This young man assumed David would be happy to hear of the
death of Saul and was quite willing to take the credit for killing him, being
careful to not take too much credit. He
says that Saul was as good as dead already and asked him to finish the
job. His report doesn't line up with the
facts of Saul's death but he surely thought David would repay him for having
killed the man who had made David his enemy.
David, however, never failed to recognize Saul as the anointed one of
the Lord. Ironically, the young man is
an Amalekite, the race that Saul was to have destroyed from the face of the
earth and failed to do. David avenges
Saul's death on this man who should perhaps never have lived at all if Saul had
been obedient to the Lord's commandment.
Where does he get this wisdom and where do these mighty
works come from? Two good questions,
questions we should ask always. We don't
want to get caught up in adoration of man or deception so it is right to ask
such things. How do they get the data to
answer these questions? They get it from
what they know of Jesus' origins and his family. It seems they would have sought a bit more information
than what they already knew. Sometimes what
we know just isn’t so and sometimes it becomes a barrier to knowing at
all. We always need to examine our
presuppositions when we reject new information.
The disciples were willing to go out on their own and do all that they had
already seen Jesus do, they didn't question where the power came from, they
knew where it came from.
The word comes back to the Gentile believers from Jerusalem,
don't worry about circumcision and all the other points of law, just take care
with what you eat and with sexual immorality.
They are unable to live completely separate lives in their locales, but
they need to be a witness to those around them that they serve a different God,
the only God, and that He cares about life and they also will testify to a
sexual ethic that is different from their past and their neighbors. The apostles prove that they are still
willing to learn what all this means with respect to the Gentiles. They processed the outpouring of the Spirit
at the home of Cornelius and worked their way through this new knowledge in
order to sort out what it meant for the church.
They relied on the testimony of the Spirit to guide them.
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