Jezebel. The very name makes us shudder! Jezebel was vindictive, manipulative and pure evil. (She had a man murdered over a vegetable garden!) When she left her palace home in Phoenicia to marry King Ahab of Israel, she had only one goal; she was going to stamp out Jehovah worship in the land of God’s […]
If you don’t think the Bible is edge of your seat thrilling, you aren’t reading it. Revenge, deception, intrigue; Days of Our Lives has nothing on this stuff! After the kingdom of Israel split in two (now Judah and Israel), the country of Israel suffered through one wretched king after another. A few kings in […]
A few years ago, I was having a really hard time after another cross-country move. I’m a people person and the insanity inducing loneliness of not knowing a single person where we now lived hit me hard. One day, as I was dropping my kids off at AWANA at our new church, a woman, whom […]
The farm down the road from us posts inspirational messages on their farm sign each week. This week it read: “If you can’t do what you want, do what you can.” This is a perfect description of David’s attitude when it came to building the first temple. He desperately wanted to build a temple to […]
Has God ever given you a “way of escape?” In the book of James, God tells us that when we are tempted to sin, God will mercifully give us an opportunity to run far from it before we make a choice that we will later regret. In the book of Second Samuel, chapter 11, King […]
I laugh every time that I see the card my daughter made me for Mother’s Day last year. She wrote: My mom’s super power is that she can find anything. She’s not wrong. It is well known in my house that nothing is truly lost until your mother can’t find it. I can find lost […]
I have a very dear friend whose husband was abandoned by his father as a child. Throughout his life, his father would drift in and out bringing his drama and baggage with him. The father wasn’t a pleasant person and it would have been very easy, even completely justified, for my friend’s husband to cut […]
Have you ever seen something so shocking that it marked you for life? In First Samuel 5, the Philistines were drunk on their victory over the Israelites. Not only had they killed thousands of enemy soldiers and left the rest running for their lives, they had captured the most important symbol of the Israelite’s God- […]
If there was ever a woman in history who could have succumbed to victimhood in life, it was undoubtedly the biblical character Ruth. There she was; a childless woman in the ancient near east (don’t even get me started), a widow (a catastrophic situation in her day and time), a foreigner living in Israel without […]
Have you ever felt that life just kept hitting you with wave after wave of difficulty and you couldn’t even catch your breath from one catastrophe before the next one was upon you? I sure have! “Why won’t it end?” we rightly wonder. There is a tiny section of scripture in the book of Judges […]