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For I know the plans I have for you,declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Jer 29:11 |
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| Archived Manna: | |
Dear
Friend,
If you do not already have a habit of gathering daily manna the first thing in the morning (we can look at the example given to us in Exodus 16 and find the pattern for collecting daily manna), make it a habit. Establish your life and your schedule to allow you the necessary time to do your daily collection first thing every morning to give you the strength to make it through the day. And remember that today’s manna will not be sufficient for tomorrow; tomorrow’s manna must be collected tomorrow morning. Saturday, April 21, 2018
Today's Passage : Today's Passage:Subjecta:The Death of Saul Bible Verse:1 Samuel 31 (NLT) "(In 1 Sam. 29-31, David offers to fight with the Philistines against Saul’s army, but they don’t trust him and send him south. There, he discovers that the Amalekites have raided and burned his camp, and have carried the women away. He pursues them and defeats them soundly, recovering all of the plunder that they had taken. Against the will of some of his more untrustworthy tribe, he gives a full share of plunder to those who were too exhausted to go on the raid with him, and thus stayed behind to guard the camp.) Now the Philistines attacked Israel, and the men of Israel fled before them. . . . The Philistines closed in on Saul and his sons, and they killed three of his sons—Jonathan, Abinadab, and Malkishua. The fighting grew very fierce around Saul, and the Philistine archers caught up with him and wounded him severely. Saul groaned to his armor bearer, “Take your sword and kill me before these pagan Philistines come to run me through and taunt and torture me.” But his armor bearer was afraid and would not do it. So Saul took his own sword and fell on it. When his armor bearer realized that Saul was dead, he fell on his own sword and died beside the king. So Saul, his three sons, his armor bearer, and his troops all died together that same day. When the Israelites on the other side of the Jezreel Valley and beyond the Jordan saw that the Israelite army had fled and that Saul and his sons were dead, they abandoned their towns and fled. So the Philistines moved in and occupied their towns. The next day, when the Philistines went out to strip the dead, they found the bodies of Saul and his three sons on Mount Gilboa. So they cut off Saul’s head and stripped off his armor. Then they proclaimed the good news of Saul’s death in their pagan temple and to the people throughout the land of Philistia. They placed his armor in the temple of the Ashtoreths, and they fastened his body to the wall of the city of Beth-shan. But when the people of Jabesh-gilead heard what the Philistines had done to Saul, all their mighty warriors traveled through the night to Beth-shan and took the bodies of Saul and his sons down from the wall. They brought them to Jabesh, where they burned the bodies. Then they took their bones and buried them beneath the tamarisk tree at Jabesh, and they fasted for seven days. " Message:
So ends the story of one of the most problematic and tortured characters in the Bible. Many things could be said about Saul. We might consider him an object lesson in what becomes of a sinner without Christ—for the disobedience that sentenced him to such a horrible later life would seem comparatively minor to us, today.
He is surely a lesson to us that God does not answer to a higher authority! God loves David and favors him—He will forgive David for countless sins—but He certainly does not love Saul, and the Bible does not really give us a clear reason.
Saul even shows, finally, a bit of nobility in realizing that God has abandoned him and that he is, therefore, utterly without hope. He fall on his sword, almost 1000 years before the Romans would make the act famous.
We right revel a moment of dramatic irony, when the Philistines “proclaim the good news of Saul’s death” in a pagan temple. They will soon be very sorry! In fact, in the previous chapter they cited the popular saying, “Saul has killed his thousands, and David his tens of thousands.” Yet, they cannot figure out that they will have a much bigger problem when Saul dies, and David takes the throne. They have the utter blindness to the Lord that has characterized pagans throughout history, from the Pharaoh of Egypt to Hugo Chavez.
But God apparently does not hate Saul. The Hebrew soldiers refuse to allow his body to be desecrated and hung on a wall. They risk their lives to give Saul a righteous burial under the Law of Moses. One might infer that they are doing God’s will.
Meditation : Prayer : Now, to God the Father, who first loved us, and made us accepted in the Beloved; to God the Son, who loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood; to God the Holy Ghost, who sheddeth the love of God abroad in our hearts, be all love and all glory in time and to all eternity...Amen |
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