Gary Gleans

The book of Numbers strikes me with the idea that the book should have been so much shorter.  When we look at the content of the book we see that in a very short period of time the children of Israel arrived at their intended destination and should have entered the Promised Land at that time.  However, because of their disobedience and lack of faith in the Lord; they spent forty years walking in circles, sinning and dying.  Once the nation literally comes “full circle” the original generation has all died off and the new generation is prepared to do what their parents should have done.  God used the difficulties of the desert to mold the character of the people so they would be willing to obey His command.  The oldest person in the nation, besides Caleb, Joshua and Moses would have been sixty years old.  The majority of the people who were now ready to go into the Promised Land were born wandering in the desert or they were children when they left Egypt. ...

Leviticus is the revelation of God’s legal code for the nation of Israel.  It communicates how God desired for men to live in relationship to Him as well as to one another.  Up until this time God had revealed very few laws but man was expected to be guided by his own conscience as well as the collective conscience of the community in the form of government.  Since man’s conscience had been corrupted and human governments were not promoting godliness and thwarting evil; God declares His will and the laws that were to regulate the nation of Israel.  As we read through the book we are struck with the seriousness of sin before God, the need for constant sacrifice and the impossibility of living according to these standards.  It is important for us to remember that the purpose of the Law was not to provide a way of salvation for men.  It was giving to demonstrate man’s condemnation before God and His desperate need of a Savior.   SYSTEMS FOR SACRIFICI...

Exodus is a fascinating story of how God established the nation of Israel.  At the end of Genesis a family moved to Egypt as honored guests.  Four-hundred years later this family had grown into millions of people who had become oppressed slaves.  The famine that took the children of Israel to Egypt lasted seven years.  God had not called them to live in Egypt but apparently they became very comfortable there so they just decided to stay instead of returning to the land of Canaan which they had been called to possess.  It is a dangerous thing to become comfortable outside of the will of God; because it will always lead us into slavery.  Exodus is the story of how God redeemed His nation from slavery and established a nation that worshiped Him.  It is a story that can be divided into four acts. PREPARATION: When God decides to intervene in the course of history in a super-natural way, He always starts by preparing a man for the task at hand.  I...

Genesis is the first book of the Bible and is foundational for understanding all of the rest of Scripture as well as life in general.  The way one understands Genesis will determine much about how Scripture will be interpreted as well as how one will respond to the claims of science as compared to the narrative of Scripture.  I take a literal approach to the interpretation of Scripture and prefer to make science adapt to the claims of Scripture as opposed to making Scripture adapt to the claims of science.  As a whole the book divides into two main sections each of which divides into four sub-sections. FOUR EVENTS: Creation: Our entire world view will be shaped by this account of creation.  If man evolved from nothing over billions of years as science claims than we will live and die and that is it.  However, since we and the rest of the world was created by God; we are responsible to Him and He has authority over us.  The very purpose of our exis...