Watching God Woo the World

This guidebook features more than seventy selected Bible stories of the all-encompassing human male and female linkages in the family of origin, sexual encounter(s), and other functional affiliations in the wider community. In the book, they are labeled like this:

BLOOD: father, daughter (FD); mother, son (MS); brother, sister (BS);

SEX: husband, wife (HW); not married (NM); or
PEERS: peers in the plot (PP) with no blood or sexual ties.

[From Table of Contents]

2. Transition: Crises and Pivotal Points

First Era, Founders: Abram/Abraham and Sarai/Sarah

Second Era, Exodus: The Two Families of Moses

Third Era, Judges: Honor to Degradation

From Judges to Kings: Hannah and Samuel

Fourth Era, Kings: Ruth to David

Fifth Era, Exile: Ahasuerus, Mordecai, and Esther

Sixth and Seventh Eras: Life of Jesus and the Early Church

Residence of the Holy Spirit: 120 at Pentecost

Supplemental Stories

[From Chapter 2]

2

Transition: Crises and Pivotal Points

While there is disagreement about the degree of historicity of the early chapters of Genesis, it is hard to disagree with the truth of the problem in the seminal stories of the Garden of Eden, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel. To their own detriment, humans persist in wanting to arrogate God. To address the problem, God set apart a family whose reason for being was to bless the world by living under the terms of a covenant with God. God promised to preserve the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, and they promised to obey. They followed the covenant much of the time and ignored it at other times. Obedience brought blessing and sustaining power even when they faced difficulties and hostility. But when they strayed from the Good Shepherd, devastating circumstances eventually caught up with them.

The stories in the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) come from the perspective of Abraham and Sarah and their descendants. The Bible chronicles this family as it grew to be a clan, tribe, nation, and finally a dispersed group that still maintains its identity in Judaism. God kept the covenant faithfully through seven distinct eras. Five Old Testament eras of disrupting moves made them more dependent upon God. The two New Testament eras put into effect a superior covenant toward which God had been moving all along.

First era: Founders

Abram/Abraham’s family leaves everything behind to go to a new land.

Second era: Exodus

Moses leads the family’s descendants out of slavery in Egypt.

Third era: Judges

Judges defend and rule the twelve tribes that spread throughout Canaan.

Fourth era: Kingdom

Kings rise to reunite the tribes into a nation governed from Jerusalem.

Fifth era: Exile

The two divided nations are defeated and sent into oblivion and exile.

Sixth era: Incarnation

Jesus is born in Judea into the regathered remnant now under Roman rule.

Seventh era: Church

The early church under persecution flees throughout the Mediterranean.

Disruptions can be reality checks in which a person moves toward or away from faith. This chapter features men and women in the crisis of transition whose obedience proved God’s trustworthiness. Their critical decisions preserved the community of faith at pivotal points.

From this point forward, the types of connection between male and female characters are listed at the beginning of each story and labeled with a two-letter abbreviation for each of the six possible general categories. For easy reference, the back cover of this book lists them.

Second Era, Exodus: The Two Families of Moses

Story: Spans Exodus–Deuteronomy. Read Exodus 1–4, skim through the events of the Plagues, Passover, and Red Sea crossing, and pick up again at chapters 16–20.

Setting: Ancient Egypt’s highly developed civilization produced wonders of the world, and its pyramids were meant to last forever. The Nile River provided water, transportation for wide-flung commerce, and fertile land by its regular flooding. Egypt’s polytheistic religion held that a dying person crossed the Nile to the afterlife. Division of labor placed shepherds at the bottom of the social heap and priests with magicians near the top under the Pharaoh.

After Abraham and Sarah, three generations followed, headed by the patriarchs Isaac, Jacob, and his twelve sons who took the name God gave to their father, Israel. These families’ stories are rife with conflict stemming from marital problems, favoritism, envy, deceit, greed, revenge, and ambition. Finally, a severe famine forced Jacob’s family to move to Egypt, a captivating account of God’s provision despite the family messes. Because they were shepherds, they had to live apart from the Egyptians in Goshen, the Nile’s delta.[ii] Separation sustained their identity through language and stories of their early ancestors passed down orally.

Eventually their numbers increased to a threatening level, so Pharaoh enslaved them. His fear continued, so he decreed that all Hebrew baby boys be thrown into the Nile. Fearless midwives and one family resisted infanticide. In contrast to the founders’ families, this family displayed mutual support and dauntless faith. To cut a long story short, Pharaoh’s daughter adopted the baby and paid his mother to nurse him. Educated by his slave mother and by Egypt’s palace, Moses grew up bi-cultural. Thus, God specially prepared him to confront Pharaoh and to lead the Israelites out of slavery. Passover celebrations endure to recount this great deliverance. Since then, no society’s moral code has surpassed Moses’s Ten Commandments.

Puzzler: Read Hebrews 11:23−29. People outside the Israelites also served God. Jethro, a.k.a Reuel, the priest of Midian, extended hospitality to the conflicted and desperate fugitive, Moses. Neither slave nor king, this sonless father of seven daughters offered his wisdom before, during, and after Moses’s momentous decision to obey God’s call. What short- and long-term purposes may God have had in providing Moses with this particular father-in-law?

[i] Exodus 6:20.

[ii] Genesis 46:34.