Mar 7 2013
How God chooses a King
There were two kings: Saul and David. God rejected Saul and elected David. Why? The answer is simple: God saw their hearts – Saul’s heart was bad and David’s heart was good. This teaches us a lot about electing leaders. We need to see their hearts – but how?
Imagine steering an aircraft with your mind. You think ‘tilt left’ and it does, you think ‘climb higher’ and it obeys. An air base in Dayton, Ohio is researching this capability. They are developing monitors that read a pilot’s brain signals and turn them into the kind that guide aircraft. Certain thoughts activate certain mechanisms. It’s strange; but an aircraft will soon tell us what a pilot was thinking! But there is a similar link between the heart and human behaviour. Specific behaviour reveals a specific thought, and consistent, habitual behaviour reveals more; it reveals a heart.
We see this with Saul and David. Saul kept doing things that revealed a bad heart, and David kept doing things that testified to a good heart. More
Mar 21 2013
The King of Justice & Peace
“Cut the baby in two and give half to each woman!” Do you remember the story? Two prostitutes presented their cases to King Solomon. They lived together and both had babies. But a baby died in the night. One woman claimed she awoke to find the dead baby next to her but it wasn’t hers. She said the other woman had taken her baby and replaced it with the dead one. But the other woman said this was a lie, that the living baby was hers. After listening to both King Solomon asked for a sword. He told his men to cut the living baby in two and to give half to each woman. The false mother was comfortable, but the real mother said, “Please my lord, give her the living baby! Don’t kill him!” So, the real mother was revealed and King Solomon gave her the child (1 Kings 3: 16-28).
Here is a 2013 parallel: Two Kenyan presidential candidates appeared before God. More