“You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name” (Exodus 20:7; Deuteronomy 5:11). Let’s look further at the phrase: Don’t…
“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to…
In the first commandment, God forbad the recognition of any other god. Basically He told them, “I’m your God, not only because I chose you to be mine, but because in reality there are no other gods. Not even one.”
Now, God goes a step further and told His people that they were not to give the worship due to Him to any other thing—anything in heaven, in earth, or in the ocean depths. Nothing made (e.g., a wooden idol), nothing imagined (the power of the sun, moon, stars), nothing experienced (feelings, external forces), nothing natural (trees, rocks, gems) were to take His place as our object of worship.
The first thing God does as He begins to give His Law is to remind Moses and the Israelites of exactly who He is, and why they can trust Him. He is, after all, the God who chose them and who has brought them safely out of slavery in Egypt. He has already demonstrated both His power and His compassion. He has already demonstrated that He is able and willing to provide for them.
The Israelites had been living for 400 years as slaves to the Pharaohs in Egypt. Through a series of miraculous events, they have now been set free, and are on their way to the land God promised to give their nation.
was engaged to Joseph who was a descendent of David (Luke 1:27). We know that she had lived, up to this point, a pretty virtuous life, good enough that the angel addressed her as “highly favored” (Luke 1:28). But we don’t know anything about her parents, what her interests might have been, what she enjoyed doing, what her hopes and dreams might have been.
The story of David and Bathsheba is a sad one in a number of ways. It put a permanent blight on David’s legacy. We read in 1 Kings 15:5, “For David had done what was right in the eyes of the Lord and had not failed to keep any of the Lord’s commands all the days of his life—except in the case of Uriah the Hittite” (emphasis added).
Last weekend I was up in Cades Cove with my sisters continuing the great bear hunt. No luck again on bear, but I was struck by the multitude of fallen trees on both sides of the road. The question came to me, were those trees fallen, or had they been felled?
As our story opens in chapter 1 of the book of Ruth, Naomi, Elimelech and their two sons have left Bethlehem (ironically, “the House of Bread”) because of a famine. They settle in Moab where Elimelech dies. Both sons, who have married Moabite women, also die, and Naomi is left a bitter widow.
Two men have been sent by Joshua to secretly check out the city of Jericho to get a feel for what the Israelites would face when they got there. Unfortunately, either they weren’t very good at covert operations, or they just stood out as “not one of us,” and the king of Jericho found out about them. He sent soldiers to the house of Rahab, where he had been told the men were staying.