God’s ultimate goal for your life is to make you happy and healthy.
So if you are ever unhappy and/or unhealthy, you can blame God for it because it’s his job to give you the tools necessary to achieve his goals. But we know everyone isn’t happy or healthy. There’s depression, cancer, AIDS and a myriad of other things that can make living a pretty miserable experience.
There must not be a God then because he’s obviously sucking at being a god.
I’ve been thinking about this lately. This whole line of thinking is probably one of the biggest roadblocks for people believing in God. How can a loving God allow suffering, disease and “evil” to exist in the world?
That line of thought only works if we assume health, happiness and goodness are God’s ultimate goal for everyone.
If that’s what God set out to do when he created us, then we can “fault God” because he definitely screwed up somewhere along the way.
It’s got me thinking.
What is God’s ultimate goal for us?
And how would knowing it “frame our thinking.” How would it change our perspective on the way the world has been setup? What would we learn from the issues we face in life?
Here is a diverse and pretty comprehensive collection of Bible reading plans. All of them are easy to follow and most include a printable copy you can keep in your Bible.
They range from two week commitments to year-long commitments, from reading straight through cover to cover, to topical readings, to a mixture of readings each day.
Anyone familiar with the number 555-1212? That’s the winning phone number for today’s post.
555-1212 Background (skip if you don’t care)
According to Wikipedia, it is the number to call for directory assistance (ie: 411). The difference between 411 and 555-1212 is that with 411, you get local assistance whereas with 555-1212, you get directory assistance for the area code you dialed.
Which means I could be in San Francisco and dial 904-555-1212 to find the Burger King closest to where I live in Jacksonville.
Not that I would actually do that, but I could.
Also, here’s an interesting piece of trivia. Apparently the numbers 555-0100 through 555-0199 are reserved for “fictional use” (eg: movies and tv shows).
How is that number going to help me?
So what’s the significance of 555-1212? Just as you can use it for directory assistance, you can use it to assist you in memorizing the books of the Old Testament. We do this by breaking the number down a little bit.
And now I have a confession.
Although the end goal is that you’ll memorize all the OT books, this post is just going to focus on the different classifications or book types found in the OT. Baby steps here, baby steps.
Bite-sized Pieces
5 – that’s the number of law books (ie: The Pentateuch) 5 – the number of Wisdom Books 5 – how many major prophets there are
12 – el numero de “historical books” 12 – the number of minor prophets in the house
Now the extra credit question. What’s the sum of those numbers? Yup, 39. Which also happens to be the number of books in the Old Testament.
Sponsored by the letter ‘H’
That’s about it for now. Next time I’ll break down the books in each of the classification types and figure out some ingenious way to memorize them. For example, God Exists Like Nobody Does is a mnemonic for the first five books of the Bible (The Pentateuch).
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.
I’ve also whipped up a PDF you can download with a summary of all this information and a pretty visual aid sponsored by the letter ‘H’.
I’d like to thank the Academy
Since I’m a “good little Christian”, I won’t take credit for something I didn’t come up with. The H-visual as well as the numbers 5, 12, 5, 12, and 5 were from The Old Testament Made Simple by Melvin Short. I just rearranged them into the phone number and added them up. Hopefully I’m not infringing on any type of copyright. ;)