Bible Verses as Horoscope

One of my daily chuckles is looking on the St. Joseph News-Press editorial page for the Bible verse of the day. Occasionally, the verse is significant--a saying of Jesus or a summary statement of Paul or something by the prophets, etc.--something that can stand alone and have meaning. Usually, however, it's a random verse plucked out of its context and therefore with little or no meaning whatsoever. It's like they have a random verse generator or a really bad verse-a-day calendar that they're working off of.

Today's verse was Exodus 26:30, which reads:

And there were eight boards; and their socket were sixteen sockets of silver, under every board two sockets.

Anybody got an idea what's going on in this verse? No, it was not the Ancient Israelite home improvement guide, but rather the making of the tabernacle in the wilderness. This is not exactly what I use for my spiritual devotions each morning.

When I was a kid, my father and I started reading the Bible together each day. (That's the kind of thing you do when you're a preacher's kid.) We started at Genesis--which is largely action-packed and got into Exodus which starts out with the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea and all that. Then we got to the tabernacle and how it was made and we pretty much ended up giving up the whole project of reading the Bible each morning together. It's pretty freaking dull. I don't think I've eve heard a sermon on the frame construction of the tabernacle. It never occurred to me and my father to just skip ahead or start somewhere else in the Bible and read there.

The sort of verse-plucking that we find on our local paper's editorial page amounts to about the same thing as looking at your horoscope. Some days, what it says may apply to your life, other days its general enough that it could apply to any one's life and then other days it makes no sense whatsoever. Somehow, I think we should expect more from our study of the Bible.

I'll keep looking at the verse of the day, however, if for nothing else, so I can chuckle at how absurd some of the choices are.

Grace and Peace,

Chase