I absolutely love the Old Testament of the Bible. The stories and accounts of events never fail to capture my heart and imagination and challenge me where I am in life even now. It's amazing to me how something that happened and was written about so long ago can still impact me in such incredible ways.
I've been reading through the book of 1 Samuel the last few days. There's an account in 1 Samuel 11 where a tribe is captured and begin to negotiate for life. They ask for the captors to make a treaty with them in exchange for being kept alive. Their captor replies that they will make a treaty but only on the condition that they gouge out the right eye of every one.
The people contemplate this and tell their captors that if no one will come and rescue them within the next seven days that they will agree to the treaty. What?????
First of all who says that they will make a treaty as long as they can gouge out your right eyes? Who even thinks of that kind of thing?? And then who would agree to that?? There are definitely parts of the Old Testament that simultaneously baffle me and make me laugh.
As I read this story though what stood out to me is that people do stupid things when they have no hope. See for this people group they knew they couldn't fight their enemy and win. So their only hope was that maybe someone would rescue them. But if no one would rescue them, they had zero hope. Therefore they were willing to give up the right eye of every single one of them. They agreed to this act of stupidity because they were out of hope.
In life today we see people make poor decisions because they seem to be out of hope. People find themselves enslaved to drugs, alcohol, debt, people, etc because they lack the hope to find a way out. They continue to allow something to control them and cause them to make stupid decisions because there is a lack of hope in their lives. I may read the Old Testament and think that this eye gouging is ridiculous, but if I look around there are hurting people all around me making poor decisions as well and waiting for hope to come through and rescue them.
Romans 10:14 says "How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?"
We live in a world that is full of hopeless people. It challenges me to consider, how can they have hope if we don't tell them that there is hope?
1 comment:
Amen to this M.
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