I realized the craziest thing one time. There’s an ice cream sandwich in the Bible. So if you look at it closely, Exodus and Numbers are almost like mirrors of each other. In Exodus, the Israelites are freshly out of Egypt. They’re free, but they don’t trust God yet. They complain about food. They question Moses’ leadership. At one point, they even say they want to go back to Egypt. And then comes the golden calf, the ultimate act of rebellion. Then you get to Numbers, and something strange happens. You start seeing the same story again. They complain again. They question Moses again. This time they even try to stone Moses and Aaron. The spies go into the land, and just like before, most of them come back afraid and spread fear through the camp. It’s like reading the same story twice.
The inner layer match, the outer layer match: this flow becomes A -> B -> C -> B' -> A' And right in the center of those two books, sits Leviticus (the middle is different). For a long time, I used to think Leviticus was just a book of rules placed in the middle of the Bible. But it’s more than that. Leviticus sits in the middle because God is teaching them how to live free, so they wouldn’t replicate the same brokenness they had just come out of. God wasn’t just trying to give them land. He was trying to set them apart. So that the nations would look and say: Wow!! Who is their God? Then you see the story keep building because it's bigger than them too. So they would become an example to the other nations. So now when I think about that ice cream sandwich in the middle of the Bible, I don’t see a strange structure anymore. God teaches in the middle of Israel's story in Leviticus. Then giving them another invitation to be different and respond differently in Numbers. A God full of love, mercy, grace and second chances for His people in the old testament friends. And maybe it was in the middle of the ice cream sandwich all along.
Heart Call:
Sometimes patterns in the Bible are not just within one book. But really stretching across different books.
There’s a word for it too. It’s called chiasm, where stories are arranged in such a way to mirror each other. Chiasms are pretty much an invitation to:
understand differently (notice)
choose differently (confront/challenge)
respond differently (reshape)
why do you think that the story was repeated in such a way?
why did God give Israel more rules after the Golden calf incident?
Photo Credits: with the help of Chat :)