a. When the Philistines heard: The Philistines were right to be afraid of a repentant, God-seeking Israel because with God fighting for them Israel was invincible.
i. When the Philistines looked at a humble and repentant Israel they probably saw weakness. They may have said, “Look at those weakling Israelites. They are such wimps, crying out before their God like this.” If the Philistines thought this way, they were dead wrong.
b. When the children of Israel heard of it, they were afraid of the Philistines: The Israelites didn’t have much more spiritual understanding than the Philistines. They should have been more confident in the LORD.
i. Our feelings of confidence can deceive us. In 1 Samuel 4:5, Israel was completely confident against the Philistines, but their confidence was false and they were soon defeated. Here, Israel is fearful and sure of defeat and they have no confidence at all. They seemed to have more faith when they trusted in the ark than when they are humble and repentant before the LORD. But small faith in the true and living God is more powerful than strong faith in a lie.
Weakness?
I once had a friend and in a demeaning tone would say of Christian’s walking into church with their bibles, look at those sheep following each other! He viewed Christianity as a weakness and after I became born again he wouldn’t have anything to do with me. We can only pray for people with this mindset and leave the rest to God.
”For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.“ 1 Corinthians 1:18 NIV
Sometimes God has to bring us to our knees to a point of weakness and desperation to seek Him with all humility to strip us of pride and stubbornness.
It’s been said, we have to allow Jesus to take the steering wheel instead of just being a passenger.
Do you allow Him to take the steering wheel or only sit in the passenger seat?
Blessings
No comments:
Post a Comment