For today, One Year Bible Online links here.

    Greed leads one into conflict with others over money, but trusting and obeying the Lord leads to having all that one needs to get by and more.

    Take your troubles to the Lord. When times are hard and troubles are all around, cry out to the Lord and He will answer your prayer. I can sympathize with the psalmist’s complaint about living among those who do not live peaceful and godly lives. His answer is the only one there is, call out to God for rescue. God will answer and give us peace.

    The author tells us that he wrote this letter so that we will not sin. However, if we do sin, he tells us that we have an advocate before God. If we are truly remorseful for our failures and strive to not sin again, Jesus will plead our case before the Father and the Father will have mercy on us.
    If we truly know God we will obey His commands. All of God’s commands are expansions on the command to love one another. If we are living in the light of God’s goodness it is not possible to hate another person. Therefore, if we hate another person we are in darkness. The writer goes beyond that, he tells us that if we are living in the light we will love our fellow believers. It is not enough not to hate anyone. We must also love our fellow believers.
    The writer than seems to change focus by warning us against loving this world and the things of this world. This is not entirely a change of focus because it is love of this world and the things of this world that interferes with our love of one another. If we love this world we will be more concerned with obtaining physical pleasures, material goods, and our own success than in the well-being of the family of God (when we are called to care for the family of God, we are called to care for the individual members of the family of God).

    Many people believe that the vision in today’s passage could only have been written by someone who actually lived in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes because it does such a good job of describing his rise to power. For me this is the least convincing of the arguments for the book of Daniel being written relatively late. I am unconvinced by such arguments because I believe that the Holy Spirit is perfectly capable of giving someone a vision of what the future holds. There are other arguments for the book of Daniel being composed in 164 B.C. which carry more weight for me. The fact that the book is composed of portions written in Aramaic and portions written in Hebrew suggest that it is a compilation of stories which had been passed down for several generations.