This part studies the second reason young David knew he couldn't fail to kill Goliath: he would engage the enemy using the giftedness God provided.
Using Judges 3:10, 11:29 and 13:25 as references to the Spirit's anointing of three Hebrew men, "the Spirit of the LORD came upon David in power" implies extraordinary giftedness in courage, faith and physical strength. It certainly involved a warrior's belligerence uncommon in a boy. Wouldn't we expect that since David's prowess in war became legendary in his time? But he had to fight God's physical battles within the parameters God provided. That's why, when Saul prepared David for war as he prepared himself—tunic, armor, helmet, sword—David couldn't function. Saul's good intentions shackled the lad. He suffered a symbolic failure. He wasn't "used to them" physically as he was even more a stranger to such weapons spiritually. He would succeed Saul as king, but in defense of God's Kingdom, not as a secular royal defending himself. Indeed, David proved a naturally brave man, and a model of courage for his men, as II Samuel 21:15-22 makes clear. They fought in apparently hopeless situations, but with COURAGE by seeing it in David. But other brave adult warriors in David's youth existed, Jonathan included, but none chose to test Goliath. David did precisely because he felt chosen by God, not merely brave. Thus, putting aside all that a physical warrior would need to wage war, David exited Saul's tent as a shepherd, in peasant's clothing, unarmed except for an empty sling. To summarize, in God's mind, Saul had ceased being king, David succeeding. In God's mind, and also in God's historical time. David didn't spend the years between the Holy Spirit's anointing and Saul's death intriguing against the king, actively recruiting rebels to share his insurrection. The opposite is true, as even a cursory reading of I Samuel 17-23 proves. Question: have we tried to serve God in a way, or in a ministry, in which we found ourselves out of our depth, or out of our interest level? Could it be that we're using only gifts we WANT to use while leaving UNUSED God's gifts he wants activated? And believe this writer, one can use God-given gifts without visible success. We serve God best, and longest, and most willingly, doing what HE has gifted us to do. Naturally, it isn't even thinkable that Christians WOULDN'T serve God. The saved must be witnesses to the unsaved—and to the hurting, the troubled, the sick, etc. But it's necessary for leaders to help Christians discover their spiritual gifts AND ways they can profitably use them for Jesus. End Part IV
0 Comments
Born in 1933 with cerebral palsy, Christy Brown faced a bleak future. Knowing the difficulty of rearing such a child at the time, medical practitioners urged the parents to institutionalize him. They instead took him home and loved him. In time Christy Brown became a world-renowned artist and the object of an Academy Award winning film My Left Foot. The impossible happening.
In the late 1870's, a practical nurse diagnosed herself as a breast-cancer patient. Consulting a surgeon didn't help; she couldn't afford his $25 fee. She rented a room in her hometown and, without anesthetics, cut off her own breast. By God's grace she endured the shock and pain to live many years. The impossible happening. All aerodynamic evidence suggests that the bumblebee's body weight, compared with its wing spread, makes it impossible to fly. Unaware of its misfortune, the bumblebee flies anyway and manages to make a little honey in the process. The impossible happening. The vow of a volunteer to fight Goliath soon reached Saul. Excited to find someone to substitute for him as the tallest man in Israel, the king's heart sank when seeing a boy walk into the tent. A YOUTH vowing to kill a "fighting MAN" from his youth? IMPOSSIBLE. The lad stiffened his back, snapped his shoulders square to make him LOOK tall as he FELT, crooked his arm in a salute and, in a voice suddenly like a man's solemnly explained in two reasons why he couldn't fail. The first—and the one in this blog--his confidence from previous experience with God in impossible situations, represented by the lion and bear. One of the predators would occasionally snatch a lamb and hurry it away. To be instantly pursued by David with his shepherd's crook, shouting his defiance. Seeing him, the animals assumed predator status of bigger game. Only to find themselves prey to God-given strength they couldn't contest. THEY, the killers, became the KILLED. Who but Samson in Hebrew history had single-handedly torn a lion open at the mouth? That model established God's willingness to use any servant trusting him to overcome impossible challenges. Which David in his role as shepherd had embodied. To him the Giant proved simply another predator God would tear apart. Question: do we have any past experience where we saw God WORK on our behalf, helping through difficulties greater than our capacity or experience? Can't we let those memories empower us in present situations that seem too tough to confront, to contest, to conquer? God will never let us face alone to defeat what he THROUGH us successfully accomplishes. End Part III Sunday, April 25, 2021, East Village, San Diego, 7:25 pm. A couple walked innocently past a parking structure...when a man hurled himself from the structure, perhaps screaming in his death plunge. The man below jumped aside, either from a premonition, hearing a sound or seeing a form in his peripheral vision. He had no time to pull his 30-year-old wife with him. The suicide smashed into her, driving her under him onto the concrete. Both died. San Diego UT, 4/27/21
Sorry to start the blog with this sad story. But like it, we can never know when we start a walk, a work or a week, that we'll live to finish it. Goliath had that experience in the valley of Elah. Forty days straight, morning and evening, no time off despite his bad behavior, he provoked Israel to tears and terror by brandishing his javelin in their faces from across the valley. On the 41st day, he renewed his taunt. By the time the sun burned hot in the sky, a boy shepherd had hurled a stone that, like the man hurtling into the woman, buried itself in Goliath's skull.... But I'm anticipating.... Sent by his father as errand boy to carry provisions for his brothers and their commander, God summoned David to the site just in time to drop the food, hurry to greet his brothers AND see and hear the Philistine's usual bluster. Surprised to watch otherwise valorous men vanish from the battle line like fog before a rising sun, the boy wondered why. Particularly when overhearing the men plaintively talk to each other about rewards coming from the king to anyone killing the enemy champion:
As older brothers have always done when younger siblings have forgotten their public manners, oldest brother Eliab branded David a smart-aleck, ordered him silenced and sent home to his few sheep, the only role in which he considered him competent. Undaunted by Eliab's anger by a greater awareness of God's call, David simply turned to other voices, who repeated the story of REWARD. It excited the shepherd boy who would never again be unknown anywhere in history. End Part II I Samuel 17 is a whopping 58 verse chapter. Its subject matter excels its verse content. For it answers the problem we all face when confronting problems beyond our capacity or experience. With background material far exceeding human invention, the Holy Spirit prepares us to see God's Glory by introducing the hero of an unremarkable family as God's champion of Israel.
All nine feet, and all 500 pounds of flesh, of the Philistine warrior marinated in self-importance due to his size as representative of a race hard to envision, harder still to oppose and impossible to imagine overcoming. A walking armored weapon, he had for more than a month rose in sections from his King-Sized pallet, in his King-Sized Tent, clanked his way to a King-sized breakfast, then to the battle line. There he strutted in giant strides across the Philistine infantry line, every step showered with hand-claps and vocal adoration. He looked across the Valley of Elah at the ranks of Israel, swaggering his mass at them, waving his spear like a rotating arrow in defiance of the puny Hebrews. As bullies are accustomed to doing, he shouted a challenge: one of you stand for Israel while I stand for Philistia. Whoever STANDS after one-on-one-combat—you choose the weapon—and your man dies, is the same as each man's army winning. That all sounded reasonable to Goliath; after all, Israel had no one comparable. It all sounded terrifying to King Saul; after all, he stood head and shoulders above his warriors as the likeliest in Israel to contest the bully. That's the way it went day after day, week after week. After shouting his curses at Israel until his voice grew so hoarse he feared it turning into a little colt, he retired to his tent to eat, drink, sleep and dream pleasant dreams. End, Part I Near the close of his life, and at the end of 25 years of successful warfare against the nations of Canaan, Joshua summoned the leaders and people of Israel to Shechem for a final convocation. Read Joshua 23-24. After reviewing God's attention in keeping Israel safe, though facing many dangers, he called the nation to a complete commitment to God. Which meant eliminating the gods they still held and worshipped AT THE TIME. An amazing inconsistency!
The appeal he made then still resonates a blistering challenge to America. He demanded Israel's faithfulness to Moses. God still demands America's faithfulness to the Christian beliefs the nation's founding fathers—Puritans and Pilgrims—held in 1607 and 1620. Where would America be now if established by people of the politics and immoralities wedded to each other in the present administration and in our culture? The Founding fathers had strong Christian convictions. Present leaders of both parties forsake those convictions to keep peace in a diverse world. America faces the very challenge facing the newly-sovereign nation in Canaan. Israel proved it had established political dominance in Canaan WITHOUT eliminating the terrifying religious beliefs and practices of those uprooted by military power. The refusal to eradicate the religious beliefs of the conquered proved "thorns", "snares" and "barbs in the eyes" of Israel. The survivors of conquest had their revenge by paganizing the Hebrews. Some of the nations determined to remain, which made no difference, since God had ordained them to destruction—which meant obliteration. Only to find an Israel more committed to accommodation with pagan religions than committed to Moses. The same issue faces America today. In our rush to ecumenicity, we want to reduce the uncompromising singularity of Jesus Christ to an accommodating plurality of religions. Call an enemy of God anyone who proclaims, supports or tolerates that satanic lie. Just because Satan refuses to believe God is no argument to consider him right and God wrong. The Devil will continue to manufacture any deity fallen humanity wants—like the 33 heathen goddesses the lady painted. The deities will change as culture changes, and everyone will be a satanic lie because but One LORD exists, and no other. And he reveals himself in the Godhead of Father, Son and Holy Spirit—and NO OTHER. That truth remains fixed in Heaven and no earthly power can alter or deny it. The challenge is this: if we will not remain true to the scriptural Godhead, to which of the MANY gods and goddesses will we be true? Will we seek? Will we believe? Will we serve? Christians, we have no choice: we must declare with Joshua we will serve ONLY GOD in CHRIST, the ONLY God! God isn't obligated to accept anything we believe just because we believe it. We are obligated to accept anything God says just because he says it! Fini A man approached Jesus and "fell on his knees before him. 'Good teacher,' he asked, 'what must I do to inherit eternal life?'" Jesus answered, "Why do you call me good? No one is good—except God alone" Mark 10:17-18.
"Why call me good?" Jesus answered. The essential question the man needed to ponder. Did he understand Jesus as good as GOD is GOOD? For that's specifically Jesus as God in the Flesh. (The best and likely way to explain the Master's reply.) It's the single question American culture needs to ponder, given its diversity-crazed appetite for more and more, and infinitely MORE and MORE of multiplied religions. Consider the display of 33 paintings in the San Diego Balboa Park's Spanish Village Art Center March, 2021. The artist, because she wanted "more female energy in the world," used her art to express it: from the Celtic goddess Andraste to Buddhist Apsara. Interesting: she sought "more female energy" in non-existent pagan deities. The art reflected merely her need to feel female power, not Scripture's declaration of God Almighty being so far beyond masculine and into such MALENESS that everything else is female by comparison. Jehovah the only God, revealed in the eternal Godhead of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three in ONE: Scripture's grand, unchanging declaration! GOD, the sole source of ALL TRUTH. Not two or more gods or goddesses speculating truth as they see it, for that creates the certainty of division in society. The artist's conception is nothing new. It's as old as Satan's successful endeavor to deceive Eve in the Garden, his equally successful effort to turn ancient Gentiles from the TRUE GOD of Romans 1:18-20, into mindless, baseless idolatry, 1:21-23, with all the sexual perversions that accompany heathen religions, including homosexuality and its associated immoralities Romans 1:24-32. Satan's success ended when he endeavored to turn Christ's test from God into a temptation—and failed Matthew 4:1-11. This writer describes that seminal conflict in Volume 1, pages 258-271 of Their Own Best Defense. No one...that means NO ONE...has any excuse to believe in atheism, skepticism, pantheism or polytheism. Only monotheism—belief in ONE GOD—makes sense because Jesus withstood—resisted, refused—all Satan's lies in the 40-day ordeal chronicled in Matthew 1:1-11. Note: he allowed himself to be tested but never for an instant saw any of the tests during the 40 days as a temptation, including their summary in Matthew and Luke. He gave Satan all the advantage in the contest to prove him a spiritual Mini Flyweight slinging cotton balls against Christ's spiritual armor-plated personality. A lesson America has forgotten. End Part III GOD ALMIGHTY authors earthly life because he is eternal, never-beginning, never-ending,
I AM-LIFE! It’s either God creating or nothing is created. For when has Nothing produced Something—at all, ever? As the Hammerstein song says, “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.” GOD: the author of every kind of life that exists, from the single-cell amoeba to the million thousand cell whale. Each constitutes the mystery wrapped inside the “flower-in-the-crannied wall” mystifying Tennyson. All the certainty of GOD and GOD alone, of GOD, and no one else, defies the denials of scholastics spouting spontaneous regeneration from nothing producing something. Nonsense that pleases only the quasi-intellectuals who consider their intelligence the LIMIT of all that’s possible and knowable, as if whatever isn’t is neither. This particularity relates to us. Aware of our humanity, God still loves us beyond understanding. While the sole authority of TRUTH over ERROR, he invites us to study him to our very depth. While so different from us that no comparison is possible, we’re alone more like him than anything else he made by having his Imprimatur-Image on our minds. Isaiah’s dynamic passages, 40:12-31, 55:6-13, and Paul’s explosive benediction in Romans 11:33-36, declare God’s independence from us and our complete dependence on him. His refusal to ever be answerable to us, or judged by us, while willing to declare us righteous by our pledge of faith in Jesus Christ. All of which poses a choice to an America that considers itself beyond the need of choice. End Part II When the Lewis and Clark Voyage of Discovery returned from the Pacific Coast in September, 1806, St. Louis merchants wanted to know how to capitalize on the Missouri River fur trade. The American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia sought information on Botanical, Zoological and Ethnological specimens, including Live Indian chiefs. And in Washington, D.C., the tirelessly intellectual Jefferson asked endless questions relating to every aspect of the Voyage. None more important than the discovery of the fabled Northwest Passage across the American continent by water. Lewis’s discoveries scotched the whole idea.
That will-of-the-wisp dream had been the continuing pursuit of white civilization since 1492. To be satisfied only in the middle 19th century by an explorer looking for the doomed Sir John Franklin expedition, itself victim of the illusion. Webster’s Geographic Dictionary, 803-804 Author Stephen Ambrose emphasized the spirit of the early 19th century, embodied in British explorer George Vancouver: it demanded to know the “true geography of the earth”. Undaunted Courage, 420. If the early 19th century had the passion, the 20th and 21st centuries have an obsession with studying the works of God in creation…SANS any interest in the GOD of creation. How could we be so spiritually blind to consider “correct understanding” of earth’s geography essential to us but no understanding of God even relevant, let alone essential? That will be the subject of this short series of blogs, and how it relates to Christians. End Part I Business tycoons Mark Hanna and George Pullman had polar differences from the middle to late 19th century. Pullman refused to bargain when workers in his company town called a strike. Hanna derided that Darwinian dogma. He called any owner a fool who wouldn’t meet his employees “half-way.” Life History U.S., Vol. 8, 104-105. Hanna understood the working man far better than Pullman. As politics is often the art of meeting half-way on issues, capital and labor should struggle to find ways to profit owners and benefit workers.
That doesn’t work when humanity asks God’s baseline condition for discipleship. God doesn’t, and won’t, meet us half-way. In the first place, he’s already gone ALL THE WAY in providing forgiveness and discipleship. He created us in his image, with the capability of being like him. He endowed us with a conscience to monitor and correct us. He educated us in the behavior he accepts and those he abominates. He implemented the means of forgiveness: initially by animal sacrifice, ultimately and finally by Christ’s own. He warned us of judgment if we don’t accept his word and of unaccountable beneficences if we do. But when he instituted the basis of Christian discipleship, he didn’t meet us part-way or half-way, finding a happy medium he could accept and we would. No Half-Way Covenants with God—like the failed effort of second and third generation Puritans. The first, basic and non-negotiable condition of discipleship is SELF-DENIAL. Understand it’s the FIRST response demanded of every believer in Christ’s Godhood Matthew 16:24-28. We can’t just say, “I believe in Jesus,” and feel that’s enough. No. It’s barely the beginning, but it qualifies us to prove our faith is real by crucifying the self-will (ego) that otherwise disputes with God every issue we don’t accept as necessary! If Jesus commands baptism, self-denial agrees, and we’re baptized. If Jesus condemns homosexuality (which he did in Mark 7:20-23, and through his Holy–Spirit baptized apostle in I Corinthians 6:9-11), we condemn it, without judging the homosexual—since judgment of the person is God’s role. The same principle applies to all other Christian teaching. These are just two of the most debated issues among Christians today. Let us always remember: it’s never enough to appreciate Jesus, admire Jesus or be impressed by Jesus. Billions world-wide, of all religions, have and are. It’s another thing altogether to be convicted by Christ’s Deity and, therefore, in submission to the complete Authority that demands absolute compliance from us. We can accept or reject hm. But we have not had, do not have, or ever will have the right to limit, alter or compromise the condition of discipleship. It’s All The Way as Jesus offered it or NO WAY. No middle ground exists. Two warnings. First, let us not equate the quality of Christianity with the comfort it brings us. For it often treats us roughly, without apologies. Second, let us never so raptly listen to ego-pleasing music that tattoos on our mental roof that we don’t hear the crescendo of God’s wrath falling in on us. Addendum to previous blog
Is anyone but Democratic loyalists naive enough to believe that the two Party Groups omitting Under God from their pledge of allegiance took that liberty without the express permission of those in charge of the Democratic Party? |
Archives
May 2024
Categories
All
|