How profound! How rich are the worship priorities of even the Old Testament, and how sad that they can be reduced these days to zero and substituted with a few sentences of subjective prayer. Subjective prayer is valid, but not in place of the worship of God.
Now when you look at these passages so often, say in a Study Bible, it is a strange thing but it won't tell you the message that God intends from the passage. It won't give you pastoral observations. What the Study Bible will tell you is valid but it's quite different. The study Bible will concentrate on technical things and say, the following verses have in mind Abraham; these other verses have in mind the months that the children of Israel spent in Sinai; the following verses describe the forty years in the wilderness. That is all correct. The chapters is doing two things at once. It is ploughing through the history in those sections, but what you have to examine is the pastoral lesson coming to you. These should stands out: all the different headings and themes that are named one after the other. Our task as Bible students is to search for pastoral sense and meaning, and to see what is actually being taught in the passage.