There's an ice cream sandwich in the Bible
wait really!?
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. The same place that they were slaves in. Isn't that crazy? 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). 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. When I look back at the story of the Israelites now, God wasn’t just trying to give them land. He was trying to set them apart. By transforming them on a personal level, but then also calling them into a global mission. Becoming a group of people who were different. So that the nations around them would look and say: Wow!! Who is their God? So now when I think about that ice cream sandwich in the middle of the Bible, I don’t see a strange structure anymore. I see a God who teaches in the middle of Israel's story in Leviticus. Then give them another invitation to be different and respond differently in Numbers. A God full of love, grace and second chances even in the old testament friends. And maybe the lesson was in the middle of the ice cream sandwich all along. Maybe that's what keeps it from melting too.
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 often an invitation for the characters in the story to:
understand differently (notice)
choose differently (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 :)