FBC Daily Devotional – November 4, 2021

Faith Baptist Church

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Well, good morning on this Thursday morning. Hope you're doing well. Today, we're reading in 2

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Samuel chapters 20 through 22 and a couple of ideas that I want to bring out in this passage.

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One of them has to do with a wise woman and she lives in this walled city,

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Abel of Bethmaica. We read about that in chapter 20 verses 15 and following.

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And what's going on there? There's been this little uprising, a rebellion against David being returned to the throne of Israel and that that rebellion has been led by a man by the name of Sheba and Joab and David's forces have chased after Sheba and these rebel forces and and they've been trapped inside this city of Abel of Bethmaica.

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So Joab and his men have surrounded the city and you know, if they're not able to penetrate and deal with this guy

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Sheba and the rebel forces, then they're really going to basically destroy the city.

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Well, this wise woman, she calls down and says, why would you do this?

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Why are you wanting to destroy this city? It's the only person who brings this up, you know, the only person who thinks to ask

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Joab about this and she says, why are you wanting to do this? You know, this city has been very instrumental in providing wisdom and help and counsel.

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People would come here to get counsel and advice and so forth and now you're going to wipe it all out. Why are you going to do that?

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And Joab replies and says, look, all I want is this guy

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Sheba and so if you deal with Sheba, then we'll go away.

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So the woman says to Joab, watch, his head's going to be thrown over the wall before the end of the day.

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And then it says in verse 22, the woman in her wisdom went to all the people, they cut off,

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I know this is gross, I'm sorry, especially if you're listening to this. I hope you're not listening to this before breakfast, but if you are,

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I apologize for that. But anyhow, the people of the town, of the city

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Abel, they cut off the head of Sheba, the son of Bichri, and they threw it over the wall to Joab.

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So Joab blew a trumpet and every man went to to his tent.

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So here is the the voice and actions of one wise woman that averted great disaster for the entire city.

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I don't know about you, but I'm looking for that one wise person who is able to to do some some counsel and persuasion in Washington and in Springfield.

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I pray and trust that God in his mercy will send that person sometime soon.

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But that's the effect that one wise person can have. In their wisdom, they can prevent and avert great disaster.

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Oh, by the way, that would encourage us to be people of wisdom, people of the book, that we might understand the ways of God, might have the wisdom to counsel in ways that will be healthful and helpful and avert destruction.

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The other thing I wanted to point out is this account in chapter 21, where there's a famine in the land for three years and David doesn't know why there's this famine.

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He goes to the Lord and says, is there something wrong? Is there some sin in the camp, if you will, that needs to be addressed to deal with this famine?

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And the Lord responds. He says, yes, it's because of the house of Saul and his bloodthirstiness, because he killed the

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Gibeonites. And you have to go back in Israel's history when Israel came into the land and they're supposed to conquer the land and all the inhabitants of it.

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And there was this little ruse on the part of the Gibeonites where they tricked the

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Israelites into thinking that they came from far away and the net result was in that deception

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Joshua and the Israelites made a covenant with the Gibeonites that they would spare their lives, that they would protect them.

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And they did down through the years. The Gibeonites have been protected. They were within the nation of Israel and really were, you know, partnered with the nation and they weren't enemies at all.

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But Saul in his aggression and his ambition, he thought it'd be a good thing to kill a bunch of Gibeonites.

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Now, we don't have the details of this story. We don't know all that happened about that. This is about it.

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This is all we have of it. All we know is that at some point along the way, Saul in his aggression killed a bunch of Gibeonites.

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We don't know who all approved of it and so on and so forth. We just know that he did it. And so here is this famine now in the land because of that sin of violating the covenant and murdering all of these

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Gibeonites. And so, you know, David has to take steps to correct this and he does so by handing over some descendants of Saul as a way of retribution for the execution of Gibeonites.

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And again, that all sounds a little brutal to us and so on and so forth. And I understand that.

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But what I want to really get at here is that chastening for sin may sometimes be a long time in coming.

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And we may not even make the connection initially. It may be months, maybe even a few years.

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In this case, it's been a number of years since Saul executed Gibeonites. It may be some time after this period of our life where we were in great transgression.

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That the chastening comes. Whatever the case, as soon as we draw the connection as David was able to do, you know,

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God made it clear to him. Here's the connection. As soon as he saw what the connection was, he took steps to correct it, to deal with it.

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And that's the lesson I want us to get. Chastening may come long after the incident that we're being chastened for.

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And as soon as we understand why, then we want to take whatever steps necessary to right the wrong, to correct the error, to make amends if we need to make amends.

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We want to make amends quickly as soon as we know about it. So that's the message I get from chapter 21 in these first nine verses.

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All right. Well, let's have a word of prayer and then get on with our day. And I trust that God's going to give us a good day as we endeavor to serve him.

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So Father, thank you for these challenging thoughts from your word today. And I pray that they would encourage us and give us a way of thinking about how to be faithful to you, even in difficult situations.

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I pray that we would also seek wisdom to be those wise people who can influence others in the right direction.

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We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. Have a good day. God bless you in it.