I recently listened to a podcast about ocean temperatures. Ocean temperatures are rising. They have been rising for many years. But in 2023, they rose faster than normal. Rising ocean temperatures are concerning. Fast rising ocean temperatures are really concerning.
This is not a post about the environment, though sometime I should write about caring for God’s beautiful earth, over which he has made us stewards. But this post is not about that. Instead, I want to talk about how that podcast made me feel.
I was listening to the podcast on my way to the ministerium meeting at another church about 10 minutes away. So I didn’t get to hear the whole podcast. After the ministerium meeting, I got back in the car, and I thought about turning the podcast back on, but I hesitated. I could continue listening. But I was feeling something inside me holding me back. What I was feeling made me not want to listen to the podcast anymore.
Anger? No. Disgust? No.
I was feeling fear. I was looking around the beautiful Lancaster County farmland, thinking about the environment, feeling fear. What would happen to all this beauty? I feared that it could be ruined.
Fear is a common feeling in our world. We are inundated with scary images. We’ve been watching a war in Ukraine for three years. We’ve been watching a war in Gaza for seven months. We hear about gang violence and anarchy in Haiti. We hear about a civil war in Myanmar. There is always trouble in the Middle East. There are terrorists. There is China. There is Russia.
Here in the USA, we’re in another testy political election year, with the same candidates telling us the fate of our nation is at stake. All of it can create fear in our hearts and minds. We are told, “The nation and the world are slipping off the edge of the precipice into oblivion! We’re doomed!” So much fear.
Today we continue our blog series through the books of 1st and 2nd Samuel, and we come to a passage about fear. We’re going to study 1st Samuel chapters 11 and 12 this week. Let’s review. The nation of Israel has asked God to give them a king. They’ve always had a king, of course. God himself is their king. But they want a human king like the other nations around them. So God tells Samuel to anoint Saul to be king.
Saul is handsome and tall. He looks like a king, but he is shy and seems really iffy about being king. It doesn’t matter, though, because he is God’s choice, so Samuel anoints him. In front of the whole nation, Samuel gives Saul God’s regulations for how a king should be king.
At this time in their history, Israel has neither a capital city nor a palace. After the coronation, then, Saul goes home. We read that he has some backers and some skeptics. That’s where we left of in chapter 10. Now we begin chapter 11, and immediately Saul faces his first challenge. Look at verses 1-5,
“Nahash the Ammonite went up and besieged Jabesh Gilead. And all the men of Jabesh said to him, ‘Make a treaty with us, and we will be subject to you.’ But Nahash the Ammonite replied, ‘I will make a treaty with you only on the condition that I gouge out the right eye of every one of you and so bring disgrace on all Israel.’ The elders of Jabesh said to him, ‘Give us seven days so we can send messengers throughout Israel; if no one comes to rescue us, we will surrender to you.’ When the messengers came to Gibeah of Saul and reported these terms to the people, they all wept aloud. Just then Saul was returning from the fields, behind his oxen, and he asked, ‘What is wrong with everyone? Why are they weeping?’ Then they repeated to him what the men of Jabesh had said.”
Talk about fear. The people of Israel are boxed in. In previous weeks in our study of 1st Samuel we heard about the threat from the west, the Philistines. Now we hear about a threat from the east, the Ammonites, who have besieged the Israelite town of Jabesh Gilead, threatening to gouge out the eyes of the people of Jabesh. This is brutal, brutal stuff. War is awful. Of course the people are afraid and weeping. They are fearing for their eyes…and their lives.
Maybe you’ve experienced something difficult. Hopefully not the threat of someone gouging out your eyes. But I suspect you have gone through or are currently going through feeling attacked on multiple sides. Difficult relationships, financial struggles, health concerns. Sometimes life is filled with things that make us fear.
This is why Saul’s response is shocking, and we’ll learn about his response in the next post.
Photo by Wil Stewart on Unsplash
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