Last week we were introduced to someone we did not know; King Lemuel or Chief Lemuel, probably the leader of a clan outside the Israelites, but still one of the children of Abraham, just not a child of the Isaac–Jacob line that leads to the Israelites. King Solomon collected wisdom sayings, mostly his own, but he also added at the end Lemuel’s mother's teachings. Though not in the Hebrew tradition, wisdom is wisdom, and all wisdom is God’s wisdom. Lemuel’s mother’s first tea

You probably remember this line from the movie The Blues Brothers (1980); “We’re on a mission from God.” Jake and Elwood Blues make this claim to justify their aggressive behavior while they carry out their plan to save a Catholic orphanage. Oddly enough, people seem to believe them. Good comedy, bad theology. Don’t believe what people say just because they claim to have a word from God. Often they don’t. Yet, people are quite gullible. The ‘false prophet dodge’ worked when

The glorious story of Esther comprises the book of Esther which, in the Christian arrangement of Bible books, comes at the end of the Historical books (Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah) and at the beginning of the Writings or more poetic books (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs). Therefore, in our series on “Women with a Story to Tell,” it is appropriate to find our next woman with a story to tell in Proverbs. Proverb is the word w

God through Jeremiah has been criticizing the current government of Judah. King Josiah’s sons, and one nephew, one after the other have served themselves, remodeling the capital while misleading the people, enriching themselves through corruption and violence, and playing a losing game of shifting alliances with Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon (reread chapters 21 and 22; especially the central theme in 22:13-17). Now we are ready to read the conclusion of God’s judgment of polit

This is the way that empires work, including sprawling nation states like China, Russia, and the United States. First, they control on their citizenry through the use of census data, the classification of kinds of people which is useful for dividing and manipulating the population, the management of news and information including undermining the free press and overwhelming the media with their own propaganda, and the suppression of dissent including shutting down the venues f

In last week’s lesson, we learned what God expects from national leaders, and it should scare some people. Specifically, God sent a message to Josiah’s sons, beginning with Shallum, aka Jehoahaz. Jehoahaz was enthroned by the people of Judah, but after a couple of months when Pharaoh Neco stopped in Jerusalem on his retreat to Egypt, he captured Jehoahaz and took him along in exile, never to be seen in Judah again. In this week’s lesson, still in Chapter 22, Pharaoh Neco ha