1 Kings 8:1-66, Acts 7:51-8:13, Psalms 129:1-8, Proverbs 17:1
Today is the 11th day of June. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It is great to be here with you today as we…yeah…we’re moving fully into the week, how the rhythm of the week is getting established, and the rhythm of the Scriptures is ongoing in our lives. So, just a couple…just a little bit of orientation to where we are. We’re working through the reign of King Solomon who has built the first temple of God. Solomon is the son of King David. So, the second generation of the Davidic dynasty is upon the throne. And Solomon is bringing Israel to its finest hour. We’re also working our way through the book of Acts and what we are hearing is the testimony of a man named Stephen who has been arrested for…well…the accusation is that he’s blaspheming God and defaming Moses. And, so, we’re in the process of listening to his testimony before the high Council, and his testimony happens to be providing us fantastic review because we’re briefly touching all of the stories that we…that we’ve journeyed through so far this year in the Old Testament. So, we’re reading from the English Standard Version this week. Today, first Kings chapter 8.
Commentary:
Okay. Some pretty significant stuff going on in the Scriptures today. The dedication of the temple in the Old Testament in the book of first Kings and the prayers of the king, king Solomon. And in them we heard his words of encouragement, God if your people sin against you, and they pray toward this place, and they remember, and they repent, right? So, no matter where they are, whether they’re carried away into exile far away, whether they’re near, whether they fall into the hands of their enemy, or whether they’ve just simply fallen into sin. If they…if they pray to this place, toward this place, remember, hear them. And we probably all know…like…the first temple, the one that we are reading about just being built, it is eventually going to be destroyed. There will eventually, after that, be a second Temple, which is the temple of the time of Jesus and his life and ministry, that has also been destroyed. And, so, there’s only kind of one retaining wall left that is thought to be from that original time and that is what is known as the Western Wall or the Wailing Wall, which you have probably heard of. And people are continually praying at the Western Wall, certainly people who come as pilgrims like we do each year. Every year I do go to the wall and offer prayers, but also the religious Hebrew people are continually praying there because, in part, of what we read from the book of first Kings today. Solomon’s suggestion to the people that if these things happen and they will turn and pray and repent and humble themselves, then he’s asking God to hear them. So, people pray at kind of the only remaining place to do this and part of that comes from what we’ve read in the Scriptures today. But that’s not the only thing going on in the Scriptures.
Once we get to the New Testament we reached the conclusion of Stephen’s testimony. And it’s taken us several days to work our way through Stephen’s testimony. And as I’ve said on a number of occasions, it gave us a review of the stories that we have passed through so far this year, but the way…the way that he concludes the testimony is to essentially indict the high Council for rejecting Jesus…basically for rejecting the prophets who had gone before and rejecting Jesus and murdering Him. So, he proved for sure he knew the Hebrew origin story and that he was a Hebrew man but his closing argument enraged them, enraged them to the point that they drug him out of the city and stoned him to death and this is the first recorded martyrdom because of the name of Jesus other than the execution of Jesus himself. And, so, they listen to Steven and they cover their ears and they grit their teeth and they screech at him and drag him out of the city and kill him. And then the rage that was aimed at Stephen turned outward from…I mean…basically from his bloodied dead body laying outside the gate, just outside the city, a gate still exists. From there, the rage turned out toward anybody who believed in Jesus, who was in Jerusalem and some people were being dragged out of their houses. The Pharisee, sort of like zealot Pharisee, Saul, was a ringleader in this outbreak of persecution, but his attempts to stamp out the name of Jesus had the opposite effect as we see in the book of Acts. So, people are running away from this kind of opposition, they’re running towards some place of safety and they’re taking the gospel with them and the good news of the gospel began to spread throughout the known world from that point forward. So, in a very real way the gospel moved forward with the blood of the martyrs. And we’re the fortunate ones, because we’ve been able to receive the message freely, but there are many people within our sphere of influence who do not understand why this is good news or about eternal life in Jesus. So, the good news that progressed forward from this point that we read in the book of Acts today because of the blood of martyrs like Stephen is an ongoing work in the world and we’re supposed to be the ones that perpetuate it, we’re supposed to participate in it, we’re supposed to be known by our love, we’re supposed to be changing the atmosphere in every space that we occupy. Our…many of our spiritual ancestors died for this throughout all of the different periods of history and we have even borne witness to brothers and sisters in this time. In this modern era where we have the Internet to interconnect us all over the world, we still have brothers and sisters who have been killed for the name of Jesus. We have it so freely that we can take it for granted, that we can look around us and see people floundering in their lives who are absolutely going down and we just kinda passively move along. So, who do you care about that’s lost in floundering and why, why would we not pursue them with the good news? Which doesn’t necessarily mean you’re trying to pursue them to explain theological concept or some sort of theological metaphor that can help…help them out of their depression or out of their anxiety or… Your introducing them to the author of life, where all of the dots begin to connect, where life finally starts to make some sense. Our brothers and sisters handed this down to us with their very own blood. It matters. Let it matter today.
Prayer:
Jesus, we invite You into that. It can rally…I mean…we can say things like this and it can rally us and it actually it can even shame us. We’re not really looking for either one of those things. We’re looking for Your Holy Spirit’s guidance and how it is that we can plant seeds wherever it is that we go and where we can water seeds that someone else has planted somewhere else. Doesn’t matter that from A-Z, we somehow create the context for someone’s conversion. It matters that we are salt and light. So, come Holy Spirit and help us to be exactly that today in everything that we do and say and think. We pray these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.
Announcements:
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And what’s going on around here is we’re gearing up for the global campfire Family Reunion that’s gonna take place at the end of August and into September, so August 31st through September 2nd here in the rolling hills of Tennessee out by the lake where there is much to do. We’re looking forward to it. We had a fantastic time last year when we inaugurated this first global campfire family reunion. It’s just we didn’t have enough room for everybody. And, so, we had to find a larger place and we’ve done that and it’s beautiful and there’s so much to do. It’s like a destination…I mean…you can just never leave the grounds and have a blast. There’s a zip line there and a lake and all the stuff that goes with a lake like swimming and canoeing and all that and there’s whiffle ball and volleyball and all that stuff, soccer. There’s a climbing wall. There’s just a bunch of stuff to do. And that’s the idea. Come together, relax, decompress, and just be together as a community. Since we’ve been journeying through the Scriptures together we have so much in common already and just the conversations and relationships and friendships that can be bolstered and developed, it’s fantastic. A bunch of you have little…like little groups. Like, you were at together at More and so your…most of your rooms are coming together to be back together or we’ve been at some other event together and you’re coming back together, like Israel. So, can’t wait to see you all. All the details about this event, the global campfire Family Reunion 2019 are at dailyaudiobible.com in the Initiatives section. Just look for Family Reunion 2019 right there at the top. You can get there from the app as well by clicking the little drawer icon in the upper left-hand. So, hope to see you. We are getting pretty excited, and for good reason, it’s gonna be a lot of fun. So, hope to see you then.
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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.