Grains of Sand

Pixabay One of my reading plans for this year is entitled 365 Popular Bible Quotations for Memorization and Meditation . At first reading of this verse I wasn’t sure why this particular quote would fall into that category, but here it is: “ But I know where you stay and when you come and go and how you rage against me .” (2 Kings 19:27) The context is yet another of those moments in Israel’s history when she is facing overwhelming odds against her. The king of Assyria and his forces are threatening Jerusalem. Hezekiah goes before the Lord to plead his cause and that of his people. Isaiah, the prophet, appears before the king with this message to deliver to Sennacherib, king of Assyria, a message that also serves to reassure Hezekiah that they have not been abandoned by the God of Israel. The message to God’s people in Jerusalem is this: “ Therefore this is what the Lord says concerning the king of Assyria: ‘He will not enter this city or shoot an arrow here. He will not come before...

video.pbs.org (Google Images) Talk about conflicted! In Matthew 8, Mark 5, and Luke 8, we have the story of the demon-possessed man who had terrorized the neighbourhood to the point that the residents tried to chain him in in the cemetery. One account describes two men being in this condition. Matthew 8:25b tells us: “ They were so violent that no one could pass that way .” Jesus chose this spot to land the boat he was traveling in. He had an appointment. The presence of the demons had driven these men crazy, literally. Even the chains and shackles could not hold them. Mark 5:5, describing one of the men, tells us that “ Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones .” What a miserable life! Then Jesus arrived on the scene. The demons obviously held these men in a powerful grip. That makes what happened in the story all the more amazing. When Jesus appeared we find one man in the posture of worship. “ When he saw Jesus from a distance, ...

Andrew and Suzanne Yesterday, the husband of a good friend of mine went home to be with the Lord. Andrew, a young husband and father of two pre-schoolers, fought his leukemia valiantly and with a demonstration of faith seldom seen. He was a scholar with, according to worldly wisdom, a long life of great contribution to society and to the Christian world ahead of him. God had other plans. Many will struggle with his death. Many will toss the “why?” question back and forth in frustration and anguish. I have no answers. But as I was reading Genesis 7 this morning I thought of Andrew’s wife, Suzanne. I thought of his family. I thought about others who are passing through deep, deep waters and perhaps struggling with those same questions. After Noah had built the ark and gathered all the animals into it, the Scriptures say: “ Then the Lord shut him in” (7:16). The skies opened up as they had never before been known to do. The fountains of the deep let go of the water reserved in them....

“ But I know where you stay and when you come and go and how you rage against me ” —2 Kings 19:27, NIV. Nothing more descriptive came to mind as I read this verse in its context that the famous poem by Lord Byron. The King of Assyria assumed that all he was, all he had, everything he was certain he could accomplish, was his to boast about and his to take. In Isaiah’s message from God to a besieged King Hezekiah in Jerusalem, the prophet writes the future of this pagan invader in the sand, draws a line, and says: “This far and no farther.” For those who belong to the Lord and are besieged by any enemy, the message rings down through history: “Do not fear, the Lord will let him go so far and no farther.” There are those forces that seek to shatter the believer, to reduce him, or her, to broken fragments. God only bends his children; he never breaks them, and he will not permit even those forces that he has permitted to be unleashed, to go beyond what he has commanded. Sennacheri...