Jan. 16thYsoph – damals und Heute

Most people focus on the nails, the crown of thorns, the blood, and the agony of the cross. But Scripture hides something far more unsettling in plain sight—something so small and ordinary that it’s easy to miss. A plant. Hyssop.

Hyssop was never impressive. It wasn’t tall like a cedar or strong like an oak. It was common, low to the ground, and associated with one thing: cleansing. In Israel’s law, hyssop was used to apply blood, water, or sacrifice to people and homes that were unclean. It was the instrument of purification, not the source of power itself.

At the first Passover, God commanded Israel to dip hyssop into the blood of a lamb and mark their doorposts. Death passed over not because the houses were strong, but because the blood was applied exactly as God instructed. Hyssop was the brush. The blood was the protection.

Centuries later, as Jesus hung dying, Scripture records a strange detail. He was offered sour wine on a sponge lifted to His lips—on a hyssop branch. This was not random. This was not Roman convenience. This was theological precision.

The same plant that once applied the blood of a lamb to save Israel from death was now raised to the lips of the true Lamb of God as He bore the full bitterness of sin. The sour wine symbolized suffering, humiliation, and curse. The hyssop symbolized cleansing. Together, they declared what the cross accomplished: purification through pain, life through sacrifice, cleansing through blood.

This is where modern Christianity often becomes shallow. We want the resurrection without the bitterness. We want cleansing without cost. We want forgiveness without blood. But God has always worked the same way—through obedience, through sacrifice, through humility, through things the world overlooks.

Hyssop tells us something uncomfortable. God doesn’t need spectacle. He uses the lowly to accomplish eternal things. The cross was not just a moment of suffering; it was the fulfillment of every purification ritual Israel had ever known. Jesus didn’t just die. He completed the cleansing.

The cross wasn’t improvised. It was written into the fabric of Scripture long before Rome existed. And even the smallest detail testifies that Jesus is the spotless Lamb whose blood alone makes the unclean clean.

Jan. 15thJuda und Tamar – warum dieser Einschub in der Bibel?

Genesis 38 often feels like an unwanted interruption in the Joseph story, a dark and unsettling back-alley detour filled with death, sex, deceit, and judgment. For years, I treated it like a commercial break, impatient to return to Joseph’s story.

But that view missed the point. Badly. Genesis 38 is not a narrative interruption but a deliberate parallel.

Genesis 37 introduces Joseph; Genesis 38 introduces Judah. Think of these two chapters as doorways. Over one is the name Joseph. Over the other is the name Judah. They both open into a single, winding hallway that is Genesis 37-50. Those chapters are not the Story of Joseph, but the Story of Judah and Joseph.

Both brothers experience descent. Judah “went down” from his brothers into Canaanite society (Gen. 38:1), while Joseph was “brought down” into Egypt (39:1). The Hebrew verb used in both verses, yarad, is the same. One descends willingly, one unwillingly. Both are separated from the family.

The question becomes: what kind of man will each become?

As we read these chapters in Bible in One Year, we are watching the story of two brothers unfold. Neither is idealized. Both are flawed. Each has his own weaknesses, sins, and blind spots. And God is at work in both their lives, breaking them down and rebuilding them into people he can use in his salvation story.

Joseph’s preparation is for a life of service in second place. He is second to Potiphar, second to the prison warden, second to Pharaoh. Even within his family, he will ultimately take a secondary role.

Judah’s preparation, by contrast, is for leadership. He is painfully humbled after his sin with his widowed daughter-in-law Tamar. But he will eventually emerge as the brother who steps forward, who offers himself in place of another, and from whose line the Messiah will come.

These final chapters of Genesis, therefore, set before us not only the shaping of two brothers, but a portrait of how God works in our own lives. He breaks us down in different ways for different callings. He humbles us, wounds us, and reforms us. He crucifies and resurrects us.

He is making less of us so that there is more room in us for Christ.

Join us for Bible in One Year. Find all the information at https://www.1517.org/oneyear