, so carefully preserved down through the ages, affixes something of a tracking number to God’s promise to the list’s originators. The promise’s fulfillment can be traced by following the names throughout history.

As soon as sin marred the Garden of Eden, God promised Adam and Eve a Seed who would come through them to redeem all the evil they had introduced to the world. A Son of theirs would deliver not only the two of them from death but everyone who proceeded from them. (Genesis 3:15)

Well, that got all the begetting started. Adam begat Cain and Abel. Then, after Cain killed Abel another son, Seth, appeared. Cain begat some “seeds,” but Seth produced the line that carried THE “Seed.”

Soon Seth begat Enosh who begat Canaan who begat some more until Noah showed up. He begat three seeds (Shem, Ham, and Japheth), but Shem carried the promised Seed forward to Abraham to Isaac to Jacob (who was known as Israel). From Israel to Judah to Jesse to David, the names drew a straight line from the “promisees” (Adam and Eve) to the Promised One–Jesus.

Then, all the begetting stops. Or does it? The “Begats” Change Direction

Jesus gave birth to no children in the natural. Yet Paul called him “the firstborn of many children.” (Romans 8:28) If his line was going to continue, the manner of begetting was going to have to change. Instead of giving birth to seeds through a natural womb, Jesus delivers children for his Father through a spiritual portal.

He reaches out his hand to us from his place in the heavenlies and invites us to join him. As our hearts touch him, he draws us out of our old life into a new one, begetting us into his bloodline and making us part of his genealogy. Our names may not appear in Scripture, but they’re recorded, nonetheless–in God’s Book of Life (Philippians 4:3). Merging Bloodlines

It may feel odd to think of merging our bloodlines with his, blotted as ours are with ugly episodes of sin. But Jesus isn’t afraid of our foibles or the bobbles of morality filling our family history. He understands. His own human bloodline was filled with ancestors bent on murder, rape, incest, deceit, jealousy, rage, apostasy, and more.

 Welcome to Scripture to Go. I hope you'll take a moment to pause with me just long enough to taste and see how good the Lord is. Hi, I'm Terry Murphy.

Today we're going to start in Exodus 30 where we find two recipes that produced fragrance in the inner rooms of the Tabernacle. One was for the holy incense burning on the golden altar. The other drifted into the holy place with the anointing oil that permeated the clothing of the high priest and his sons.

So let's start with the four spices on the incense altar. These were stacte (stack-tee), onycha (on-ee-ka), galbanum (gal-bah-num), and pure frankincense. Now, for some of you, these are household words. Your old factory memory is already producing its effect. The rest of us are going to have to work a bit to imagine what they might have smelled like.

So let's start with stacte. This spice probably came from a styrax plant--what some of us might recognize as a snowball or snowball bush. Its white spring flowers smell something like orange blossoms.

Scholars differ on the true source of the second spice, but most agree onycha came from the resin of a rock rose. This tough evergreen ground cover has aromatic leaves that add a musky, almost medicinal smell to the incense.

The third ingredient, galbanum, comes from the same plant family as parsley, fennel, or carrots. It exudes a strong green aroma (think crushed pine needles or snapped green peas).

Finally comes frankincense, collected as tears dripping from the slashed bark of the Boswellia tree, it offers an earthy balsamic aroma that is at once soft, sweet, and citrusy.

These were burned together in only one place--atop the golden altar of incense directly in front of the Holy of Holies. Though the smoke of the incense is often associated with prayer, you might say it also represents the presence of God in fragrance form.

Rich, sweet, healing, homey, comforting, calm. It was an aroma found only where God and man had sweet communion.

Once upon a time, only Levitical priests could enjoy the pleasing scent. Today, Jesus has taken Aaron's place as the great high priest and we have become sons and daughters in the same order of Melchizidek in which he serves, and we too have access to the fragrance of his presence whenever we serve at his incense altar.

Think of this, whenever you go to him in prayer. A heady fragrance awaits you there, whether you can physically smell it or not. His balm is there, his sweetness, the welcoming scent of home, the promise of comfort and healing are in the air.

Knowing he prepares this sweet place of welcome to us. Why wouldn't we then come boldly to his throne of grace.

Mercy and grace? They await us in the smoke.

Thanks for joining me on scripture to Go. I hope today's snack helped you taste and see that the Lord is good. Be sure to click on the follow button so you know when next week's table is spread with more to Nilan. If you get hungry in the meantime, slip on over to my website@tmurphywrights.com to read my latest post and subscribe to my blog.

Bye for now.

Welcome to "Scripture to Go." I hope you'll take a moment to pause with me just long enough to taste and see how good the Lord is. Hi, I'm Terry Murphy.

Inexpressible beauty lay hidden behind the veil. How could we ever hope to see it?

 Welcome to "Scripture to Go." I hope you'll take a moment to pause with me just long enough to taste and see how good the Lord is. Hi, I'm Terry Murphy. Let's go back in time today and take a peek at the Tabernacle Moses. Picture, if you will, a giant rectangular courtyard surrounded by a linen fence.

Inside the gate, a large bronze altar is burning sacrifices day and night. Behind the altar is a two-room tent. The front room is called the holy place. From the doorway, we see a large gold lamp stand to our left, and a gold table loaded with bread to our right. Between them right in front of and blocking the entrance to the next room is a small gold altar with burning incense on top.

This golden room sounds pretty nice, doesn't it? But if we had lived during Moses' time, we'd never have seen any of it. Only Levitical priests came into the holy place, and only when it was their turn to serve. But this wasn't even the most exclusive room in this tent. Behind the incense altar hung a curtain called the veil, marking the entrance to the Holy of Holies.

Here rested the glorious arc of the covenant. Not even priests could come into this room. Well, unless they were the one and only high priest, but even he could only peek in once a year.

So What?

So what does any of this mean for us today? We are not Levitical priests, much less high priests. What does the tabernacle have to do with mere mortals who lack the qualifications to go inside?

A better question might be, "If God only expected to share this space with a few special people, why did he spend so much biblical ink on describing it?" Exodus 25–40 presents the tabernacle in detail after meticulous detail, making it so tempting to just skip over giant swaths of scripture when we read.

But what if these details are included, not to bore us, but to stimulate our desire to imagine that place so clearly we begin to drool over it? To yearn, to linger in a place that only includes he and we, him and us.

I think this was the "one thing" Mary desired in Luke 10:42 when her sister Martha wanted her to leave Jesus' side for kitchen duty. It was the "one thing" David sought in Psalm 27:4—to dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of his life and to behold his beauty. Remarkably, Hebrews 10:19–20 says, we now have access to this place we could only dream of before. The blood of Jesus purchased a new and living way into these rooms.

So next time we come across these passages, let's resist the urge to skip over them and take the time to see what's here. The Holy Spirit just might take the opportunity to lure us even deeper and show us even more of his beauty.

What are you waiting for this Christmas? Can you mark it on your calendar or does it only have a due date right now?

Welcome to “Scripture to Go.”

I hope you'll take a moment to pause with me just long enough to taste and see how good the Lord is.

Hi, I'm Terry Murphy.

So, are you old enough to remember the Heinz ketchup commercial—the one that uses Carly Simon's song “Anticipation”?

Before the age of squeeze bottles, ketchup consumers knew the virtue of patience. To get the sluggish condiment to emerge from a glass jar, you had to tip the bottle just so, to allow a little bit of air to ease behind the ketchup and release it. The not-so-patient method was to give the bottle a good whack on the bottom. Of course, this might result in a slop of red lava on your clothes instead of your hamburger, but that was the price of success.

Christmas anticipation offers similar challenges. We see it coming inside the “glass jar” of our calendar. More than anything, we'd love to give it a good rap on the behind to make it move faster. But this is nothing compared to the suspense of the first Christmas.

In the annals of waiting, nothing—not sluggish, ketchup, or slow days on a calendar—outstrips the anticipation of the birth of a child. This was Mary's experience. Today we have Jesus' birthday marked on a calendar, but for her, the due date was still a mystery.

Christmas continues to arrive two different ways for us. Some happens on schedule. We know when the family is on the way or when we're headed out to meet them. But other advents promise less predictable due dates.

For example, have you had a new idea stir in your belly, like an unborn baby waiting for the light of day? Then you've known Mary's uncomfortable ride to Bethlehem. Uncertain how much more you can stretch to contain the promise. You grow increasingly uncomfortable with each sway of the donkey's back.

Whatever we're anticipating this season—whether we know its arrival time or only have a due date—we can lean on the author and finisher of our Christmas story. He is tipping the calendar and his promise is flowing more predictably than ketchup toward the opening.

And we can wait for it joyfully because, as it says in Ecclesiastes 3:11, God will make everything beautiful, in its time.

Whatever the history of Christmas Trees, their evergreen nature makes them fitting heralds for the reappearance of the Tree of Life.

You know, Christmas as a holiday has some hazy history. It wasn’t even a “thing” to celebrate until somewhere in the mid-300s AD according to Wikipedia.

The date of Jesus’ birth, and when, or even if, we should recognize the event has long been the subject of controversy. No place in Scripture do we find God asking us to observe Messiah’s beginning moments as a particular holy day. There have even been times and places where the celebration of Christmas has been banned for being papist, for having too many similarities to pagan rituals, or for engendering entirely too much gluttony, drunkenness, and frivolous behavior.

Whatever its background, Christmas celebrations have initiated some fun traditions—evergreens in our living rooms being one of them. Now, I know the Christmas tree has its own controversial background, but it also carries some pretty fun spiritual symbolism we can appreciate.

Trees are first mentioned in Genesis with the creation story. That tree of life in the Garden of Eden, held such promise for mankind. But we were cut off from it before the third chapter of Genesis was over. Fortunately, it makes another appearance at the end of the book in Revelation 22:2 bearing twelve kinds of fruit and healing leaves.

In between the beginning and the end, the tree often resurfaces in Scripture as a symbol of Jesus hanging on the cross to restore our access to life itself. He is described as a shoot from the root of Jesse, the Branch of righteousness from David’s line who hung on a tree with transgressors so that we might have life.

Whatever its background, the Christmas tree is a good reminder of Christ. The use of ever-greens for this purpose more significantly represents the ever-living tree in Revelation that offers its fruit and healing all year long.

As we decorate our evergreens this season, let’s remember the one who truly lives forever. May these dressed-up pines and spruces honor the tree of life who not only begins but ends our Christmas story.

There's nothing like fresh-baked bread at Christmas. And no wonder. Bread is part of what Christmas is about! Listen to see why.

Welcome to “Scripture to Go.” I hope you'll take a moment to pause with me just long enough to taste and see how good the Lord is.

Hi, I'm Terry Murphy.

Hey, guess what? It's December already. The month of acceleration of activities and preparations. So, let's take a moment to take in the fragrance of the kind of bread that provides energy without calories.

One of my favorite parts of preparing for Christmas is fixing all sorts of homemade breads for the season. There's nothing like pulling and stretching on dough until its gluten starts screaming for mercy. And nothing says home to me like the welcoming fragrance of bread baking in the oven.

It's really quite biblical, you see because part of the original Christmas had something to do with preparing bread.

You probably know the story. Joseph and his very pregnant wife, Mary, made their way to the family homeland to take part in a census. Their destination was Bethlehem. In Hebrew, Beth-le-hem means house of bread. Once there, Mary gave birth to her son, Jesus. Draping him in cloth, as we might with dough preparing to rise, she laid her little loaf in a feeding trough called a manger.

One day he would rise into a full-sized man and declare in John 6:35 that he was the Bread of Life. Feeding on the substance he provided would so satisfy people they'd no longer hunger for a lesser bread. Jesus even dared to equate himself with the manna that dropped down from heaven to feed the Israelites in the wilderness so long ago.

Deuteronomy 8:3 said of that manna, that it came to let God's people know that natural bread would never be enough to sustain them. They needed the supernatural nourishment that came from every breath, every word, proceeding from the mouth of the Lord. Distilling from heaven like dew on the grass, this man was the spirit of the Son of God taking on flesh at the last supper.

This self-proclaimed Bread of Life would rise at the table and lift up the Passover bread. Blessing it, he passed it on to his disciples saying, “Take. Eat. This is my body broken for you.”

So, if any of your preparations for Christmas include making bread, think of Jesus as you mix and knead and wait for it to rise.

Let its fragrance in the oven remind you of the gift of bread—the manna from heaven laid down in a manger in Bethlehem. Inhale his goodness and exhale your gratitude for the loaf that ever satisfies.

Thanks for joining me on scripture to go. I hope today's snack helped you taste and see that the Lord is good.