Men spoke from God - Ruminating in the Word of God

The Lord is awe-inspiring, fearsome, fascinating, intriguing, majestic, and full of splendor: breathtaking! Here is what I saw of him today and what came to my heart and mind in Genesis 30:22-24,

"Then God remembered Rachel; he listened to her and opened her womb. She became pregnant and gave birth to a son and said, "God has taken away my disgrace." She named him Joseph, and said, 'May the Lord add to me another son.'"

Here is something I wrote on this passage in November, 2007:

In chapters 29 and 30 we read of the offspring that are born to Jacob, his two wives and their maidservants. So far 10 boys and one daughter, Dinah. Now an eleventh son is born to Jacob (number twelve will come later in chapter 35, Benjamin), and the baby's mother, Rachel names him Joseph, which means "May he add". We will be reading much about Joseph in the latter chapters of Genesis. 

It is Moses who has written these accounts for us in Genesis. As he tells us that "God remembered Rachel", I take it to be his way of acknowledging it is God who has blessed Jacob with the offspring that were born to him. But Moses goes on to say that God listened to Rachel. That is a little more specific. How would Moses know this? As I recall the many things Moses has had to say about things from God's perspective, I see that Moses would have to be told these things by God himself. Genesis opens with these words, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light."

Only God would know these things and could pass them on to man. Either God told Adam, etc., whose accounts were passed down through the ages to Moses or God told Moses directly himself. Either way it takes God to say what he thinks, he feels, he communicates to the other members of the Trinity.

This is what is on my heart this morning. As I read the accounts of what took place in the pages of Genesis it strikes me that what is written had to come from God himself. Peter speaks to this issue in his second letter, "Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." 2 Peter 1:20-21.

I know many commentators of Genesis have lost sight of this reality as I read their understanding of the text of Genesis and I wonder just how much we have really embraced the reality that our Bibles have their origin in God himself. If we did, if we were convinced that the Bibles sitting on our coffee tables were none other than an all-powerful voice from eternity, from our Creator God himself, we would be spending much more time in them, allowing what he has to say saturate our lives and move us in response to the revelation of his glory found within its pages.

Anything of the Lord capture your heart from Scripture today? Share what moved you about him from your Bible reading today. I'd love to hear from you!

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