Today, I am reading and commenting on 1 Chronicles 27-29.

The first thing I noticed in today’s passage was that Asahel, Joab’s brother, was the commander of the army division on duty during the fourth month.  Now Asahel was killed in battle by Abner while David was king of only the tribe of Judah.  Which tells us that David set this system up before he became king over all of Israel.  Asahel was also the only one of these leaders for whom a successor was named.  I do not know that I see anything of deep importance in this fact, but each time I read through the Bible I get a little better understanding about the people and events it describes.

The point I want to focus on is what David says to Solomon as he turns control of the kingdom over to him.  He tells Solomon to acknowledge God and serve Him with wholehearted devotion and a willing mind.  When I started I was going to focus on a later part, but that just struck me.  There are three parts of our relationship with God.  First, we need to acknowledge Him.  We need to recognize that He is God, Creator of the Universe and Ultimate Authority.  Then we need to serve Him with all of the devotion which our being can summon.  It is worth noting that devotion is primarily an emotional response.  When we truly devote ourselves to God with our whole being, all of our emotions become subservient to that devotion, our love becomes subject to serving God, our joy becomes subject to serving God, our sadness becomes subject to serving God, our anger becomes subject to serving God, etc..  When any of these emotions detracts from serving God, we put them aside.  The final piece of this is that we serve God with a willing mind.  This refers to using our ability to think and reason to serve God.  We apply our minds to understanding and serving God.  It is not enough to be emotionally committed to serving God.  We must apply our minds to it as well.  We apply the ability to reason and to think logically in our service to God.  God did not give us the ability to reason in order to ask us to put it aside.  No, He expects us to apply our minds to understanding what He has done in this world.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.