Beginning With Moses (eBook)

As we start on this wonderful journey together, let me first give you a little background information. My wife Stephanie and I have served for a total of 20 years as missionaries of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod in francophone Africa. Our first phase of service was from 1988 to 2003. Our second phase began in 2016 and continues to the present day. However, the genesis of this work was the decade in between those times in Africa that I spent serving as a parish pastor in the United States. It did not take me long to discover that, even among many of our families who attended church regularly, a near biblical illiteracy was evident. This was especially true regarding the Old Testament. This sad state persists widely in the modern Church despite Jesus saying in Luke 24:27 on the road to Emmaus with two of His disciples that “Moses and the prophets” spoke entirely of Him. Moses and the Prophets remain a deep dark place of mystery for many in the Church because modern preaching and teaching too often makes the mistake of the ancient heretic Marcion and greatly devalues the portion of the Bible that comprises 78% of its chapters – the Old Testament!

So, I decided rather quickly that my people needed a large dose of biblical theology. Biblical theology understands Jesus to be at the heart of a continuous story of salvation that runs like a golden thread from Genesis to Revelation. In the Book of Exodus, Moses calls that testimony to God’s intervention and activity in human history the Haggadah. The Haggadah, centered in the exodus of God’s people from slavery, was to be taught to the children by the parents of every generation.

To that end, I established a daily Bible reading guide and then signed up many of my church members to a daily biblical theology focused teaching devotion that I called Reading Time Five Minutes or RT5M, for short. In real time, six days a week for most of the next year, I wrote a teaching devotion of no more than one written page that corresponded with the appointed reading for that day. The program was a fabulous success! Before long, I had a distribution list of over 700 people, which went way beyond the members of my own congregation.

The daily biblical theology devotions were the genesis of a 36-week biblical theology curriculum that I soon developed for the kids in my confirmation classes. Not long after, I began teaching the new curriculum to the adults too as they needed it just as much as the kids did. I dubbed that program Thru the Bible and I taught it 7 times to different groups of kids and 4 times to groups of adults during my time in the parish.

During the recent worldwide COVID outbreak, I resurrected and updated the old email devotions and sent them to over 150 pastors and church leaders in Africa. I also translated them into French for nearly half of those recipients. It was a way that I could keep feeding these new Christians after Steph and I were repatriated to the States and their seminaries and churches began closing due to the outbreak. Now I have collated those devotions into this book. Here is what you are going to see in this collection:

Digging Deeper - As I said, the RT5M devotions were the genesis of my Thru the Bible course. As I took two years to prepare those TTB lessons and have since lovingly updated them every time a new insight comes to me. There is a ton more theological insight contained in those presentations than is reflected in these brief devotions. So, I’ve decided to add a ‘Digging Deeper’ section containing Thru the Bible insights on the pages following each daily devotion. Thus, you have the option of just reading a “5 minute” devotion or doing that and digging deeper too. I hope most of you will want to dig deeper each day. The Bible is fascinating! I put “5 minute” in quotes because a few of the devotions are probably longer than that. I am a pastor, after all, and thus, by nature, struggle mightily not to be overly verbose, especially about a topic that excites me so.

Author Specific Conventions Used – In the teaching of Thru the Bible, I used a few turns of phrase specific to me and I also created several mnemonic devices or memory aids to help my students remember theological truth. I figure I should introduce them to you here since I will be referencing them all the time, especially in the Digging Deeper section.

One could actually speak of four ‘P’s’ of perception; the last being poetry. Significant portions of the Digging Deeper section will be devoted to this extremely little known, but hugely important, aspect of the biblical presentation. Literally every text of the entire Bible, both in the micro (a single pericope or account) and the macro (an entire section or book) is structured literally like a cross according to the tenets of Hebrew chiastic poetry. It’s the Gospel in 3D shaped like a cross!