God Sightings Week 22, June 13th – 19th

Old Testament: I Kings 11:1 – 21:29 

 
• Within these chapters we find one of the greatest heroes of the Bible – Elijah the Tishbite. He becomes a man that not only continues to work miracles, but also has no fear about standing up against the King himself. No story is more associated with him the showdown between the God of Israel and gods of the surrounding nations. However, if one just reads the text as it is, there are some disturbing elements to it. I don’t want to take away the “holiness” of it from you, but it wouldn’t hurt to point out a few things. One, notice how the text presents Elijah as poking fun at the other priests; in fact it says that he “mocked” them. (I Kings 18:27). That’s probably not behavior we would encourage people to do in our day, regardless of whether or not we agreed with them. Furthermore, after the LORD had burned up the sacrifice, Elijah personally kills all of the priests. This would have been 950 people, if we use the numbers given in I Kings 18:19. Again, not to detract from the point of the story – which obviously is that God is LORD over all and the other gods of the nations are nothing – however, I can’t help but thinking how barbarous this behavior is. No one could that today. In fact it’s illegal according to our laws. It doesn’t hurt to think through what you read, even in the Bible, because not everything is very applicable on the surface reading. Sometimes you have to look deeper to get anything that works for us today.  

New Testament: Acts 9:1 – 13:15 

 
• The story of Paul’s “conversion” is one that it familiar to most readers of the Bible. I put “conversion” in quotes because Paul was already a part of the correct religion according to the Bible. He was already a part of the physical family of God. However, he still needed to have the heart “circumcised” and see Jesus as the Christ that had been promised within his own scriptures. For the sake of interest, compare this version of his encounter with God to the versions in Acts 22:4-16 and 26:9-18. There aren’t any large differences. But in the second version we have the familiar theme of the scales falling from his eyes; while in the third version God has much more to say to him than in the first two versions. His own recounting is found in Gal. 1:13-17. Interestingly enough, he doesn’t mention anything about losing his sight at all.  

 

• We also find the gospel truly being proclaimed beyond the boundary of physical Israel. It seemed to be a foreign concept to the disciples. Paul apparently needed a vision to show him the truth that “truth” is for all people; not just his nation. We find this in Acts 10 – the story of Cornelius. Truth of any kind, I might add, belongs to all people; not just a select few