Get it? It's 2 Epiphany...& I'm having an epiphany.
I was in college (COLLEGE) as a literature major before it occurred to me that the word "epiphany" as used in literature (as in "the epiphanic moment") was the same word as "Epiphany," the feast and the season in the church. It was an epiphany, too.
The Bible in 90 days which I have been reading for a week now has, until this morning, seemed like pointless slogging. Who ever knew there was all that STUFF and all those RULES in Exodus and Leviticus!? Why did they have to say everything 19 times!? Why did they do all that junk!? The group has been helpful in throwing some light on these issues...that these were people who WERE subject to a million rules before the coming of Christ. Still, all the reading about skin diseases and women's uncleanness has been getting to me.
THEN, this morning, there were two items in the Scripture that were illuminated for me by what I have read this week! 1 Samuel 3:1-20, where God calls Samuel but he keeps thinking that Eli is the one calling him, begins this way:
Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.
We had been discussing how God was all over the place in the earlier days giving instructions to Moses & Aaron; He'd had them build this HUGE tent/tabernacle thing that apparently weighed several tons, and they took it all over. And God went around with them in a pillar of cloud. So when I heard the part from Samuel about the word of the Lord being rare, I thought, "Oh! That's what they're talking about!"
In the Epistle, 1 Cor 6:11-12, Paul says,
And this is what some of you used to be. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. 12“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are beneficial. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything.
As opposed to in the Old Testament, when NOTHING was lawful for anybody! Thanks be to God for Jesus!
