For today, One Year Bible Online links here.
Everything and everyone will serve God’s purposes. Even the wicked will serve God’s purpose. When they come to their day of disaster they will serve as an example to others.
I believe in God’s commands. It is through them that He teaches us good judgment. Since God is good and He does only good, if we follow His instructions we will do only good. When we falter and fail in our attempts to keep God’s law the arrogant will smear us and claim that the fault lies with God’s instruction. And here in verse 73 is my prayer for the day:
Now give me the sense to follow your commands.
It is only through the intervention of the Holy Spirit that I will be able to be wise enough to keep God’s commands.
Jesus warned His disciples that they would be expelled from the synagogues for their faith in Him. When we read this we see it as something which happened in the past, something which happened when Christians were thrown out of fellowship with Jews. There is truth in that, but I believe that there is more to it than that. Those who faithfully follow Jesus will be expelled from Churches as well. You can see it happening to a degree today. It is rarely an explicit, active expulsion, but those who are faithful followers of Christ are made to feel unwelcome in many of our Churches today. Fortunately, Jesus has given us the Holy Spirit so that we might continue to follow Him in the face of those who distort and misuse His teaching.
David’s reaction to the illness and death of his first child with Bathsheba gives us a lesson for dealing with those same thing. When the child became sick, David fasted and prayed, pleading with God for the child’s life. He refused all efforts to convince him to eat and rejected every attempt to comfort him. However, as soon as he became aware that the child had died, he cleaned himself up, worshiped and praised the Lord, then got something to eat.
David’s explanation should guide our behavior. As long as the child was alive, there was a chance that God would heal the child and allow him to live. Once the child had died, there was no longer any reason to fast, mourn, and pray about him. Let us spend our time and effort on those who yet live, where our prayers and concern might still change things. (The wording did not come out quite as I had hoped. I apologize to anyone who might find what I have written insensitive.)