Samuel, Saul and David

2006-01-15 Posted at 04:03:05 PM

Who were these guys? You always hear about them, something about David and Goliath, David grew up to be a king, Jesus came from David's lineage... Saul and David didn't really get along... That's about all I knew about them, until today when I started flipping through 1 Samuel. You can read it here, but in case you want the short-and-sweet, you can read my summary here. But please find the time to read it from the Bible.

If you're like me, when you finally make time to look into the Word of God, you head straight to the New Testament. I have found that a lot of NT books refer to characters such as Samuel, Saul and David. A little background info might not be a bad idea, so let's look into the book of 1 Samuel to find out who these guys were, and why does everybody refer to them so often.

Flipping through the book, it looks kindof interesting,,, much more interesting than you would expect from an Old Testament book. You can tell this book has a story that moves, and I'm not just talking about 'this person was the son of this person, son of this person... son of....' (there is only one paragraph like that in 1 Samuel at the beginning).

1 Samuel starts out describing a man named Elkanah, who had two wives: Hannah, who couldn't have children, and Peninnah, who had lots of children. They didn't like each other and Peninnah liked to tease Hannah until she cried. My two wives don't treat each other like that (just kidding).

Hannah goes up to Shiloh with her husband to woship the Lord, and she asks Him if she may please have a child. She says, if God gives her a child, she will give it to him.

So God gave her a child. What a nice guy!

Hannah raises her child for three years and then goes back to Shiloh and gives her son, Samuel, to the preist named Eli. She visits him every year and gives him clothes.

So Samuel grows up serving God with Eli and Eli's sons, who by the way are wicked. They do things like eat from the sacrifices meant for God and sleep with the women working in the temple.

God decides to curse Eli and his family, because Eli knew about what was going on, and didn't do anything about it.

God appears to Samuel and tells him what he is going to do: Everyone in Eli's lineage will die in the prime of their life, so there will be no old men in his family. Ouch.

I will finish this later. Read 1 Samuel, it's a good book. Tchus

He sat down to teach them?

2005-06-09 Posted at 10:53:12 AM

That's right. After the little episode at the Feast of Tabernacles (John Chapter 7), Jesus

went up to the Mount of Olives.

At dawn he...

wait a minute. At night, he went up into the mountain.

He spent the night there! This guy must really like camping. Alone.

He probably spent the night talking with God.

Anyway,,,

At dawn he went back to the temple and sat down to teach them

waitaminnute -- he SAT DOWN to teach them? What kind of teacher

sits down AMONG his class to teach?

Read about it here.

Nichodemus

2005-06-03 Posted at 12:14:59 PM

Jesus' disciples want to go to the Festival of Tabernacles, but Jesus wasn't too hot on the idea.

You see, the religious leaders would be there, and they didn't like Jesus.

In fact, they didn't like him enough to want him dead.

Jesus said, "No, I don't really want to go. It's not my time to die yet. But by all means, don't let that stop you guys from going."

So Jesus' disciples went to the festival without him.

The Festival of Tabernacles, I imagine, is like a city-wide event where people come from all over to celebrate. Kindof like Head of The Trent in Peterborough, without all the drunkenness.

Jesus, however, really wanted to go. So, he went alone and in secret.

He watched the party from a distance, but after a while, he couldn't help himself and he went into the temple to preach.

In the middle of his teaching, he said, "Why are you trying to kill me!?"

The crowd said, "What are you, demon-possessed?? No one is trying to kill you!"

But after thinking about it for a minute, the people started to say to each other,

"Ooooh, is this like that guy that everyone is trying to kill?"

The pharisees eventually found out that Jesus was in the temple teaching, so they sent guards to go and arrest him.

When the guards came back empty handed, the pharisees were furious.

"BUT! That Jesus guy," the guards insisted. "He really sounded like he knew what he was talking about!"

"What!? You LISTENED to him??" The pharisees were furious.

"Hey!" Nichodemus spoke up. "How can we judge this guy if we don't listen to him? How do we know he is breaking the law?"

The pharisees didn't like that Nichodemus had made such a logical point.

They told him to go and do some research in the scriptures about prophets, and they all went home.

Nichodemus was the pharisee that liked to go out at night and talk to Jesus, because he believed in him, but was afraid of losing his job. When he saw how the other pharisees were not treating Jesus fairly, he felt the need to speak up, despite the possibility of losing his job. That took courage!

This is, of course, a paraphrase of John 7. I strongly encourage you to read it in your bible or here.

I also strongly encourage you to post a comment. If you can't think of anything to say, try answering these questions:

What can we learn from Nichodemus' actions?

What was Jesus THINKING?? He could have been killed!

What else can we learn from this passage?

No Newer Entries No Older Entries

Page content is Copyright ©2005-2007 Gavin Blair