God is always working

New Guest: Like this one, most entries are devotional. Those related to Car Biz can be located by searching the blog archives for that title. You might start with 'Welcome,' the first entry, dated November 12, 2008, where I introduce myself and the blog. I hope you'll record your responses as you read, since these entries serve best as the first remarks in a coversation.

Blessings and best wishes,
Dr. Will

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Devotions: Ps 33, 107:33-43; 108:1-6; Jdg 16:1-14; Acts 7:30-43; Jn 5:1-18

Let the righteous rejoice in the Lord; it is fitting for the upright to praise God. For He and His word are straight and true. God loves righteousness and justice. All creation is filled with His steadfast love. He is Master of nature, and His counsels stand forever. Blessed is the nation whose God is YHWH, the people He has selected as His heritage. God watches over all that we do, and my soul waits for Him, my Help and Shield. YHWH, let Your steadfast love rest on me, even as I trust in You. God makes deserts into farmlands, and verdant lands inton salt wastes. He oversees the wellbeing of His people. He exalts the humble and humbles the arrogant. The upright see all this and rejoice; let the wise consider these things, and abide in YHWH's steadfast love. Father, my heart, too, is steadfast, and I will sing Your praises forever. Be exalted, O God, so that those You love may be delivered and helped by Your right hand.

God continued to use Samson's undisciplined libido to harm the Philistines. Samson went to Gaza and visited a harlot there. The people of the city planned to surround the prostitute's house and capture or kill Samson when he emerged the next day. But Samson had gotten up at midnight, and he uprooted the city gate—posts, doors, bar and all, and carried them on his shoulders to the top of the hill that is in front of Hebron—nearly 40 miles east of Gaza. Next, he became infatuated with a woman named Delilah in the Sorek valley in the northern end of the Philistine plain along Palestine's Mediterranean coast. Noting this, the Phililstine lords approached Delilah and told her to entice Samson and gain knowledge of the source of his great strength, so that they could overpower him. They offered her eleven hundred pieces of silver for this service. So she asked him. Samson told her, 'If they bind me with seven fresh bowstrings which have not been dried, I'll become weak as any other man.' She concealed men in her chamber, and after Samson fell asleep, she bound him so and told him, 'The Philistines are upon you, Samson!' But he snapped the bowstrings effortlessly, and his secret remained secure. Delilah berated Samson for mocking her. So he told her another story: 'If they bind me with new ropes that have not been used, I will become weak as any other man.' Delilah repeated the procedure, and Samson snapped the ropes off his arms as if they were thread. A third time Delilah asked Samson for the secret of his strengh; and again he lied: 'If you weave the seven locks of my hair with the web of a loom and make it tight with a pin, I will become weak as any other man.' So while he slept, Delilah did what he described, then awoke him—and again he broke free effortlessly, pulling away the pin, the loom, and the web.

Stephen's testimony before the Jewish Council continued: 'Forty years passed after Moses went into exile in Midian. An angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mt. Sinai, in a flame of fire in a bush. Moses turned aside to this wonder and the voice of the Lord came to him: "I AM the God of your fathers, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." Moses trembled and dared not look. God told him to put off his shoes, for he was standing on holy ground. And God said, "I have seen the ill treatment of My people in Egypt; I have heard their groaning; and I have come down to deliver them. Now come, and I will send you to Egypt." Moses, whose leadership the people had utterly rejected four decades earlier, God sent as both ruler and deliverer by the hand of the angel in the burning bush. Moses led them out, performing mighty signs and wonders in Egypt and at the Red Sea and in the wilderness for forty years. This same Moses told the Israelites, 'God will raise up for you a prophet from among your people, just as He raised me up." This same Moses linked the messenger of God and God's Israelite people, our ancestors, who passed along the living oracles of God to us. Oour fathers refused to obey him; they thrust him aside and in their hearts they longed to return to bondage in Egypt. They told Aaron, "Make for us gods to go before us; we have no idea what has become of this Moses who led us out of Egypt." And they made a gold calf idol and offered sacrifices to it and rejoiced in this object made by their own hands. But God turned and gave them over to the worship of the host of heaven, as the prophets wrote: "Did you offer Me slain beasts and sacrifices for forty years in the wilderness, house of Israel? You took up the tent of Moloch, and the star of the god Rephan, the figures which you made to workship; and I will remove you beyond Babylon."'

Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a national feast. Near the Sheep Gate is a pool named Bethzatha, which has five porticos. There lay a multitude of invalids, including one man who had been ill for 38 years. Jesus, seeing him and knowing his situation, asked the man, 'Do you want to be healed?' The sick man replied, 'Sir, I have no one to put me into the water when it is stirred; while I am trying to go down, someone else always steps in ahead of me.' Jesus said to him, 'Rise, take up your pallet, and walk.' And the man did exactly that! All this happened on a Sabbath, and some Jews berated the man: 'It is the Sabbath; it is not lawful for you to be carrying your pallet!' He answered that the man who healed him had told him to take up his pallet and walk. They asked who it was who did this, but the man didn't know Jesus or His name. Later, Jesus found the man in the temple and told him, 'See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse befall you.' The man went away, and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. The Jews persecuted Jesus for healing the man on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, 'My Father is always working, and I Am working, too.' Therefore, the Jews redoubled them efforts to kill Jesus, because He not only broke the Sabbath but also called God His own Father, making Himself equal with God. [They believed Jesus was a blasphemer, not the Son of God.]