Читать книгу The Grand Sweep - Large Print - J. Ellsworth Kalas - Страница 73

NUMBERS 28–31

Week 9, Day 3

As we have seen before, life has its holy, memorable occasions. They add luster to life and direction, too, and the biblical writers want to be sure they are not neglected. The Israelites, with a routine lifestyle in a world that seemed never to change, needed such occasions to lift their eyes to the divine; you and I, sometimes almost drowned in an endless sea of sound, activity, and clamor, need these times to lift us from the trivial and the transitory to the eternal.

It isn’t always easy for us to put ourselves in the place of the Israelites in their wilderness wanderings. When we read the rules concerning women and their relationship to husbands and fathers, our modern sensibilities are offended; and when we see the violence of Israel’s vengeance against the Midianites, that offense is heightened. But we need to remember that it is always easy, in another time and place, to say, “They shouldn’t have been like that”; as a matter of fact, future generations will no doubt pass such judgments on us. No generation really has a right to impose its standards or its solutions on the actions of another, because each generation has to cope with its problems with the equipment at hand. We can hardly imagine the struggles of maintaining order in a nomadic wilderness; so we’re probably no more qualified to say what they should have done than they would be to offer advice on dealing with air pollution, nuclear holocaust, and urban crime.

PRAYER: Give me the grace, O God, to be a faithful steward of the times in which I live, demanding as they are; in Christ’s name. Amen.

Why, as you see it, are all these special occasions marked also by special offerings?