1 Samuel 26:1-28:25, John 11:1-54, Psalms 117:1-2, Proverbs 15:22-23
Today is the 20th day of May. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian and it is a pleasure to be here with you today on this 20th day of the month of May. I guess that gives us 11 days left in this month. So, we’re well through the middle. And boy, we will finish this month and head into our six month of the year already. It’s crazy how quickly things go. What a busy year it’s been though, at least for me. I am learning to maintain, and I am learning that it requires maintenance to maintain and I am learning that in order to have time to do maintenance and maintain maybe there’s some things that have to diminish or maybe even fall away, but one thing remains true and that is the rhythm of the Scriptures speaking life and light and good news into our lives every single day. And, so, we’ll take the next step forward. We’re kind of rounding the bend here on our time in first Samuel. We’ll conclude first Samuel in tomorrow’s readings. So, we’re reading from the Christian Standard Bible this week. And today, first Samuel 26, 27 and 28.
Commentary:
Alright. It’s pretty dramatic happenings going on in first Samuel. Battle lines have been drawn up. David, who has been so intertwined with Saul, right, Saul’s been trying to assassinate David since he killed Goliath practically. David has had to grow up fast, he’s had to grow up in the spotlight, he’s had to learn how to be a warrior, he’s had to learn to be stealthy, he’s had to learn how to stay alive, and he finally…he’s defected to the Philistines and become a Philistine simply to stay away from Saul because he’s thinking, eventually Saul’s gonna get me. So, as it turns out, the entire Philistine army and the entire Israeli army are about to have a huge battle. And David’s now a Philistine and is expected to fight as a Philistine. Saul, on the other hand really has no voice of counsel whatsoever. Like, the isolation has become nearly total. And, so, Saul is seeking out a medium to try to get Samuel’s counsel from beyond the grave, and this happens and Samuel’s counsel as we leave today’s reading is essentially, “I’ll see ya here tomorrow.” So, ominous to say the least as we prepare to turn a corner and end the book of first Samuel tomorrow.
Then in the book of John we have the resurrection of Lazarus, which is indelibly imprinted on my mind because we’ve been there to this location several times and the tomb of Lazarus is something that’s included in the Promised Land films. And there are many things we can talk about in the story of the resurrection of Lazarus, many things that we could talk about, but let’s just focus on the aftermath, right? So, we read the whole story. Jesus is somewhere else. Word gets to him. He eventually gets there. Lazarus has died, right? And the sisters, they have a message for Jesus, they fall down before Jesus and say what we seem to find coming out of our mouths a lot, “if you had only been here”, right, “if you just would have showed up for me, this wouldn’t have happened.” So, there’s so many rich human elements in the story. But it’s a famous story and we know that Lazarus rises from the dead. What is so deeply fascinating is what happens next. I mean Bethany is on the Mount of olives. It’s just like kind of on the back side of the Mount of Olives. And, so, really it is only a couple miles from Jerusalem. So, a resurrection of this magnitude, right, a guy walking out of a tomb wrapped in linen cloths after four days in the grave, how quickly do you think that word could travel two miles. So, it’s not long before people in Jerusalem are finding out about this and it’s not long before the religious leaders are meeting about this. And what is so deeply interesting is that their response to resurrection is to plot assassination, right? So, Jesus is bringing life and their fearful that everyone will believe Him and if everyone does believe Him then the Romans will come and take the power away and maybe even suppress or destroy the religion, which ironically is something that they attempted to do much later. Like, I mean they completely destroyed Jerusalem over rebellion in A.D. 70. So, just a few decades later. So, the thing that they were trying to kill Jesus about, right, to keep the peace, didn’t keep the peace. And we just have this absolutely crystal clear example before us of how twisted we can get when we get enmeshed basically in trying to keep God in our heads, right? So, trying to get God in our heads is the sciences that we have around our religious faith and persuasion. We would call this theology or doctrine. None of these things are bad. They help us form an understanding of what it is we believe. And yet what we are seeing play out in the Gospel of John are people who have devoted their lives to trying to figure that very thing out and how to obey the rules precisely to achieve perfection before God. And their response to God in the flesh, bringing resurrection and the light into the world is to plot to kill him because of what the Roman people might do if everybody believes Jesus. Like, we have this benefit of reading to the Gospels and we can scratch our heads because we’ve come through the age of reason and enlightenment and so we have these processes for sorting out logically things. And, so we can look at this story and go, but guys, like, if everybody believed in a person who could raise people from the dead, who’s not…I mean, who’s in danger here? But their expectation is for a military overthrow of Rome. Like, this is all they can get their minds around. If there is a Messiah coming and they did believe a Messiah, a messianic figure was coming, in their mind this person was going to get everybody on the same page for battle, for military overthrow of Rome, for a rebellion. And they…this was going on before Jesus and it happened after Jesus leading to the destruction of Jerusalem. If you want to read stories of Jewish rebellions against occupiers of the land prior to Jesus, then you read the stories of the Maccabees. Jesus just didn’t fit into the paradigm they were looking for, which was a strong military type leader. Instead, Jesus is walking around bringing light into the darkness by saying, the way you overcome…a more powerful weapon then a sword or a spear is love. Love your enemy’s if you want to truly conquer them. Because the two of you can be enemies and you can kill each other but then your dad, but if one of you loves the other one and that hatred turns into love, then you have gained one another and love has replaced hate, light has replaced darkness in the world. What if this were perpetuated? And they just…they just could not get their minds around it, or probably more true, they may have been able to get their minds around it, they just believed it was an impossibility. It wasn’t ideal because we do the same thing all the time. We’ll be having a conversation and describing something that would be ideal and we’ll say, “in a perfect world…in a perfect world that would be possible.” But we’ve gotta ask ourselves, what are we doing here if we are not here to reveal God’s kingdom and see it on earth as it is in heaven - a perfect world. So, there’s plenty to consider in the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead. But one of the things we should look at is how the religious people responded by plotting to assassinate Jesus and why because as we look into that we find that those kinds of seeds also live within us.
Prayer:
Father. We invite You into that. We invite You into our doubt and our fear, into our anxieties, into the things that twist us so backward that we do not see forward at all. Like we’re so confused and so deceived and so trapped that we really do functionally believe this is all there is, there is nothing more. And, so, we’ve gotta protect ourselves. We see this playing out in this story today and we see that this is in us as well and we see this in the face of an of a resurrection. So, we see how backward things can get and we invite Your Holy Spirit to show us the places inside of us where we have been twisted backward because of fear and we have been twisted backward because of betrayal and we have been twisted backward because of any number of things that have happened in our lives. We need to be facing forward, we need to be facing forward into the kingdom where we see all things are possible if we believe, which is exactly what You said in this story today. “Didn’t I tell You that You would see the glory of God if You would believe me.” And, so, we choose to believe. Come Holy Spirit we pray. In Jesus’ name we ask. Amen.
Announcements:
dailyaudiobible.com, is the website, its home base, its where you find out what’s going on around here. So, be sure to stay tuned and stay connected.
If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, the words fail me as far as coming up with new ways to say how grateful that I am for your partnership. We really wouldn’t be here if we didn’t do this together. Thank you. So, there is a link on the homepage at dailyaudiobible.com. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 19 96 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.
And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment, 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.
And that is it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.