Saturday, October 24, 2009

2 Kings 20-21

This was just a retelling of the story of king Hezekiah asking that yrs be added to his life.
We read about all the wicked things that the sons he had after he was granted more life did. One was even killed by his own servants.

2 comments:

Jamie said...

In the notes of this reading, the publishers of this book errantly suppose that Hezekiah's prayer to live altered God's will, and he was thereby punished for asking. I, again, cannot stress how wrong this is, and how unkeeping with the rest of the text; including, as we'll see in our next reading. God's will cannot be altered..by prayer or otherwise. What can be altered is how He achieves that will. And, again, God would never grant a prayer just so He can then say, See I told you so. That is NOT how God operates....and this is obvious if you take the Bible in context. I am also confused to why the publisher's think this, because we'll see in our next reading, as Paul Harvey would say, The rest of the story as to why things went bad for Hezekiah after God healed him and he lived for 15 more years.

I want to point out to that the king of Assyria makes a good point in these readings. That is, he says that none of the other gods of other lands saved their people from being defeated by him, so why do the Israelites think their God can? History tells us that their God did. So what does that tell us about those other "gods" and our God. He [our God] is a living, faithful God that fights our battles for us and with us. Those other "gods" were just what God said they were....nothing, save the work of man's hands.

Jamie said...

I know what skeptics would say. They'd say well, the deaths of those 185,000 Assyrians was just coincidence...that's not proof that God did that. Really? So everytime (and there's a lot of them) something happens at just the right time and place to help out the Israelites that's a coincidence or "luck"? Even the most skeptical statitician (sp?) would say that if you look at all of the perfectly timed coincidences in the Bible, there are just too many....that is, they're a statistical impossiblity. In fact, statiticians have already calculated that you'd have a better chance if they filled the entire state of Texas one foot deep of silver coins of finding a gold one, then of all the miracles in the Bible being "coincidences". Yet skeptics and atheists still claim there is no proof.