For today, One Year Bible Online links here.

    We all know someone like those described in this psalm, people who laugh at the idea that they should feel guilty for what they have done wrong. They go through life rejecting responsibility for the pain they have caused others. However, those we should truly admire (and whom most of us do) acknowledge when they have caused others pain and seek to make up for it. Let us strive to be like the latter.

    God is king over all of the earth, despite what various rulers and government officials may think. Ultimately, it is God who is sovereign. Those who acknowledge this will experience joy. Those who refuse to acknowledge it will experience judgment. God has established fairness and justice throughout the earth. I will praise and exalt Him for it.

    The Roman officer who oversaw Jesus’ crucifixion was so impressed by His behavior that he worshiped God as a result. Do we demonstrate behavior during difficult times that will lead witnesses to recognize that we are servants of God and to praise God?
    The account here of the women being the first to discover Jesus’ resurrection is one of the strongest arguments against it being made up story. Women at the time were considered unreliable witnesses. Not only were the women the first to discover Jesus’ resurrection, the men were unwilling to believe them. If this was a made up story, it would have been one of the prominent disciples who discovered the empty tomb. It would have been Peter, Andrew, James, or John, or some combination of them who came to the empty tomb.
    I just noticed something in this story that never occurred to me before. Many people talk about the parallels between the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection and various mythological accounts about how winter and spring came to be, mythological accounts which discuss the cycle of life. The thing is that the Gospels make no such connection. The Gospels do not connect Jesus’ death and resurrection to the seasons the way those myths, from which the story supposedly derives. However, there is one mythological idea to which I think this account alludes. There are several mythological stories of people going into the Land of the Dead to find someone they loved. The angels in this account allude to this when they ask the women why they are looking for Jesus among the dead. There is an important lesson here for us. We do not have to enter the Land of the Dead to be reunited with our loved ones who serve God.

    After Gideon’s victory the people of Israel asked him to become their king and start a dynasty. Gideon declined, telling the people that it is God who should rule over them. However, despite refusing to become their king, he did gather gold from them to create an ephod which would serve as a focus for the people of Israel. I am quite convinced that by doing this Gideon set the stage for his son Abimelech killing most of the rest of his sons as recounted at the end of this passage.