When you stop learning you start losing knowledge. No one ever knows so much that they cannot improve by learning even more. Even if that was possible our minds are built so that when we stop adding to our knowledge we start to forget the things we already knew.
If we serve God He will arm us for the battles He wishes us to fight. When our enemies are God’s enemies they will fall before us and no one will answer their cry for help. We do not need to seek revenge against our enemies because God will repay those who harm us. God will hold us safe and subdue those who fight us because we serve God.
The first phrase of this passage is a great conclusion to the subject Paul has been covering for the last few days. I have been talking about how Paul tells us that if we sin we are allowing our sinful nature to control us and if our sinful nature controls us the Spirit is not in us. And yet, who among us has the strength to resist temptation day in and day out. So, here Paul tells us that the Spirit will help us in our weakness. Paul uses the example of prayer, but the help the Spirit will give us extends to helping us resist temptation. If we allow the Spirit, He will help us overcome other temptations as well. We just need to listen to the Spirit’s prompting and do the things which He tells us we should be doing. As we do the righteous things which the Spirit tells us to do we will find that we do not have time to do the things which our sinful nature tells us to do.
Using his example of how the Holy Spirit helps us pray, Paul then transitions to a new topic. He tells us that we often do not know what to pray for and about. However, the Spirit knows and helps us do so. There are times when we just need to cry out to God and allow the Spirit to convey our needs. God knows our hearts and knows what the Spirit is saying on our behalf. We can be confident that God will listen to this pleading on our behalf and know that He will cause all things to work together for the good of those who love Him. So, if God is working to make all things work together for our good (we do love the Lord, don’t we?), then what do we have to fear from others? After all, if God is for us, who can be against us? (Yes, I know, lots of people, but they can do nothing which God does not allow.)
God has made us right with Him. He has taken the actions necessary to bridge the divide between us caused by our sin. He did this because of His great love for us and there is no power on earth, in heaven, or anywhere else which is capable of separating us from God’s love. I will conclude this with Paul’s statement on the issue: “Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love.”
After the northern tribes rebelled against Rehoboam and made Jeroboam their king, the priests and Levites all moved south. They did this because Jeroboam replaced them with priests of his own choosing. The result of Jeroboam’s actions and the actions of the Levites was that those people in the Northern Kingdom who genuinely wanted to worship and serve God moved to the territory controlled by Rehoboam.
Let us serve the Lord so that our only enemies will be those who hate Him. When that is the case we can be confident that we will stand victorious over them. When your enemies tell you that God is dead, just remember, Jesus’ enemies said the same thing on Good Friday approximately 2000 years ago!
When the disciples ask Jesus to send the crowd away to get food for themselves, Jesus tells them to feed them. The disciples respond that they have just enough for themselves. Jesus’ answer is to have the disciples bring their food to Him. He then blesses the food and breaks it into portions for the disciples to distribute. The lesson here is that when we do the will of God our supplies will be sufficient to complete the task He has set us.
This is followed by the story of Jesus walking on the water. Actually, the part of this which has seemed like the important part of this story is that Peter walked on water. There are two elements here. Peter got out of the boat and started walking to Jesus. Then he started looking at the waves and he began to sink. It is often pointed out that Peter got into trouble because he took his eyes off of Jesus. This is true…and important. But we often forget to point out what he was able to accomplish as long as he kept his eyes on Jesus. It was when Peter stopped thinking about Jesus and started to think about what he was doing, “Look at me! I am walking on water,” that Peter got into trouble. When the focus of his thoughts were on going to Jesus, on following where Jesus led, Peter was able to do the impossible. When he started looking around and thinking about what he was doing that Peter got into trouble. It was then that he started thinking, “How am I doing this? What if it stops working?” If we focus on Jesus and following Him without thinking about what we are doing, we too can “walk on water” (literally, but not just walk on water. We can do much more.). However, if we start to think “Look at me! I am really doing the Lord’s work now,” we too will start to worry about what could go wrong. No matter what we are doing, whether it is healing the sick, feeding the hungry, or preaching the Gospel, we need to make sure we are doing it in order to get closer to Jesus, not so that others see what wonderful Christians we are.
Joseph tested his brothers in many ways in order to see if they had changed as much as he had. He put them into circumstances where they could have easily left their brother to suffer. However, they demonstrated that not only did they regret what they had done to him, they were willing to sacrifice themselves to save their brother Benjamin. However the most important part of this passage was when Joseph told his brothers that they should not be angry with themselves for what they did to him. It was God’s plan to send Joseph into Egypt ahead of them to save them and their families from the famine, as well as saving many others. We should have similar view of life. The difficulties and hardships we face in life are there in order to position us so as to carry out God’s will when the time is ripe.
There never comes a time when we know so much that we cannot benefit from further instruction. When we stop learning we start forgetting.
Those who are willing to lie, or otherwise mislead, on the witness stand make a mockery of the very concept of justice. They encourage evil, which will rebound upon them.
The psalmist continues his praise of God and recounting how God will rescue those who trust in Him. God will strengthen those who love and serve Him. He will aid them against their enemies. God will not answer the cries of those who make themselves our enemies if we serve Him. Of course that also means that God will not answer our cries if we attack those who serve Him.
The Lord lives! He will pay back those who harm us. Let us praise Him with all that we are.
This is such a wonderful passage. It starts by reminding us that the Spirit will help us in our weakness. We may have trouble resisting sin’s temptation, but God’s Spirit will help us overcome. Further, there are times when we do not know what, or how, to pray. The Spirit will pray for us. Remember this when you are struggling to put together a prayer. We do not have to get the words right in our prayers. The Spirit of God, which lives within us, will convey what we are seeking and will harmonize it with God’s will.
Paul then goes on to point out that, since God is on our side, there is no one and nothing we need fear. If the Creator of the Universe is standing at our side, who or what can possibly stand against us? In all things God works for the good of those who love Him. If we love Him, everything that happens, no matter how bad it seems at the moment, will work together so that good will come to us. God loves us and nothing in this world, or elsewhere, can separate us from that love. Since God is the Creator, everything and power is less powerful than He. Let us never forget that no matter what happens, God will still love us. No matter what we have done, He loves us and will welcome us back if we turn to Him.
When Rehoboam returned to Jerusalem, he immediately mustered his army to reassert his control over the parts of Israel which had broken away. However, God sent a prophet to warn him against going to war against his fellow Israelites. It appears to me that Rehoboam had no choice in whether or not to go to war. The passage seems to indicate that the army refused to march against Jeroboam, not that Rehoboam reconsidered doing so.
The passage further tells us that the priests and Levites who lived in the lands controlled by Jeroboam moved to the areas controlled by Rehoboam. They did this because Jeroboam rejected the Levites as the intermediaries with God (which was established by the Law of Moses). For the first three years of Rehoboam’s reign, they strengthened supported him because he was faithful in following God’s commands. However, once Rehoboam became secure in his power, he turned away from following God’s commands and started to act according to his own will and desires.
When the inevitable trouble arose from not following God’s commands, God sent a prophet to call the people back to Him. Rehoboam and the leaders of Judah recognized their sin and turned back to God. Rehoboam humbled himself before God and God turned His anger aside, but Rehoboam still suffered the consequences of his earlier sins.
I am using One Year Bible Online for my daily Bible study. For today, One Year Bible Online links here. I have found that by writing this daily blog of what I see when I read these scriptures, I get more out of them. I hope that by posting these ruminations others may get some benefit as well. In order to make that possible I read the passages and write my thoughts a day, or more. in advance. My work schedule has recently changed, meaning that I may not have time every day to complete these. As a result, I am trying to get several days ahead. I hope this does not negatively impact the quality of these posts (if that is possible). If you have any thoughts or comments regarding these verses or what I have written about them, please post them.
Joseph’s testing of his brothers’ change of heart continues in today’s passage. He frames his brother Benjamin to see how his half brothers will react. When his servants overtake his brothers and discover the “stolen” cup in Benjamin’s possession, Joseph’s brothers all return to Egypt. When they get back to Egypt, they tell Joseph that they have all returned to be his slaves. Joseph tells them that only the man who “stole” the cup would be his slave. The rest were free to return to their father in peace. At which point Judah, the brother whose idea it was to sell Joseph into slavery, steps up to beg for his brother’s freedom. Judah makes an impassioned plea for Joseph to make him a slave and allow Benjamin to return to their father.
All of the brothers stood by Benjamin when trouble arose. An important point to note is that none of the brothers knew that Benjamin had not stolen the cup. Then when their solidarity was not sufficient to save Benjamin, Judah stepped up and offered himself in Benjamin’s place. When that happened, Joseph could no longer contain himself and revealed to his brothers who he was. Joseph’s brothers showed that not only did they regret what they had done to Joseph, but they had changed and were willing to suffer to prevent the same thing from happening to Benjamin.
Until today, I had never noticed that the reason Jesus attempted to go off by Himself in this passage was because He had just heard that Herod had executed John the Baptist, His cousin. When Jesus suggested to His disciples that they feed the crowd, they responded that they did not have enough food for that many people. This was after they had been sent out to heal the sick and cast out demons. They had seen Jesus do those things and had then done them, but this was something new. How often are we like that? When God calls us to something new, do we lack the faith to believe that He will provide us with the power to do it?
The story of feeding the 5,000 is followed up with Jesus walking on the water. It is a kind of follow-up to the way the disciples reacted to Jesus telling them to feed the 5,000. This time when Peter sees Jesus walking on the water, he asks Jesus to tell him to come to Him. When Jesus tells Him to come, Peter gets out of the boat and begins walking on the water as well. However, Peter soon stopped focusing on Jesus and began thinking about the danger he was in. That is when he began to be overwhelmed and started to sink. But even then, he called out to Jesus to save Him. There are two important lessons for us as Christians here (actually, there are probably more than that, but I’m just going to look at two of them). First, if we are going to “walk on water” when God calls us to, we need to get out of the boat. That’s one that lots of people talk about, but it’s important enough for me to repeat. Second, when the distractions around us start to overwhelm us, we can call out to Jesus and He will rescue us from the danger that our lack of faith has gotten us into.
At the beginning of psalm 18 the psalmist told us that he was at his end, about to be overtaken by death and his enemies. Then he called on God for deliverance. In response, God reached down from heaven and struck his enemies. The psalmist was victorious, but not because of his own strength and power. It was only through the strength which God gave him that he was able to stand up and defeat those arrayed against him. The important point of this psalm is that if we remain faithful to God, not only will He rescue us from desperate situations but He will give us the strength to completely defeat those who stand against us. If we are fighting to accomplish the goals which God has set us, we will completely overwhelm every person and force which stands in our way. But we will not do so through our own power, but with the power which God has given us.
The Lord lives! Praise to my Rock!
May the God of my salvation be exalted!
If we seek out wise teachers (and learn from them) and follow those who walk on straight paths, we will not be held back when we walk nor stumble when we run.
I am using One Year Bible Online for my daily Bible study. For today, One Year Bible Online links here. I have found that by writing this daily blog of what I see when I read these scriptures, I get more out of them. I hope that by posting these ruminations others may get some benefit as well. If you have any thoughts or comments regarding these verses or what I have written about them, please post them. I hope that the Spirit is moving in others through these posts as the Spirit has definitely been convicting me.
When Joseph’s brothers were preparing to leave, Joseph ordered that once again the silver with which they paid for the grain be put in their sacks with the grain. However, this time he also ordered that his silver cup be placed in Benjamin’s sack along with the silver he paid for the grain. As soon as his brothers had left the city Joseph sent his steward after them to accuse them of stealing his silver cup. The brothers deny stealing anything and agree to having their possessions searched. When the cup is found in Benjamin’s sack his brothers tore their clothes and returned to the city. Upon returning to the city, Judah spoke for the brothers and begged Joseph to make him, Judah, a slave and allow Benjamin to return to his father.
Joseph was overwhelmed with emotion by Judah’s impassioned defense of his brother and could no longer contain himself. He revealed himself to his brothers. Joseph tells his brothers that they should no longer be angry with themselves for selling him into slavery because God had sent him into Egypt ahead of them in order to keep their families alive. Joseph then tells them to return to Jacob and bring him and their families back to Egypt where Joseph can help take care of them for the remaining five years of famine. When Pharaoh heard that Joseph’s brothers had come he sent orders that they should take carts from Egypt to go and load their families into to bring them all to Egypt. Joseph sent his brothers on the way with plentiful supplies and gifts for his father. As they left he called after them asking them not to quarrel on the way. When they got back to Jacob and told him that Joseph was alive and running things in Egypt, Jacob did not at first believe them. However, once Jacob saw the gifts Joseph had sent, he changed his mind and wanted to go to Egypt to see his son Joseph before he died.
One of the important parts of this passage for us to pay attention to is what Joseph said to his brothers when he revealed himself. He tells them not to be angry at themselves for what they did to him because it fulfilled God’s will. We should both follow Joseph’s example and his advice. We should follow his example and forgive those who have done wrong to us, recognizing that God has, or will, bring good to us out of those wrongs we have suffered. But we should also forgive ourselves for the wrongs we have done. Before we can do that we need to do as Joseph’s brothers had done and change so that we are not the sort of people to repeat those wrongs. This story contains a microcosm of how we as Christians should deal with our bad choices. We need to repent and change our behaviors so that we do not make the same mistake again. Then we need to forgive those who have done wrong to us. Finally, we need to forgive ourselves for the wrongs we have committed, determining not to repeat those wrongs.
This passage starts with something I have never noticed before. When Jesus learned that John the Baptist had been beheaded, He withdrew by boat to a solitary place, presumably to be alone with His thoughts. When Jesus did this, the people of the surrounding towns followed Him on foot. When Jesus saw the large crowd that had gathered, He had compassion and began healing their sick. When it got late in the day, His disciples came to Jesus and suggested He send the crowds away so that they, the crowds, could go and get themselves something to eat. Jesus’ response was for the disciples to feed the crowd themselves. The disciples replied that they only had five loaves of bread and two fish, not by any stretch of the imagination enough to feed a crowd of this size. Nevertheless Jesus told His disciples to bring the food they have to Him. He then took the food, blessed it, broke it into pieces and gave it to His disciples to distribute to the crowd. The disciples filled twelve baskets with the leftovers they gathered up after everyone had eaten and was satisfied.
When they had finished, Jesus made His disciples get into the boat and go ahead of Him to the other side of the lake. He then dismissed the crowd and went up on the mountainside to pray. Shortly before dawn, Jesus headed out to the boat walking on the lake. The boat was well out from shore by this time, although not as far as it might have been because the wind was against it. When the disciples first saw Jesus they thought He was a ghost and were frightened. Jesus spoke to them and told them not to be afraid. Peter asked Jesus to confirm that He was who He said He was by telling Peter to come to Him. Jesus does so. Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water towards Jesus. However, when Peter noticed how rough the wind was making the water he became frightened and began to sink. Peter cried out to Jesus. Jesus reached out His hand and caught him. Together they climbed into the boat.
This second story highlights something that was pointed out in our Sunday worship service this week. In First Century Palestine, a disciple was someone who strove to become just like his teacher. Someone strove to become the disciple of a particular rabbi because they wanted to be like them, because they wanted to do the things that that rabbi did. That is why Peter wanted to walk on the water to Jesus, he wanted to be like Jesus and to do the things that Jesus did. When we look at this story, I think we see that the disciples were beginning to realize that Jesus was more than a man. Peter here asked Jesus to tell him to come to Him on the water because Peter was not sure that this was something it was possible for him to ever be like Jesus in. That is, Peter, along with the rest of the disciples, was beginning to believe that they were unable to realize their goal of being completely like Jesus. When Peter asked Jesus to tell him to come to Him on the water, Peter was asking if this was something that they could aspire to. Jesus’ answer to Peter, and to us, was that yes, everything He did is something that we can learn to do if we follow Him. Jesus calls us to be His disciples, to strive to become just like Him and to do the things that He did. We too can feed the five thousand and walk on water. However, in order to do it, we need to be willing to get out of the perceived safety of the boat and put ourselves at risk. All too often that is my problem, I am afraid to get our of the boat and walk to where Jesus is waiting for me to join Him. At least Peter got out of the boat even though his faith failed him before he got to where Jesus was waiting. I am afraid that my faith will fail me before I get to where Jesus is waiting and thus I do not even get out of the boat.
The psalmist tells us that he pursued his enemies until they were destroyed. However, he tells us that they turned and fled from him not because of anything he did, but because God caused them to do so. Let us praise and exalt God because He will cause our enemies to turn from us and flee. The Lord lives and He will be our rock and our savior. He will avenge us and save us from our enemies. We need not fear pursuing the goals that God sets for us, for He will cause those who oppose us to turn and flee.
We can recognize the path of wisdom because it is straight and clear. If we follow the path of the wise ours steps will not be hampered and we will not stumble when we run. If we hold onto wise instruction it will provide us with life.
I am using One Year Bible Online for my daily Bible study. For today, One Year Bible Online links here. I have found that by writing this daily blog of what I see when I read these scriptures, I get more out of them. I hope that by posting these ruminations others may get some benefit as well. If you have any thoughts or comments regarding these verses or what I have written about them, please post them.
After the Northern Tribes chose Jeroboam as their king rather than Solomon’s son Rehoboam, Rehoboam returned to Jerusalem and prepared to make war against them to gain control over them. The prophet Shemaiah received a word from the Lord that they should not fight against the rest of Israel and the warriors of Judah and Benjamin chose to listen to this advice. Instead of going to war against the Northern Tribes, Rehoboam fortified towns and strengthened the defenses throughout Judah. The priests and Levites that had been living among the Northern Tribes moved to the area controlled by Rehoboam because Jeroboam would not allow them to serve as priests. Jeroboam appointed his own priests to serve at shrines he created where they offered sacrifices to goat and calf idols Jeroboam had made. Jeroboam’s decision to create shrines to idols led many Israelites to move from among the Northern Tribes to the area controlled by Rehoboam.
Rehoboam spent some time consolidating his control over the territory he still controlled. In addition to fortifying towns and stationing troops in them he gave his sons administrative authority and stationed them throughout in some of those towns. Unfortunately, once Rehoboam has firmly established himself, he stopped trusting in God and turned away from Him. When God brought the Egyptians up to attack Jerusalem, Rehoboam and the leaders of Judah turned back to God to save them from the Egyptians. We are told that the Egyptian Pharaoh ransacked the treasuries of Jerusalem, but left Rehoboam as king.
Rehoboam was succeeded by his son Abijah. Abijah and Jeroboam went to war against each other. Abijah mustered 400,000 troops and Jeroboam mustered 800,000. When the armies faced off against each other, Abijah told Jeroboam’s forces that Judah continued the practices of worshiping God, while Jeroboam had driven off the priests of God and replaced them with priests to pagan gods. Abijah told Jeroboam’s army that they were fighting not just against the army of Judah but against God Himself. Jeroboam outflanked Abijah’s army and attacked from the front and the rear. The army of Judah called on God and was victorious.
Paul writes that the Holy Spirit will help us in our weakness. We do not know what to pray for, but the Spirit will intercede for us as we lay before God our concerns. God will search our hearts and the Spirit will intercede for us so that our needs and wants become aligned with God’s will. Paul tells us that all things work together for good for those who love God. Paul goes on to say that if God is for us, who can stand against us? If we fully rely on God, there is no reason to fear any power on earth or in supernatural realms because none of them can stand against God. Even when we face trouble, calamity and/or persecution we should know that God will still work to bring about good for us. Nothing can separate us from God’s love. He will continue to love us no matter what our circumstance and we should strive to return that love. We must always strive to remember these two things no matter what our circumstance. First, God will work in all things for the good of those who love Him. Second, nothing is able to stand against God and separate us from His love. No matter what hardship or trial we face we can have confidence that God is using it to bring about good for us.
We are never too old to learn. There should never come a time in our lives when we are unwilling to take instruction from those who know things that we do not.
