Daily Devotion and Meditation on the Word of God on January 27, 2009

Hello My Friend; Good day.

Our reading for today is from Jeremiah chapter 41. It is a very tragic, bloody, and barbarous story in this chapter. The evil that men do leaves after them, but the good is often entered with the bones, so Shakespeare had written. Though descended from the royal line of King David, the activities of Ishmael did not portray royalty. He acted as a bandit, a terrorist, a gorrilla leader. After treacherously killing Gedaliah, the Babylonian appointed governor for Jerusalem at the dinner table the governor provided to honor him and his ten friends, Ishmael also killed some 80 good honest men who came from Shechem, Samaria, and Shiloh to Jerusalem, with heads shelved and in sack-clothes to lament the ashes of the Temple of the Lord and their fallen beloved City. He pretended to be in sympathy with them, tricked them to the area and killed 70 of them, but ten tricked him and escaped. Ishmael made captives of the rest of the people left in Mizpah-the king's daughters. Johanan and his military men left their post and that was the reason Ishmael had his way to kill Gedaliah and the Babylonian guards. Johanan also made another mistake of leading all the survivors whom he recovered from ishmael on their way to Egypt. We shall see in our next reading, chapter 42 that it was a Big mistake to go to Egypt.

There are many lessons to be learned from this story:i. the pretended friendhip; the one who ate Gedaliah's bread lifted up his hand to kill him; 2. Gedaliah's naivity of not listening to the warning given to him in chapter 40 and allowing Johanan to be away from his duty; prophet Jeremiah had warned that it was better to go into captivity than remain in Jerusalem. Surely the bitterness of captivity was past, but death still lingered because there is no rest for the wicked.

Prayer for today: O Lord, our times are in your hand. Give us the wisdom and discernment to know and enemies who come to us in disguise of friendship. Draw good people to us and lead the wicked away from us through the power of the One who can save us to the uttermost. Amen.

Apostle Ndueso Udoiwod.