The Sword of the LORD

“In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying , If any man thirst, let him come unto Me, and drink.  He that believeth on Me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water .  (But this spake He of the Spirit, which they that believe on Him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified.)” (John 7:37-39).  The feast that John was referring to in this verse is the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, or Sukkot, as it is called in the Hebrew language.   It was a week-long celebration that occurred at the end of harvest to remind the Jews, among other things, of their sojourn in the wilderness when they dwelled in temporary structures before they entered their final resting place: the Promised Land.   God instituted the Feast of Tabernacles when He said to Moses, “Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, The fifteenth day of this seventh month shall be the fe...

Recently, I have studied and thought a lot about the account of Jesus walking on the water in John 6 and Matthew 14.   The story occurs right after Jesus fed more than 5,000 people with just a few loaves of bread and two small fish.   I would like to explore a different aspect to this story, however, that is very easy to look past.   Matthew 14:22 reads, “And straightway Jesus constrained His disciples to get into a ship , and to go before Him unto the other side, while He sent the multitudes away .”  We see here two groups of people: the multitude, and Jesus’ disciples, and we see two very different ways in which the Lord is dealing with them.  He is sending His disciples across the sea ahead of Him, but He is dismissing, or sending away, the multitude.  The Lord seems very deliberate in accomplishing these two tasks; and so He was, for He did nothing in His ministry that was not deliberate.  Everything that Jesus did had both plan and purpose....

  “Then the children of Judah came unto Joshua in Gilgal: and Caleb the son of Jephunneh the Kenezite said unto him, Thou knowest the thing that the LORD said unto Moses the man of God concerning me and thee in Kadeshbarnea…And Joshua blessed him, and gave unto Caleb the son of Jephunneh Hebron for an inheritance.  Hebron therefore became the inheritance of Caleb the son of Jephunneh the Kenezite unto this day, because that he wholly followed the LORD God of Israel .” (Joshua 14:6, 13, 14). One of my favorite individuals in all of scripture is the Old Testament Bible character Caleb.  You may remember that he and Joshua were among the twelve men that Moses selected to send into Canaan to spy out the land before the armies of Israel went in to claim it.  Of the twelve spies, only Caleb and Joshua had a positive report about the Promised Land that God had said was theirs.  The other ten spies had many things to say about the land, but most of them were negati...