Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Welcome to our May Reflections and Corrections episode. Let's start with the reflections.

We recently finished our 12th book of the Bible, and we're currently working our way through three others. So let's get the 30,000th of view on where we are in the chronological timeline

of the Bible's overall metanarrative. The Bible is one unified story. Way back in Genesis, God set

out to build a relationship with one particular family, but things go terribly wrong when they

fracture the relationship through sin. But their sin doesn't surprise God. He already had a plan in place to restore

this relationship even before it was broken, and he continues working out that plan immediately,

undeterred and unhindered by their rebellion. He sets apart a man named Abraham to be the patriarch

of the family, and he gives this family

a name, the Israelites. They're a busted bunch of people who lie, cheat, and steal. God blesses

them despite their sin, but sin still has its consequences. One of the long storylines of consequence

is of the 400 years they spent enslaved in Egypt. God sends a man named Moses to demonstrate his power

to the Egyptian ruler who reluctantly agrees to let the Israelite slaves go. They flee to the desert,

led by God and his servant Moses, and then little by little, God gives these people the basic

rules of how to have a stable society. All they've ever known is slavery under a cruel

dictator. They've never seen good leadership demonstrated. There are a bunch of uncivilized,

ungrateful people who have only just met God and Moses, and they're not keen on obeying either of

them. But in the midst of their sin and stubbornness and foolishness, God knows that what their hearts need is him.

So he sets up camp among them in the desert.

More than anything, he wants them to remember who he is to them, the God who rescued them out of slavery.

He's trying to point them back to the truth that people who recognize him as God can rely on his pattern of

faithfulness even when they are unfaithful. But they keep forgetting. And every time they forget,

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