1 Samuel 20:1-21:15, John 9:1-41, Psalms 113:1-114:8, Proverbs 15:15-17
Today is the 17th day of May. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian. It is pleasure, every day, to be here with you, including today. It’s wonderful to take the next step forward as we move into the latter half or latter days actually of our week. And we’re continuing to move through the back half for the back part of the book of first Samuel, which is where we’ll take our next step forward in the Old Testament today. We’re reading from the Voice Translation this week. First Samuel chapter 20 and 21 today.
Commentary:
Okay. So, as we are rounding the corner on this week and preparing to close it down let’s just take a second to orient ourselves to where we are in and the stories in the old and new Testaments. So, we’ve been watching King Saul and then we saw David enter the story and we saw his rise to prominence and fame, and we’ve also watched Saul’s decline. And, you know, at this point in the story, David is convinced for good reason that Saul, that his actual intention is to assassinate him. And, so, he goes to his friend Jonathan and he’s like, “I swear, I swear I’m only a step away from death. Your dad…your dad is gonna kill me.” And Jonathan didn’t believe this, but he did very quickly learn very soon after that, yeah, in fact, Saul did want to kill David and he learned that for sure because Saul tried to kill his own son, Jonathan. It’s not the first time we’ve seen this kind of behavior out of Saul, even towards his own son. And, so, we…you know…at this point we can’t look at Saul and, not see a man whose kind of gone off the rails even though he has supreme power. It all really boils down to the fear of man, of comparison and trying to get an identity out what people think. This has allowed Saul to move into this jealousy and paranoia and rage. Meanwhile, we’re watching David hold onto God for dear life because there’s like no other way. He has had to grow up so fast and has had to become a warrior, a stealthy warrior so quickly that his instincts are certainly well sharpened. And, so, we see a final meeting between Jonathan and David where Jonathan is accepting the fact that King Saul wants David dead and he’s sending away, and we’ll pick up with the story as we move forward in our next step tomorrow.
So, then we move to the gospel of John and Jesus has healed a man who was blind since the day he was born and he did it again on the Sabbath day and it’s the Sabbath day that has Jesus in so much trouble with these people, with the religious leaders because they have, you know, spent a lot of time arguing with each other about what work is, like, what constitutes work because you’re not supposed to work on the Sabbath day and healing falls into that category. And, so, Jesus on a number of occasions, steps right into the face of that and heals people on the Sabbath day and argues legitimately, like “are you serious?” Like because the Pharisees were like, “this is happening on the Sabbath day, so it must be happening because of the devil”, right? “This man is a sinner because he’s doing this on the Sabbath day.” And this is an ongoing thing with Jesus between the Pharisees. One of the things that has them so irate and so acutely aware that they will not be able to control Jesus and rein him in. I mean the truth is, had they been able to rein Jesus and get just get him to be just like good Orthodox Pharisee, then, I mean they would’ve had a superstar rabbi on their hands. Jesus just, he didn’t come to play that game. It was not his mission to try to find prominence and yet he was able to do all of these miraculous things that were bringing him prominence and bringing envy upon him from the Pharisees. And, so, in the story that we read today, right, this man who was blind from birth sees, he goes to the temple, the Pharisees start asking questions, they’re asking like all kinds of interrogating questions and asking them from all kinds of angles and they draw the man’s parents into the mix to prove he was blind from birth because they believe this is a joke, but everybody around knows this is the man. He was blind from birth, and now he can see. And, so, they’re just after this guy and they throw him out of the synagogue simply because he’s stating the obvious. He’s basically saying, “I don’t know how to judge who a sinner is, that’s your job. You’re the religious elite, like, you spend your life studying this. So, you guys are the ones that get to determine who’s a sinful one. I don’t know whether he’s a sinner or not. I just know I couldn’t see, and I now can see because this person healed me.” So, there’s plenty for us to think about here. Jesus, for sure, messed with the theological understanding of the Pharisees when he healed on the Sabbath repeatedly. And at the same time, nobody could claim that the blind receiving site wasn’t an act of God. So, they were in a theological and in a traditional, like, impasse. And rather than simply acknowledging God’s goodness they fell back on their traditions and in the process denounced God. So, we should understand in this story that there are more types of blindness than just being unable to see the physical sense of light and shape. The Pharisees were also the blind people in this story. They were blind to what God was doing among them because it conflicted with their theological understanding of God. Isn’t funny how this is a recurring theme in the Gospel’s but it’s only usually talked about in terms of the religious elite people, the ones who were theologically students of the Torah, it’s them versus Jesus, we never bring ourselves into the mix. But God is bigger than…He’s bigger than all of the theological understandings that we can construct around him, the scaffolding that we build around him to try to explain what he does and what he doesn’t do in and on how that implicates us. God, at least as we read through the Bible, just care about that so much. Like, he’ll disrupt whatever he wants to disrupt. He will disrupt someone’s understanding anyway he chooses. And yet, this day and age, I mean, we still find ourselves in theological wars. Like we still find ourselves fighting over Jesus and what He’s gonna do, and what He’s not gonna do, and how He’s gonna do it, and who is gonna do it with and why. The theological disagreements that we have with each other, these are…they have purpose if we’re actually digging in and searching for the truth, but they don’t have much value when they’re nothing more than our attempt to be right, right, to be superior, to curate our lives so that it would appear that we’re closer to God. That makes us look a lot more like the Pharisees than it does Jesus. I mean God loves us all. We’re gonna have to learn to do the same thing. Battling over our personal doctrine isn’t going to draw us closer to God. And the funny thing is, at least in my experience, the closer we become to God, the more we realize how little we actually know. And Jesus gives us a beautiful invitation in this story to receive site where we are blind and to begin to know him well beyond our formula.
Prayer:
Jesus, we invite You into that. Holy Spirit come, because so often we turn to theology and doctrine and we look to our leaders to tell us what to do, to tell us what to think and feel and how things work, when You have invited us actually into a personal relationship. It becomes tricky when we’re trying to walk in a personal relationship with You but also trying to know the rules. And this eventually leads us into building walls and walling ourselves and walling everyone else out and it leads to our own pride and our judgment of one another and then our search for an identity by comparison, and all the sudden we find ourselves being a Pharisee and King Saul and we feel like we’re protecting You. And the truth is we’re protecting our own fears, we’re afraid to be in first person, always on, never off relationship with You because that might mean we have to live by faith, and that most of the time we won’t know if we’re doing the right thing or not, other than just knowing within our hearts that You are leading us forward. And yet that is the beginning of the journey. And we have so many examples from people in the Bible who walked with You and how counterintuitive their journey was and yet we think we can just lay out a grid of theology and doctrine and just have every eventuality accounted for in our lives and then we’re so mad when we’re walking a counterintuitive journey ourselves. Come Holy Spirit, help us to become aware that what You are doing is inviting us into a life of faith and we claim the life of faith every day. And yet the life of faith by default invites us to live beyond what we think we know, it invites us to live inside the realm of mystery beyond what we can control and beyond what we can explain. So, come Holy Spirit, draw us deeper into Jesus today. Lead us on the narrow path that leads to life. Lead us into all truth we pray. In the mighty name of Jesus, we ask. Amen.
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And that is it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.
Community Prayer and Praise:
Hi, it’s Sherry from Kansas. I was just listening to the May 15th podcast. Louise, I think you said your name was Louise, you’re from Massachusetts and you’re a senior citizen with an arthritic disability and you’re very much alone, you don’t have any family and you never dreamed that you would end up this way in your latter years, and I want you to know I’m in the same situation as you. I did have some family, but they were the ones that stole from my parents while my parents lay dying. And when I lost my parents I lost that family as well. So, I lost everybody all at once. I want you to know I understand. You’re not alone. There are people, other people like you and I in this world and I just want you…I just want to pray for you right now. Father, I lift up Louise before You and I ask You Father to give her the sense of Your presence Father and to let her know she’s never ever, ever, ever alone and Father that this entire Daily Audio Bible family will be praying for her. But I pray Father that You will connect her with someone, maybe a caregiver that comes to visit or someone in the area where she lives if she’s in an apartment building, but God I just lift her up to You and I ask that You give bring her someone God, a companion, a friend and that she also would know that You are her friend as well and God that You will move heaven and earth on her behalf Lord. Father, I thank You for it and I just pray for her to be encouraged and Lord I ask that You lift Your spirit and Father that joy would just come and I thank You for…
Hello this is Joyful Noise from Southern California. This call is for Just a College Student. I was blown away about how you introduced yourself and there is no “just” because you’re also child of God. And, you know, I just wanted to share with you how compelling your story was because you…you didn’t make any rationalizations when you asked for prayer. You said a sinful relationship or sexual sinful relationship that “I” started. You took complete ownership. That’s confession. And, so, do you know, Just a College Student, that God promises that He separates that sin from us as far is the east is from the west and you now have forgiveness. And, so, you have confessed your sin to…to the church, the Daily Audio Bible, right, and you confessed to God at the same time. And, so, therefore you’re on your way to healing. I wanted to share that with you and just what an encouragement. And just know that, you know, the kids that you will be ministering to at the summer camp, the Christian camp that you’re worried about attending, just know that they are also struggling with sin and that you, perhaps, may have a ministry or maybe somebody that you come across that you meet that is struggling with something similar. And then just know that, you know, God’s gonna use that. He’s uses all of our sins for His greater glory, doesn’t he? So, just know that you’re going to be perfectly positioned and it’s preordained by God that you going to be there. I also just really want to reiterate what you said, which is that I don’t know where I would be without the Daily Audio Bible community either, me either brother. I just want to share, Brian, you’ve been such a blessing and you shared, right around the end of March or early April, you shared that at any given moment someone is listening to and praying for…
Hi DAB family, this is Eric from Massachusetts it’s Wednesday, May 15th. This morning on the DAB I heard two people call. One of them was from the college student from Indiana struggling with sexual sin. Yeah, I know exactly where you’ve been. And, so, I want to pray for you and the next call was a lady from Massachusetts that actually moved from Indiana to Massachusetts last year. And this lady from Massachusetts is older and lonely and I get that too. So, I want to pray for both of you. Holy Spirit, Lord I ask that You come down on these two people, this Young man in college in Indiana. I want to pray for him Lord that he seeks Your face and that he asks for help within his church community, within the people around him that he’s vulnerable and he’s willing to share what’s going on in this life Lord. I pray that he would find strength and power in Your mighty name Jesus. I also pray for this woman I think her name was Eileen from Massachusetts whose lonely. I understand. I live in Massachusetts. If you’re anywhere around the Framingham area, please reach out to me and I’ll come and visit you. My email is erchurch@protonmail.com. Lovely you family. Take care.
This calls for a college student __. Brother I’m praying for you and the bondage that you are in. You are not alone. Don’t forget that. I would encourage you to really be in prayer to whether you should go to this summer thing because it sounds like…like it could not be a good thing. I don’t know what…what it is but you did not sound like you were ready to go do that man. But really, really pray on that and think about that. Lean into God. I’ll be praying for you. Keep us updated. We all love you and are praying for you. Alright. Bye.