1 Kings 9:1-10:29, Acts 8:14-40, Psalms 130:1-8, Proverbs 17:2-3
Today is the 12th day of June. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It’s great to be here with you as we pass through the center of a week, not “a” week, this week and move ourselves toward the back half and we’re moving ourselves in the middle of the month friends. It just keeps…it just keeps happening. Like magic, day by day, step-by-step we move through another year and we move through another revolution in the Bible and another revolution in our lives. So, we take that next step forward. We’re reading from the English Standard Version this week. This is kind of a special day. This is the 163rd day of the year and we have been traveling on a journey, since pretty much the beginning of the Bible toward a Promised Land, right? And, so, we took that journey all the way until we were at the banks of the Jordan River with Joshua and we came into the land and then the land was conquered and today we reach what is the apex of that Promised Land in the Scriptures. Everything starts to slide downward, downhill from here. So, I’m telling you that in advance so that as we read through our reading from first Kings today, that we can experience this apex, this mountaintop experience that we’ve been journeying toward since almost the beginning of the year. So, having said that, we’re reading from the English Standard Version this week. First Kings chapters 9 and 10 today.
Commentary:
Okay. So, as I mentioned at the beginning, we were moving into the apex of the ancient land of Israel that we had been journeying toward and that is what we witness today. We will see that as we begin to read tomorrow things are going to go off the other side. Like, we’ve been working our way up this mountain to this greatest moment when everybody is on board and prosperity is boundless. I mean, can you imagine the things that were described today, like eating utensils made of pure gold, right? Silver being so plentiful that you don’t even count it. Just imagine the buildings that have been described today. We may see them now and think, “I don’t know, that’s not such a big deal”, but at the time this was the absolute center of a progressive culture. So, you imagine this fleet of ships at Ezion-geber, right, by Eloth. Eloth is still a city down at the Red Sea. So, you imagine this fleet of ships sails away down into deepest Africa coming back with these treasures. You imagine dignitaries coming from all over the world to just see this spectacle, right? We read the story of the Queen of Sheba and her fascination, deep fascination with Solomon, and everything and everything that was going on. So, we are right in the middle of the absolute tip, the best moment and we should just enjoy it. We’ve climbed a long way to get here and it will only last for one day and tomorrow we’ll begin to look at its the latter years of Solomon’s reign and what comes next after Solomon.
In the book of Acts, Philip is instructed to follow the road out of Jerusalem down to Gaza, which is the road going down into Egypt, which is one of the main roads that connect the continents. So, a main road for sure and he obeys and there’s this Ethiopian and the gospel is shared with the Ethiopian and the Ethiopian is baptized. And it’s like a little bit of an aside like and then Phillips gone. And the next thing he knows, he’s in his Otis and then he is on his way to Caesarea and it’s just this kind of quick thing. And yet this Ethiopian was a very prominent official, right, of Queen Candace of Ethiopia. And, so, no doubt because he’s been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus he’s going to take the story back to Ethiopia, so back to Africa. And, so, we begin to see that the gospel is spreading in all directions. It’s making a beeline out of Jerusalem because Saul is on a rampage persecuting Christians. So, it’s going in all directions and we see that now it’s moving southward into the continent of Africa.
Prayer:
Father, we thank You for Your word. We thank You for bringing us to this point and we enjoy this point under King Solomon’s reign in the Old Testament because we’ve been journeying toward this point, even when we crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land, and we finally were able to step foot with the children of Israel in the Promised Land, it was still in undeveloped land. And, so, now we have a picture of things as they reached their pinnacle. And we already know that since we reached the mountaintop and it’s not gonna stay here, that it’s gonna begin to deteriorate. And we ask, Holy Spirit, that You allow us to see how that happened and what happened and where those roads lead because they all apply to our own lives and our own mountaintop experiences and the same reasons why we go down the other side. So, come Holy Spirit we pray. In the name of Jesus, we ask. Amen.
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