Category: Judgment

1/6/2022 0 Comments

Tell the Righteous!

Meditation
Isaiah 3:10-11—Tell the righteous that it will go well for them, for they will eat the fruit of their labor. Woe to the wicked—it will go badly for them, for what they have done will be done to them.

God’s word to Isaiah challenged me to study the word righteous because it is in that context that things go well for people. What I found was staggering in some ways. But before we look at the signs and fruit of righteous living we should understand 14 lessons that teach:

12/31/2021 0 Comments

Finding Stasis

Meditation
Daniel 5:26-28--This is the interpretation of the message: MENE means that God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end. TEKEL means that you have been weighed in the balance and found deficient.PERES means that your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and Persians.

12/16/2021 0 Comments

Nahum--Pronouncing God's Vengeance

Nahum, the only person with that name in the Old Testament, prophesied against the nation of Assyria particularly against its capital city Nineveh—located about 220 miles north of modern Baghdad in Iraq.[1] But unlike when Jonah brought God’s warnings against Nineveh and the city repented, Nahum’s audience was proud and perversely wicked—completely unwilling to listen to God and therefore destined to experience His wrath.

8/28/2021 0 Comments

Withering

The Hebrew word navel, basically means wither or lose heart. It is used twenty times in the Old Testament. The word describes Moses in Exodus 18:18—warned about wearing out from trying to judge the people alone. Eleven times it refers to plants dying. Isaiah uses it to show people withering from sin (Isaiah 64:6). When you think of the condition of the world right now does it feel like it is withering? Such a thought should not be surprising for God warned us that this would happen.

7/29/2021 1 Comment

Nebulous

I have a theory for which I would love to get your feedback. Earth’s inhabitants all spoke the same language when they were created. That ability to easily communicate fed their pride and they decided not to spread over the earth in obedience to God’s command (Genesis 1:28). They preferred to build a prodigious city with a colossal tower where they could make a name for themselves or, in essence, do whatever they felt like doing (Gen. 11:1-4). Because of their pride and idolatrous hearts God came down to their city, called Babylon, and decisively acted.

4/14/2021 1 Comment

Degraded

When the leaders of the military set as their highest priority rooting out right-wing extremists and ensuring transgender Americans can serve in the force we can be sure that our readiness is woefully compromised. Who feeds the Commander-in-Chief his information? If it is people from the Palm Center the United States is in big trouble. This organization focuses its attention on America’s LBGT population and they say focusing on transgender issues is an urgent priority for military readiness.[1] Supposedly “recruitment, reputation, retention, unit cohesion, morale, medical care, and good order and discipline” are compromised by banning transgender Americans from serving. But they do not back up their statements with evidence outside their small population group. As someone who served in the military for 36 years I can tell you from my experience that their findings are absurd.

3/22/2021 0 Comments

Baal

The Israelites were living in mountain hideouts, caves and strongholds to escape the Midianites, Amalekites and Qedemites who frequently attacked them (Judges 6:2,3). Before God would use a young man named Gideon to deliver Israel from these aggressive raiders, He needed to wrest the weakest house in the tribe of Manasseh from their allegiance to Baal. Gideon’s own father and family members were engaged in idol worship. So an angel of the LORD appeared to him and gave him a mission.

3/7/2021 0 Comments

Mama, You're Singing in the Cracks!

Randy told us the following story at our elders’ meeting. A young boy was sitting at the piano playing a well-known song when his mother came up behind him and started singing. The boy stopped playing and looked up at his mother and said, “Mama, you’re singing in the cracks!” The poor woman was off-key and the boy wanted her to know it.

9/30/2020 0 Comments

The Return

Abraham Lincoln proclaimed, “It behooves us then to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.” On April 30, 1863, Lincoln's National Day of Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer was observed. Two days later, Lt. General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson was mortally wounded in a freak accident where he was shot by his own troops. The loss of this powerful Confederate leader changed the course of the war.[1]

9/2/2020 0 Comments

Two Sides of Belonging

Meditation
Acts 12:1,2--About that time King Herod cruelly attacked some who belonged to the church, and he killed James, John’s brother, with the sword.

5/30/2020 1 Comment

Judges

Israel experienced the death of their famous leader Joshua still facing the enormous task of conquering Canaan. The book of Judges follows up where the book of Joshua left off, with the challenge of expelling wicked nations in territory God assigned for His people in a period that spans three centuries.

3/31/2020 0 Comments

Numbers

The fourth book of the Bible is Numbers which is a translation of Arithmoi, from the Septuagint. It is titled as such because the book contains two census counts, numerous statistics, tribal and priestly figures, and other numerical data. The Hebrew name is included in the first sentence of the book and means “in the desert of ”; an accurate description of the book’s content, which follows the Israelites through almost forty years of desert wandering.[1]
The story began in the second year of the Israelites escape from Egypt, as they camped in the Wilderness of Sinai around 1444 BC. It ends 38 years later “in the plains of Moab by the Jordan across from Jericho” (36:13) in 1406 BC.[2]

6/7/2019 0 Comments

Hail

Hail is mentioned 36 times in the Bible. The majority (16x) are recorded in the book of Exodus. Thirty-one times hail is used as an instrument of God’s anger and judgment. We see this particularly evident when God devastated Egypt with hail as one of the ten plagues to force Pharaoh to release the Israelites from captivity. Forty some years later, God used hail to wipe out the armies of five Amorite kings who attacked Israel.

3/26/2019 0 Comments

Frustration

Have you ever been frustrated by something that should work and doesn’t? For the last several months I’ve had a rotten time trying to charge my phone. I purchased several charging cords but the connection always seemed to be an issue to the point where many times I would have to hold the phone and firmly push the cord to get a steady charge. I was just about to take the phone into the store and replace it when I had an idea. Taking a pin I probed the cavity where the cord connected and immediately all kinds of dirt and matted hair began to come loose. Honestly, I felt pretty foolish—no wonder the phone was not properly charging—it was plugged up with debris.

11/27/2018 0 Comments

Bypassing Trouble

Meditation
Luke 9:51-56--When the days were coming to a close for Him to be taken up, He determinedto journey to Jerusalem. He sent messengers ahead of Him, and on the way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make preparations for Him. But they did not welcome Him, because He determined to journey to Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do You want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?” But He turned and rebuked them, and they went to another village.

7/16/2018 0 Comments

I Will Destroy You

Ammon was a nation located east of the Israelite tribes of Gad and Rueben who were also both situated east of the Jordan River and Dead Sea. We know from Genesis 19:38 that the Ammonites were descended from Lot’s youngest daughter’s son Ben-ammi. From Deuteronomy 2:19 we learn that God did not allow Israel to attack or take any of the Ammonites land because He had given it to Lot’s descendants. Remember Lot was Abraham’s nephew. We also know from Deu. 23:3,4 that because the Ammonites and Moabites refused to help the Israelites during their journey out of Egypt that God excluded them from ever entering “the Lord’s assembly.”

10/9/2017 0 Comments

Discretion

The dictionary uses the following definition for the word discretion—“1. the power or right to decide or act according to one's own judgment; freedom of judgment or choice . . . 2. The quality of being discreet, especially with reference to one's own actions or speech; prudence or decorum.”[1] Discretion seems to be an increasingly neglected concept in our society. More and more people freely express their opinion or take action either with little prior thought to the consequences or with the deliberate decision to cause harm. For example, on Columbus Day, a national holiday, police in New York City have to protect statutes erected for Christopher Columbus for fear that people will vandalize or destroy them. Instead of taking into account the pride that Italian Americans have in a famous explorer, protestors feel justified in defacing or tearing down his monuments because of the perceived harm he caused to native Americans.

2/29/2016 0 Comments

Leaving Hostility

Meditation
Genesis 26:21,22—Then they dug another well and quarreled over that one also, so he named it Hostility. He moved from there and dug another, and they did not quarrel over it. He named it Open Spaces and said, “For now the LORD has made room for us, and we will be fruitful in the land.”

The Philistines inhabited the land of Canaan and because water was precious in that arid region there was competition over who controlled it. In the passage above, Isaac, the son of Abraham could not escape quarreling with Philistine herdsmen who, envious of his wealth, claimed any wells Isaac’s servants dug up as their own. They should have been thankful for more sources of water. Instead, by their hostile actions, they were sending a message to Isaac—“Get out of our land.”

10/4/2015 0 Comments

If He Did What We Deserve

For ten days I underwent training to be an assessor as part of my responsibilities for a new job I will be taking with the military. By Friday night of the second week I was exhausted. This job is intense because it requires me (when I am on call) to make a final recommendation to senior U.S. or Canadian leaders at the critical point of what appears to be an enemy attack. Because I have no experience in aviation, I have to learn new terminology and methodologies in order to make key decisions for terrible contingencies that can occur rapidly.

6/8/2014

Learning from Disgrace

Dr. Myles Munroe wr0te in his book The Burden of Freedom, “When a lifestyle of irresponsibility is allowed to increase, the voice of conscience is progressively silenced . . . Conscience has died throughout much of the world’s society because we have inherited a spirit of irresponsibility.” Irresponsibility thrives when we fail to punish wrong behavior. But we also spur its existence by too quickly applying mercy without permitting disgrace. This may seem odd since the word disgrace carries such a negative connotation. This is why Scripture is profoundly important. Notice how God used disgrace to teach us a lesson.

Photo used under Creative Commons from Rachel Maxey Miles