I am using One Year Bible Online for my daily Bible study. For today, One Year Bible Online links here.
Samuel gives his farewell address. He starts by asking if anyone has any gripes against him, has he in anyway abused his authority? The people answer that he has never done anything to call into question his judgements. Samuel then recounts how the people turned from God and were oppressed, but God provided them with judges to deliver them when they turned back to Him. Finally, Samuel tells the people that they have done wrong by demanding a king, but that God will forgive them as long as they continue to worship Him and follow His commands and do not return to worshiping idols. We must remember this. We will sin, but when we do, we must acknowledge our sins and live with the consequences of those sins. And then we must strive to be faithful to God going forward.
After Samuel’s farewell address, Saul selected 3,000 men out of the 300,000 that had answered his summons to go to war against the king of the Ammonites. He chose these men to be a standing army. He placed 1,000 of them under the command of his son Jonathan. Jonathan attacks and defeats a Philistine garrison. The Philistines mobilized their army with a core of trained men that outnumbered Saul’s force by 2 to 1 with an unnumbered amount of conscripts that we are told was “as the grains of sand on the seashore” accompanying them. King Saul then summons all of the fighting men of Israel. Saul had arranged for Samuel to come and offer a burnt offering to the Lord. When Samuel is late, Saul, fearing that his men will all desert him, offers the sacrifice himself. As he is finishing offering the sacrifice Samuel arrives. Samuel demands to know why Saul has done this. Saul explains that he was afraid the battle was about to begin and he had not yet asked for God’s help, so he felt compelled to offer the sacrifices himself. All very practical reasons that sound like good reasoning to us today. Samuel tells Saul that God had given him (Saul) very explicit instructions which Saul took it upon himself to violate and Saul would be punished for this. This is an important lesson for us today. There may be sound, pragmatic reasons for us to take an action, but we must obey God first even when that seems to bring risk to us. Today’s lesson hits very close to me. I have been considering a job that has a schedule that conflicts with my Church commitments. The job fills some very desperate needs in my life right now, but perhaps this lesson is telling me not to allow pragmatism to displace faithfully following God. I will need prayers on this so that God can give me clarity as to what His will for me is at this time.
This passage starts with Jesus staying out of Judea because the Jewish leaders were seeking an excuse to have Him executed. When the Festival of Shelters came up, His brothers asked Him to go to Jerusalem for it. They tell Him that if He wants to become famous, He needs to go to Jerusalem for the big festivals. The passage tells us that they did not believe in Him. Jesus tells them to go ahead without Him, that He is not going now. When I read this passage, I think that His brothers wanted Him to go to the festival because they wanted to bask in the reflected glow of being brothers to this big celebrity. This is a common human failing, we like to be seen associating with celebrities. I think that part of the reason Jesus sent His brothers on without Him was to protect them from the suffering that He knew was coming His way.
After His brothers have gone to the Festival without Him, Jesus heads there as well, but keeps a low profile. The people at the Festival argued about Jesus, whether He was a good man or a charlatan. Midway through the Festival, Jesus starts teaching at the Temple. People are amazed that He can know so much because He had not gone through the equivalent of seminary. This is a problem I see today, we have a tendency to think that pastors ought to have a seminary education. If we see someone who we think has gifts from God to be a pastor, we think, “He should go to seminary to become a pastor.” I think this is wrong. I think that if we see someone who has been given the gifts from God to be a pastor, we should call them to the pastorate. If someone feels led by God to go to seminary and others concur (whether before they have been called to the pastorate or after, or perhaps because they have some other calling), then they should go, but not everyone who God calls to the pastorate is also called to attend seminary. We as a Church need to stop valuing a seminary education above the teaching of the Spirit of God.
Can I truly say with the psalmist, “My heart is confident in you, O God?” Am I willing to “thank you, Lord, among all the people?” Or are there people who I don’t want to know of my faith? When I started this blog, it was not readily accessible from my main web page. This was not on purpose, but when I realized it had happened, I put forth no effort to fix it because I thought this blog might interfere with the purposes of that main page. I have recently started to address this issue, but my original concern was wrong. For that matter, I have not publicized this blog several places that give me that option. It is true that that was partially because I do not want to do a lot of self-promotion, I want people to find and use this blog because God guides them to it. However, it is, also, because I did not want to have to defend what I wrote here before people who oppose what I believe. I need to follow the instructions of this psalm and sing God’s praises among the nations because I do believe that His “unfailing love is higher than the heavens,” and His “faithfulness reaches to the clouds.” I find myself once again echoing the father of the demon-possessed boy who had seizures, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”
Over the last few days, we have had several proverbs which condemned untruthfulness. This one contrasts a “deceitful tongue” with “gentle words.” I found the above image and it contains the following words, which too few of us today honor.
the blessings they impart!
how oft they fell as manna fell
on some nigh fainting heart
in lonely wilds by light-winged birds
rare seeds have oft been sown:
and hope has sprung from gentle words
where only grief has grown.
These words are so true. We cannot know how often a kind word spoken in passing may have changed someone’s life, or given them strength when they felt the world was about to crush them. We cannot know when our gentle words will be the thing that gives someone the hope and confidence to face their lives trials, nor when our failure to say those words may be the last straw in someone’s losing battle against life’s tribulations.
On the other hand this proverb tells us that “a deceitful tongue crushes the spirit.” I pray to God that I have never been the one to utter the cruel words that were the straw that broke the camel’s back for someone who was losing the battle against life’s difficulties. I know there have been times when I said something unthinking where I had to later spend hours attempting to repair the damage. On the other hand, I have had friends who were only my friends because when we first met, I did not have the heart to tell them I didn’t really like them, people who came to mean more to me than I could ever have meant to them.