Feb 21
Exodus 11-17 3:14 God tells Moses “I am who I am”. What importance is this? There are many movies, books, and stories about the name of God, but is saying that I am who I am giving a name “I Am”, infinite, or just saying that I am the supreme being and that’s all you need to know. Or maybe it is that names are meaningless when you are God. Another thing I thought was weird was how the Lord hardened the Pharo’s heart. I’m not sure if God was making him denie freedom to the Israelites or what. I’ll have to look into this further. Moving on to this week’s journal entry. Most of Exodus is review for me mainly because I watched the Charlton Hesston film late at night when I couldn’t get to sleep. One thing new I noticed was at the very end of our assigned reading where the Israelites defeat Amalek. I think this came out of no where and I’m not sure if it should have more meaning or not. The power of the staff over the battle was interesting but I’m not sure why the battle even happened. Was Amalek part of the Eguipton army? Why blot out his name from memory?
Lewis 138-150 Faith is broken down in two parts. The first is belief. Like the example where Lewis was afraid of the anesthetic wearing away, many people worry about there being no heaven, God, or meaning in life. The second part dealt more with faith as an action than a belief. It seemed to me that what the second chapter was about was allowing the believer to understand that everything is not in his/her power and that at times it is only by the grace of God that one can overcome.
Piper 19-20 I think these were two of the best readings we had to do yet. I enjoyed reading the first section because the relevance of everyday suffering and death to the chapter, and God, is one of importance. This is because everyone has gone through depression, suffering, and pain. The second chapter is great because it addresses the idea of fads and it introduced the devil into play. I loved the current anology of tattoos being kewl at first but after thirty years being a indebile reminder of conformity. I think that even though the true meaning was a little deeper than not getting tattoos or piercing, it made a good point that some things look good now but are really just fads in society. Also this is the first reading in the course to introduce the devil and how he owns the earth. This is interesting.
