Numbers seems to be a non sequitur. End of 14, Israel has their butt handed to them by the Canaanites. They disobeyed God, they are not allowed into the Promised Land. 15 starts with sacrifice rules "When you come into the land you are to inhabit..." Then they move to sacrifices for unintentional sins, then the death penalty for Sabbath breaking (by stoning), and then a fringe rule to remember the covenant.
I see it as a promise renewed. They can't go in now, but the LORD hasn't abandoned them. Unintentional sinning, here is a way again to make up to the LORD. The LORD hasn't gone away just because the people did.
Now, the Sabbath death penalty...seems harsh to my ears. But it kind of explains why the Jewish leadership got all riled up when Jesus was healing on the Sabbath. And probably why Jesus did so much intentional healing on the Sabbath. The LORD makes the rules of the Sabbath, not the people. It is a day to honor the LORD, the day the LORD rested from creation.
16 is a crisis of leadership. Korah, Dathan, and Abiram lead a rebellion of 250 leaders of Israel against Moses and Aaron. The charge: Arrogant leadership and (unsaid) failure to deliver up the Promised Land after yanking Israel out of Egypt. But Moses and Aaron are not the leaders, the LORD is. They work for the LORD.
So the rebels are swallowed up by the earth and a plague runs through the camp, killing a lot more of the people 14000 from a population of 1.4 million (or so).
SIDEBAR: The LORD...you see this in the text a lot, Lord in all caps. God told his name to Moses at the burning bush. Jewish leaders thought that name too holy to pronounce, so in the scripture verses, they annotated the name so people would read Adonai, the Hebrew word for Lord, instead. LORD is how that is designated in the translation into English.
Acts 18 and 19 are the conclusion to Paul's second missionary journey and the beginning of the third. Paul meets Priscilla and Aquila, fellow tentmakers (Paul is bi-vocational), who will appear in letters Paul has written.
I was raised on these stories like they were road trips. But Paul spent 18 months in Corinth, and two years in Ephesus on the third journey. (There are letters of Paul to both churches).
At the end of his second journey, Paul cuts his hair for a special vow, 18:18. It is probably the vow of a Nazarite (see Numbers 6).
We also find out that it is not just through Jesus that the Way (the Acts name for the church) is spreading. We meet Apollos at the end of 18, gifted preacher, but baptized by John the baptizer, not Jesus. It was a 'baptism of repentence, to believe in the one who came after' according to Paul in 19:4 at which point they too were baptized into the Holy Spirit.
Through 19, Paul is carrying on like Jesus did, preaching, performing miracles, casting out evil spirits. He made inroads into the professional magician community, a bunch of them converting and burning their magic books (this becomes a parable for me growing up about teens who find Jesus and then burn their heavy metal rock music collection).
In Ephesus, Paul causes a riot because of his economic influence. He is apparently so successful in preaching that the local economy, built on the tourist trade for religious articles related to Artemis, Greek goddess of the hunt and patron of Ephesus, the local economy begins to suffer. It got so bad that the proconsuls and the regular assembly met to deal with it.
There is not a lot here explicitly in the conflict between Paul and the Jerusalem church expect for the press exposure Paul is getting. It is going to lead up to another conversation. Whether that conversation is a challenge to the power of Jerusalem or simply a growing church going through growing pains, that remains to be seen.
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