Numbers 11:24-30
When a book does not occur much in the cycle, I like to cover it. It is an optional reading, although pretty much everyone considers everything optional these days. Numbers covers the period between getting the Ten Commandments and when they arrive at the Land of Canaan. There are plenty of rules listed, like the other Mosaic books. It seems at times God is giving up on these people who complain so much and break the rules, but near the end he states clearly that he won't. It begins with a census, which is highly problematic and disputed, and is probably where the name comes from.At times, it's almost funny. You may have heard the phrase “manna from heaven”, meaning food easily available. Manna could be many things. There are actually some foods that match the Biblical description of how they gathered it. Wikipedia has a good page on it. The funny part is at 11:6 when they are complaining about missing all the good food back in Egypt, and say, “But now we have lost our appetite; we never see anything but this manna!”
Or a little later, when Moses asks God to just “kill me”.
In response, God says, “you want meat, I'll give you enough meat, until it's coming out of your nose.”
And Moses retorts, “where you gonna get all that meat?”
You'd think he was used to God doing things by now, so God says, “what? Are my arms too short?”
Which brings us to the meeting described in this passage. This snapshot is given to us on the Day of Pentecost to show another leader being free with the powers of the Holy Spirit. It doesn't bother Moses that they are getting some sort of ecstatic experience and expressing it. The details of which are not important. In the next chapter, Moses will be challenged, so this is also a setup for that, showing that he is a good leader.
Acts 2:1-21
The Apostles were celebrating the Jewish Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, but as with a few other festivals, Christianity made it its own thing. Peter repeats some words from Joel, a minor prophet somewhere around the 2nd exile who predicted a plague then repentance and restoration. Peter says “shall be saved”, differing from the King James Version, “shall be delivered”. But I haven't delved into those translations too deeply.1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
This is some good Paul. It doesn't take much interpreting. Acknowledge the gifts people have. How hard is that? A little later, in verse 21, he says, “The eye cannot say to the hand, I don't need you!”. Just in case you don't get it that even if your gifts are somehow “better”, you don't get to just take off on your own. The gift of sight is pretty awesome, but what value is it without the rest of the body? I read a book back when I first started working on church committees, “Sacred Cows Make Gourmet Hamburger”, it had a good discussion on this analogy of the “body of Christ”.One of the analogies they made was of a person, i.e. a human body, in a burning car. Obviously you would want to get out. But the car is on fire, so the door handle is hot. The author was probably imagining a door handle from 1980. In any other circumstances, if you grabbed that handle, every part of your body would participate in letting go and tending to that burning hand. But in a burning car, your body has a different agenda, a different goal, to save the whole body. Really, that's always the goal, but at times, some part of the body needs to make a sacrifice.