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A site for readers with an interest in the greatest themes of all times
Featuring Grown Up Bible Stories and The Story in Easy English
Also on this site: Bible Study Essays How to Have a Relationship with God
Revised and returned to this website:
Living Water
New Bible Studies John Lessons 32 33 34 35
Grown Up Bible Stories
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He
couldn’t just shake his head and mutter something about the will of God. He had
too much at stake. He had one child, a twelve-year-old girl. She was his only
one, and she was ill, deathly ill. Religious man or not, it is neither natural
nor right to walk away from a dying child and assume that her death is the will
of God. So today, this man went to seek a religious figure from outside the
local organization.
He
was a legend in his own time. The first son of the nation’s first king, he stood
to inherit the crown. He even showed promise of filling that crown better than
his father did. A national hero, a man with great popular support, he had a lot
going for him. Only, as the saying goes, "It’s hard to soar with the eagles when
you work with a bunch of turkeys." In this case, it wasn’t a bunch of turkeys—it
was his royal father.
She was desperate. Her
three-month old baby lived under a death warrant, and hiding him grew more
difficult by the day. She was part of an oppressed ethnic group living in the
territory of one of the world’s superpowers. The government had decreed that all
baby boys of her race must die. It was an effort at population control, an
effort born of mistrust and prejudice. Today, we’d call the whole mess ethnic
cleansing. When the midwives who delivered her people’s babies managed to
outsmart the ruler’s command to kill all male children at birth, the command had
become general. All of this king’s subjects were ordered to drown any infant
boys found among the unwanted people. A command that broad was impossible to
escape. Her baby had to go in the river. She had hidden him as long as was
humanly possible. The end result was inevitable. It was time to face reality and
let the sweet little thing go.
All They Did Was Show Up for Work
Whatever happened at the top, the people living out the hard realities of the situation were commoners. Peter was working class. His guards were soldiers. Both he and they were pawns in the hands of the big boys. None of their lives mattered to the man making the decisions.
One of history’s more interesting incidents involved a sin by one of its greatest kings. The incident isn’t so spectacular because King David did the wrong thing. David had already demonstrated the full range of human weaknesses despite his great devotion to God. Rather, the story grabs the attention because it lifts the curtain and gives a glimpse of the interaction between heaven and earth. It is one of those places in the Bible where the veil hiding the spiritual realm is eased back and we get a view of some of the forces at work in the unseen world. (Ends with a Christmas parallel.)
They didn’t really have civilian police officers in ancient Palestine, but this man came pretty close. He was educated in the law. He had ties to the highest national authorities. He was intensely patriotic and burned with zeal for his nation and its law. He didn’t merely do a professional job of arresting criminals. He actively sought opportunities to attack them.
Samaria was the kind of city where a practitioner of the occult could find himself honored as a man of God. We know this fact about this city because history records that a man named Simon did just that. In a superstitious world where evil spirits are seen as gods, it doesn’t take a lot to sway people’s thinking. Even a sleight-of-hand artist might pass himself off as a spiritual superstar in such a setting. It does seem, though, that Simon did have at least some real influence with the unseen world. The record is that he practiced magic and amazed the locals who saw him as the great power of God.
It is hard to call any day involving Jesus Christ an ordinary day. The only ordinary thing about Him was that He was human. He specialized in the extraordinary—teaching about God at a level that defied the routine of religion, feeding thousands with a few loaves of bread and a couple fish, driving out demons without the rites of the exorcist, and healing the sick without medicine were hardly ordinary activities. Yet, presumably, even these things would eventually begin to seem ordinary to those who followed Him regularly. On one of these more-or-less ordinary extraordinary days, a messenger came along and interrupted. . . The appeal may not have been stated, but the intention was obvious. Somebody in a household that often hosted Jesus was sick. Not just common-cold sick, but sick enough to warrant sending a neighbor out on foot for several days to call an important man away from His work. They were facing something serious. They were worried.
Eliminate planets, stars, moons, cosmic dust, and matter of any kind. Also eliminate energy. All that is left is space. It is dark. It is empty. It is colder than you’ve ever experienced. If you should happen to find yourself in this environment, you would be dead before you even realized how remote and helpless you were. Yet, this is the picture we get if we look far enough into the past. People debate just how the earth came to be and how the different species of life arose upon it. They debate these things, but the debate must end in a black, terribly cold emptiness with no raw materials with which to build a universe, no time in which to do so, and no energy with which to work.
He was a victim. When the great Chaldean king, Nebuchadnezzar, came from what we now call Iraq, deposed the Jewish king, and took whatever promising young noblemen he could prisoner, the young man in question got swept up in his net. There wasn’t a Geneva Convention to keep the rising emperor from killing his P.O.W.’s, so the young man did fare better than some of Nebuchadnezzar’s captives. Still, he was little more than a slave, a lifetime servant of a sometimes-brutal dictator.
The last few days represented total upheaval. Mary Magdalene had been an eyewitness to the defeat of the greatest display of God’s power yet known to humanity. She had seen no one less than the man she knew to be a prophet of unprecedented power die like an ordinary mortal. Actually, he’d died like less than an ordinary mortal. He’d hung from a wooden rack and died publicly as a condemned criminal.
The king lay alone, far from the admiring crowds that had filled and shaped his life. He lay alone, sick, defeated, and suffering. He was royalty, yes, but at the moment, he was mostly a hurting human. Other famous kings of the Jewish nation sought the God of their fathers at such times. But for Joash, God wasn’t really an option. He’d lost his faith among the crowds of admirers who’d thronged him.
Life
seemed very normal in the years before the disaster. In fact, some would have
suspected that conditions were close to ideal. The records that far back are a
bit sketchy, but it looks as if there may have been worldwide unity. People
spoke the same language. There isn’t a lot of evidence that the earth’s
population had developed into multiple nations with their conflicts and wars. In
fact, migration and social isolation had yet to produce what today we call
races. It was an ideal world socially, or rather it had
been.
According to the preacher, things were coming apart at the seams.
Jesus had just reiterated the Old Testament command to love one’s neighbor as oneself. His hearers were already familiar with this important duty. Still, it was a powerful message, a message that no one could argue with.
Among the audience that day in old Palestine was a lawyer, however. A lawyer was, even then, an expert on exactly what the law said and also on making what it said fit the situation the way he wanted it to. He saw a loophole and went for it. He said: "And who is my neighbor?"
The man
remembered as Herod the Great held an enviable position. In a world dominated by
an Emperor, he had politicked and battled his way into a royal title. He was
King Herod. Subject to Rome’s Caesar, of course, he ruled a significant
chunk of Middle Eastern real estate. He wielded life-and-death authority over
thousands of people. Herod owned an enviable position, and he knew it.
One of
history’s most despised individuals started out as one of the privileged
few.
He was an outdoorsman. Rugged and self-reliant, he was the kind of guy a lot of men choose as a role model. He was a hunter, used to getting what he wanted by his own strength and skill. It is no surprise that he became his father’s pet.
One of my
favorite Bible stories involves a very mysterious character, Balaam the son of
Beor. But, let’s start at the beginning.
It’s one of the ironies of history. When God planned a Messiah to bring healing to a hurting world, he chose to start the action with a very dysfunctional family. But then again, redemption in a dysfunctional world would have to start with dysfunctional people. We remember Abraham and Isaac, the first patriarchs of this family, as good men—and they were. They also were products of the world and society they lived in. As a result, even these great men faced difficulties in their home lives.
There have been people that God Himself placed in very trying circumstances. They have been people who’ve had to serve God by working for His enemies. I suppose you might call them the spiritual equivalent of spies or secret agents. As in earthly politics, the job is neither safe nor easy. It also leads to some very strange situations.
One couple, however, walked sadly and alone. They didn’t walk like people heading home from a holiday. For that matter they didn’t walk like people returning from a holy day. They looked more like people whose faith had been crushed. It had been, and their greatest hopes lay in ruins.
Had you been there, you would not have seen anything to suggest the enormity of the crisis. A lone man camping in the Middle Eastern desert hardly would suggest a situation in which the future of Heaven and Earth hung in the balance. Had you drawn closer, however, you would have seen that the man was skinny, unnaturally skinny. Had you drawn even closer, perhaps you would have observed a sickly yellow tint to His skin, a jaundice stemming from enough hunger to have seriously impacted His health. History doesn’t describe His appearance, but had you drawn closer still and looked carefully, you might have even read in his eyes a look of inner struggle. Perhaps you would have wondered what demon was plaguing that man as you walked on your way. Actually, there was a demon plaguing him, but it wasn’t an inner one.
Caves are dark places. The darkness fit the lone man’s mood. It fit his sense of despair. It fit his need to hide. True, back at the cave’s entrance there was light, but the light missed this particular man on this particular day. He’d had his day in the sun. He’d performed gloriously, too, bringing a display of God’s power that would be remembered for thousands of years. But as he hid in the cold darkness of the earth, that day lay behind him. He’d been a spiritual hero last month. Today, he was a has-been.
Their stories contain several parallels. Both started out as younger sons in agricultural families. Both cared for sheep. Both had trouble with older brothers. Both were men of God. Both knew hardship and luxury. Both rose from obscurity to great power and prominence. In fact, both became national rulers. Each was tempted to intimacy with another man’s wife. They responded to that temptation differently, and their stories end differently.
It was a
day like few others; a day filled with parting and grief, a day of victory over
death and yet of bereavement, a day of miracle and mystery. While there have
been greater days in history, there has never been one just like it. For one
man, it was the day from which all days afterward must be counted. That man was
there, saw it all up front, and faced the crisis of his own destiny as a
result.
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