The Real Meaning of Life

https://biblehub.com/nkjv/2_kings/13.htm

Well, I wrote this post once but before I could publish it, it disappeared. So I’ll try to write down the points of these chapters that made an impression on me.

First, you’re going to see some duplicate names. We’ve had a Joash (Jehoash) who reigned as the King of Judah, now we have a Jehoash who is reigning as the King of Israel. And just as there are many “John’s” in the world today, there were many people in the Bible that shared the same name. Most of them were identified by their father, for example Joshua, son of Nun, but not all are. And yes, it can be difficult to keep track of. Jehoash, the King of Judah, was hidden as a baby from his wicked grandmother, Athaliah, whereas Jehoash, the King of Israel, was the son of Jehu.

That said, in these chapters we see the accounts of various kings and how the throne changed hands from father to son, along with a description of whether they were faithful to God, whether they worshiped idols, or whether they were lukewarm, so to speak. And if you remember from the days of Moses, God instructed the children of Israel to move into the promised land, force out all of the idol worshiping pagans, and not to intermingle with them. Of course, they didn’t follow God’s plan, and now this is the result. The children of Israel failed to completely take over the land, and they began to take wives of the Canaanites and many have now left God and worship Baal instead.

At one time, I blamed all of this on Abraham. When Abraham lost his faith and decided he would create his own heir through the surrogate Hagar, he started the riff between Ishmael the first born, and Isaac, God’s intended heir. This eventually led to the riff between Esau and Jacob, and the descendants of Esau and Ishmael believe the land is rightfully theirs despite it being God’s Will that Israel occupy the land.

And that has led to wars and rumors of wars. We see here where Israel has had to fight Syria to retake cities that were once theirs, and Edom and Moab are invading Israel. But I no longer blame Abraham, because they can’t even get along with each other. The promised land, which God intended to be Israel, has divided into two countries, Judah and Israel, and in effect, we have cousin fighting cousin.

And guess what, the fighting we read about is still going on today. The names of the countries have changed, Persia is now Iran, those who claim to be “Palestine” were once the Philistines, and we continue to have war and rumors of war. Nothing has changed over the last 3,000 years. And the events we read about today happened around 1,000BC, about 500 years after Joshua and his army entered the land, and 3,000 years to present day where fighting still exists.

And I’ll say one more thing then I’ll change the subject. When I hear someone talking about “Peace in the Middle East”, I think to myself, “haven’t they read the Bible?” God said they would fight each other forever, and what God says stands.

Next, we read about the death of Elisha, and most importantly, about his awesome power. During a funeral, invaders came, and they had to quickly lower the man into the ground. When he touched the corpse of Elisha, he miraculous came alive and stood up. Elisha was able to heal the man, with the power of God of course, even in his eternal sleep.

And I called that a miracle, but it truly wasn’t. God is all powerful, He can make anything happen. He can command light just by saying “Let there be light”, and He can raise the dead just by arranging them to touch the corpse of a prophet. What awesome power! And why do you think God did that? He’s still trying to turn people away from Satan, away from sin. It wasn’t a miracle, it was God’s Will. He did that to show the people His power and to try to draw them back to Him.

But just like those who scoffed at the power of Jesus, the priests even suggesting Jesus performed His “miracles” because He was possessed by Satan, we do everything in our power to explain things away in order to dodge the simply fact that God is our Creator, He is our Heavenly Father, and that He loves us beyond imagination.

There is a reason behind everything, and most are that it is God’s Will, and it’s for the best.

So the corpse of Elisha raised a man from the dead. He truly did have a double portion, didn’t he? Praise be to God for sharing some of His power with His prophet.

The last thing I wanted to share is a website that outlines Bible history. They’ve done this by working backwards in time, tediously looking at how long people lived, how their lives overlapped, and they’ve been about to establish an estimated timeline for everything. It’s not perfect, it’s just an estimation based on scripture, but it gives you a pretty good idea of things. For example, as we read where “this King was XX years old when he took the throne, and it was in the XXth year of this Kings reign, and he reigned XX years and then he died”, they were able to create a reverse genealogy chart if you will, not necessarily of family members, but of Biblical characters.

I doubt that it is admissible as evidence in court, but it is a really good historical, not religious, reference to the past. It can be found at the link below.

http://timeline.biblehistory.com/home

And just a reminder, I don’t proof read anything I write. You may very well find spelling and grammatical errors, and that’s okay. I’m sharing my faith, not writing a school paper.

God bless everyone!