Saul and his sons meet their demise at the hands of the
Philistines, just as Samuel prophesied.
Saul's death is a sad ending to the story of Israel's first king. He and his sons, including Jonathan, are
killed in battle. Saul pleads with his
armor bearer to run him through but the man has too much respect for the king
to do so and when Saul falls on his own sword, the man does the same. The Philistines treat the body of Saul with
the same contempt David had shown for their champion, Goliath, beheading the
corpse, stripping it of armor, carrying the head as a trophy and putting the
armor in a place of worship. The body,
however, is nailed to the wall of the city where the brave and valiant men of
Jabesh-Gilead come and take the body for a solemn and proper burial. Remember that Jabesh-Gilead is likely the
ancestral town of Saul's mother, they have a particular interest in this
man. In all this, the sad truth is that
Jonathan died, a good man, indeed a far better man than his father. Oh Saul, what could have been?
Jesus returns from the country of the Gerasenes to find that
He is needed by one of the rulers of the synagogue. The man's daughter is sick unto death and he
doesn't care that Jesus was so ritually defiled he might not be able to go back
to a synagogue, much less the temple for a great long time. He may be a synagogue ruler but at this
moment the Law was far less important than his daughter. On the way to the house the crowds press
around and a woman with an issue of blood that won't quit takes the risk,
mingles with the crowd and touches the hem of Jesus' garment in faith that He
can heal. She has risked defilement of
not only Jesus by touching Him but also all those around so when He asks who
touched Him she has a good bit to lose by admitting this. Jesus, however, cares not because He has been
defiled by her but because He senses that power has gone out from Him and He
wants to know where it went. Even with
all this, Jairus presses Jesus to come to his home and in the end finds that
even death is not too much for Jesus to overcome. Who is this man that is undefiled but who
imparts cleanness and who is able to raise the dead?
James emerges in our
view as the clear leader of the church in Jerusalem. He steps forward and gives the verdict on
what to do about the Gentiles. They are
to be instructed in a few things: to keep themselves from things polluted by
idols, and from sexual immorality, from what has been strangled and from
blood. Those are all things where the
culture of Gentiles differed from Judaism and therefore they needed to
understand God's way. It is not a matter
of becoming Jewish, and these things were never taught by Jesus but they were
important matters of the Law. Jesus,
remember, taught only Jewish audiences.
He had some contact with outsiders but never in the context of His
teaching. His teaching, moreover, was
always based in and took seriously the Word of God written. It would be wrong to suggest that because
Jesus didn't speak on certain matters they were unimportant. We don't worry about the dietary restrictions
in our day because the blood is never in the animals we eat, they aren't
strangled and yet we should not eat that which is sacrificed to idols. That leaves the issue of sexual
immorality. Were the apostles wrong to
focus on this? That is certainly the
position the liberal church of our day would have to conclude. Was the Holy Spirit operating in the apostles
or not? We either accept their authority
or we reject it, but where do we get our authority for rejecting those whom the
Lord chose?
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