I don’t know about you, but I enjoy numbers. Sitting here relaxing on New Year’s Day (an activity as rare as my grandfather’s favorite steak), I wondered what 20:20 verses were rattling around my ESV. In case you were also curious, I thought I’d share.
To put it mildly, I have serious misgivings about where we are headed as a civilization. I’m not sure I’d like to live through the roaring reboot of this decade’s predecessor, but here we are. I live by hope, sometimes to my own detriment, today shall be no different. When I want to hope, I stand on truth, the sure bedrock from which hope springs.
Your dose of truth for 20:20 includes everything from the consequences of sleeping with your aunt to instructions on how God told armies to build seigeworks. Sadly, some of my favorite books do not possess a chapter 20 and some that do weren’t loquacious enough to reach that number of verses.
I believe my favorites were in 2 Chronicles, John and Acts. Numbers 20:20 proves Edom was the original Gandalf (although I wouldn’t recommend telling God’s chosen people to shove off unless you’re down for a smiting). Judges 20:20 is the climax of one of the most gruesome stories in the Bible – beginning with rape, middling in civil war and ending with a mass abduction to fix a small genocide. 1 Samuel places us in the event that began David’s exile from Saul’s court, one of the best sagas in the Bible.
We can’t get too dogmatic about these verses, after all, the whole of the Word is for our instruction. If nothing else, this exercise just proves how vast the scope of Scripture is.
You may recognize Exodus 20 as the chapter of the 10 Commandments. For full instructions on how not to cast off the Voice of God this year, begin at our first verse. We live in uncertainty, such is the nature of our temporal sojourn this side of life eternal. Let us never choose to stand far off, but to always draw near to God in 2020.
20:20 Verses
Moses said to the people, “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of him may be before you, that you may not sin.”
Only the trees that you know are not trees for food you may destroy and cut down, that you may build siegeworks against the city that makes war with you, until it falls.
The rest of the deeds of Hezekiah and all his might and how he made the pool and the conduit and brought water into the city, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah?
And they rose early in the morning and went out into the wilderness of Tekoa. And when they went out, Jehoshaphat stood and said, “Hear me, Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem! Believe in the Lord your God, and you will be established; believe his prophets, and you will succeed.”
So they watched him and sent spies, who pretended to be sincere, that they might catch him in something he said, so as to deliver him up to the authority and jurisdiction of the governor.
Gittel Fruma 
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