Genesis 43-50 and Matthew 1-15

1st of all here is where I’m not sure I’m super loving Stortz’s reading plan. Like we talked about earlier, I’m super type-a/ borderline ocd. I like things in order, nice neat and tied with a bow. So skipping from Genesis to Matthew bothers me a little bit HOWEVER I kind of understand why she does it this way. The Old Testament is the Old Testament, right? So if we read it straight through- it may keep things chronological, kind of, and it keeps the different books of the Bible within their type (remember her book shelf picture from earlier?) BUT I do think it would get monotonous and hard to keep going. I obviously can’t speak for Stortz but I wonder if her logic in doing this was to (a) keep the content more relevant to today’s world (unless you’re planning to go out and sacrifice animals), and (b) to help us draw parallels between the old and the new covenants. Regardless, we’ve started this journey with Stortz so I’m continuing, hope you all are still with me!!

At least we’re finishing Genesis strong with some really good meaty material-

Matthew starts out strong- with a LONG genealogy. Like we’ve already talked about, I find this stuff super interesting IF you take the time to sketch it and make the connections. So this thing goes all the way from Abraham to Jesus- how crazy is that?! If I go on ancestry.com even if they had my dna kit, it would take some serious digging (and upgrading to the paid features) to get 3 or 4 generations back much less the nearly 2,000 years between Abraham and Jesus!! AND if we go backward just a little bit- the family trees that we already traced in the Old Testament went from Adam to Noah, then from Noah to Abraham, so if we piece all three of these together we can actually trace from Jesus all the way back to Adam??!! So like 6,000+ years?!

So now we kind-of graze over the wise men portion of the Christmas story BUT what sticks out to me here are Joseph’s dreams. Didn’t we just read about another Joseph and the importance of dreams in his journey?

THEN, then we get into some really good stuff and start learning about JESUS! His forty days and forty nights in the desert, we meet the disciples, Jesus is performing miracles right and left, and He is giving us the “rules”- both in explicit law form but also in the form of parables. 🤯

Grab and cup of coffee because again- there is just SO MUCH to digest in this week’s section. What sticks out to you? Are you seeing something “new” that maybe you haven’t noticed before?

Before we move on to Week 4, let’s do another quick recap

This week, we saw:

Joseph gets reunited with his brothers and later with his dad when the brothers come to Egypt looking for food.

Jacob blesses Joseph’s sons

Jacob blesses his sons

Jacob dies

Joseph lives a long life and had great great grandchildren before he also dies, in Egypt when he is embalmed

Hebrews are in Egypt