Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. [Matthew 28:19-20 (ESV)]
As Philip was walking down the road to Gaza, a chariot overtook him. Riding in it was the Ethiopian eunuch. Scripture tells us he’d been to Jerusalem to worship. Deuteronomy 23:1, however, stipulates that no emasculated male can be included within the Jewish religious community or allowed to enter the Temple area. Even though he’d been to Jerusalem to worship, possessed a costly sacred scroll, and hungered for God, this man who feared God and identified with Judaism wasn’t welcome. As a castrated man, he wasn’t a Jewish convert and never could hope to be.
The Spirit instructed Philip to walk beside the eunuch (who just happened to be reading aloud the words of Isaiah). While reading out loud seems strange to us, it was a common practice at the time. With no punctuation or space between the words, reading aloud aided in understanding the text. When Philip asked if the man understood what he was reading, the eunuch replied with a question of his own: “How can I, unless someone instructs me?” When Philip joined him in the chariot, the man wondered to whom Isaiah’s prophecy of the suffering servant applied. Was Isaiah speaking of himself or someone else? Beginning with Isaiah 53 and continuing on through the scroll, Philip told him all about Jesus.
When the eunuch saw water, rather than asking to be baptized, he asked why he couldn’t be baptized. As a Jewish sympathizer, he knew that a full immersion baptism, known the tevilah, was essential for conversion to Judaism but was prohibited to him. Perhaps he expected Philip to tell him that Jesus found him as unacceptable as did Jewish law. Philip didn’t; instead, the two men immediately stopped and Philip baptized the Ethiopian man!
What do you think are the are the odds of a Greek-speaking Nubian (Greek was the language of the royal courts), who’s a follower of Judaism, reading aloud from a Jewish scroll written in Greek (the Hebrew Scriptures had been translated into Greek in the 3rd century BC) that prophesized Jesus and, at that very moment, encountering a Jewish Greek-speaking follower of Jesus from Samaria on a 50-mile stretch of road between Jerusalem and Gaza? What are the odds of them coming upon water on a “desert road” exactly when the man wants to be baptized? What are the odds of a wealthy foreign official allowing a mere commoner (one who’d been walking for several days) into his chariot? For that matter, what are the odds of the man who ran the national treasury admitting he didn’t understand a simple scroll? This, however, was a divine appointment orchestrated by God!
God took Philip 50 to 100 miles out of his way to meet someone considered unacceptable and defective under the old law and bring him to Jesus under the new one! In that one encounter, by bringing the Good News to a foreign eunuch, Philip fulfilled a prophecy found in Isaiah 56! When circumstance align perfectly, as they do in this narrative, we often attribute them to coincidence. There are, however, no coincidences in God’s plan. Both the Ethiopian and Philip may have been surprised that day, but God certainly wasn’t! He never is!
Divine appointments await us all if we are obedient to God’s leading!
The book of Daniel begins with the arrival of the first set of Judean captives in 605 BC and the first six chapters describe the events occurring in Babylon until around 536 and the beginning of the Persian empire. In contrast, chapters seven through twelve are filled with visions and dreams. As part of the Jewish and Christian canon, the traditional view is that this book is a factual recounting of Daniel’s life and a record of supernatural predictions written during the late 6th century BC. Skeptics, however, call its author a fraud and the book fiction because of the mention of Belshazzar as the last king of Babylon, Darius the Mede as the one who took over Babylon, and the incredible accuracy of Daniel’s fulfilled prophecies. They claim that the book had to have been written (or amended) 400 years later in the 2nd century BC by someone claiming to be Daniel.
The Israelites were surrounded by various pagan peoples who worshipped foreign deities. Baal ruled over Canaan and Phoenicia, Chemosh over Moab, and Marduk/Bel and Nebo over Babylonia. The Philistines’ had Dagon and the Ammonites worshipped Molech. These gods usually had a domain over which they ruled. For example, Baal’s domain was rain, storms, and the harvest. Moab’s Chemosh presided over war and mountains. As patron deity of Babylon, Marduk/Bel was supposed to protect the city and rule over storms while Nebo’s purview was wisdom and science. The Philistines’ chief god Dagon presided over death, the afterlife, war, and agriculture while Ammon’s Molech reigned over the underworld, which may explain his association with child sacrifice in the Old Testament.
Today, when someone is called the “salt of the earth,” the speaker probably means he or she is a dependable, unpretentious and honest person—someone of moral integrity. That is well and good as far as it goes, but Jesus meant more than that when He called us to be “the salt of the earth.”
Eighteen years after the kingdom divided and Jeroboam became king of the northern kingdom of Israel, Rehoboam’s son Abijah became king of Judah, the southern kingdom. As Solomon’s grandson and David’s great-grandson, Abijah was part of David’s dynasty; Jeroboam was not. Although 1 Kings called Abijah a sinner, 2 Chronicles recorded the one highpoint of his short reign. War broke out between Israel and Judah and Judah’s warriors were outnumbered two to one. As the two kings squared off, Abijah shouted out to Jeroboam and his army. Referring to the “covenant of salt” between God and David, Abijah called Jeroboam a traitor, his men scoundrels, and charged Israel with rebellion against the Lord’s chosen Davidic dynasty of kings. Their rebellion hadn’t been against Solomon or Rehoboam; they’d rebelled against the kingdom of the Lord! Continuing with his tirade, Abijah charged the northern kingdom with apostasy because of their idolatry and illegitimate priests. After pointing to Judah’s faithful worship, he warned Israel they would not succeed because God was with Judah. Indeed, in spite of overwhelming odds, Scripture tells us “God routed Jeroboam and all Israel” and the Judeans were victorious because they “relied on the Lord, the God of their ancestors.”
When God sent Jonah to the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, it was to warn the people that they would be destroyed for their sins. While we tend to focus on the miracle of Jonah and the sea creature, the real miracle in the Book of Jonah is the city’s response to the prophet’s message—Nineveh immediately repented of its sinful ways. Some forty years later, however, the Assyrians were once again back to their old behavior: rejecting God’s authority and worshipping idols. Around 740 BC, they attacked northern Israel and, in 722, they invaded the remaining kingdom and took Samaria, just as both Hosea and Amos had prophesized they would. The northern kingdom’s population was resettled elsewhere in the Assyrian Empire and Samaria became the center of a new Assyrian province.
Devotions of the Heart 