Spirituality in the Messyness
I'm still making my way slowly through the Old Testament, savouring the content and seriously reflecting on it. A question I ask myself, particularly when reading some of the more mundane chapters, is “why is that included?” Sometimes I am perplexed, as I have been reading Chapters 34 and 35 of Genesis. Reflecting over a few days on this I realised something; I am constantly looking for the deep spiritual meaning when I should be looking from perhaps a more secular perspective. This realisation has been a breath of fresh air. I have come to understand that some of this content is there to show what the real life was like behind Bible heavyweights such as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and also where it fitted in to the world at that time. The fact that we read of these people having children with their servants or servants of their wives, or we read of the ‘rape’ of Dinah and Rueben sleeping with Jacob’s concubine, or the fact that Jacob’s even had concubines we see real life; messy, ...