Judges 12 – The Ephraimites are offended that Jephthah did not call on them for help in the fight against the Ammonites. This brings the two clans into deadly conflict, a conflict which results in the defeat of the Ephraimites. Jephthah ruled for six years.
Ibzan, of Bethlehem, comes
next. He too had 30 sons and 30
daughters (this must be some kind of magic number at
this time). He judged for seven years.
Elon, the Zebulunite, comes
next—nothing is told of him except he ruled for 10 years. Then Abdon,
son of Hillel the Pirathonite (Ephraim) was judge. He had 40 sons and 30 grandsons who rode on
70 donkeys. (This kind of detail is intriguing. Note it repeats for Jair in chapter 10, for
Ibzan and for Abdon) He judged for eight years.
Judges 13 – Again the Israelites
backslide and again they are made subject to the Philistines, this time for 40
years. Manoah, a Danite, had a barren
wife. An angel of the Lord appears to
her and tells her she will conceive: “No razor is to come on his head, for the
boy shall be a nazirete to God from birth.
It is he who shall begin to deliver Israel from the hand of the
Philistines” (13:5). This son will be
Samson.
Manoah
too is given an opportunity to talk with the angel, though he doesn’t realize
it is God’s angel. He wants to know what
rule of life the child should have, but the angel simply repeats what he said
to the woman (that she should not drink wine or eat anything unclean,
etc). Then Manoah asks the angel his
name, but the angel says, “Why do you ask my name? It is too wonderful” (13:18).
So
Manoah offers a kid and a grain offering to “him who works wonders. When the
flame went up toward heaven from the alter, the angel of the Lord ascended in
the flame of the altar while Manoah and his wife looked on; and they fell on
their faces to the ground” (13:19-20). Manoah thinks they will die because they
have seen God, but the wife thinks this is silly since it would negate the
things the angel told them to prepare for.
Augustine (354-430 AD)
Introduction: Augustine was born 100
years after Origen’s death in Thagaste (Roman Africa), what is now Algeria. His
mother Monica was a Christian, and he grew up in the church until he was a
teenager, when he left to become a Manichean. Manicheanism was a gnostic
religion of what Wikipedia calls “Sassanid-era Babylonia” and taught that there
was an existential struggle going on between the forces of good and evil, and
evil was embedded in the material world. You would think such a belief would
not lead one into a care-free sexual life, but it was around this time that
Augustine had an affair with a woman in Carthage. The affair resulted in the
birth of a son – Adeodatus – and a thirteen year relationship with the woman.
She apparently was not considered a suitable “match” for marriage by his
family, but he had a relationship with her until she died.
He
became a teacher in Thagaste, a position he kept for about 9 years, and then he
moved to Rome to teach. He won appointment in 384 at age thirty to teach rhetoric
in the city of Milan. He was moving away from Manichean religion at this time
and growing in reputation as a teacher.
In
387, moved by a passage from Paul’s epistle to the Romans (13:13-14), he felt
moved to convert and in the Easter Vigil in 387, he and his son were baptized.
In 388, they both returned to North Africa. Adeodatus and his mother both died
around this time and Augustine sold all he had in the way of possessions and
property and gave the money to the poor. He kept the family house and converted
it into a monastic establishment.
He
was ordained a priest in Hippo Regius in what is now Algeria, and became a
famous preacher. In 395, he was appointed bishop of Hippo. Augustine’s writings were seminal in the development of western
Christianity and western thought/culture generally. He blended traditional
Christianity and Neoplatonic philosophical notions. He is admired by Christians
in Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant communities.
My Plan: I have never read all
of Augustine’s Confessions. He wrote it
around 397-398. It is a reasonably short work and notable because it is the
first autobiographical work of early Christianity. There is no copyright
involved so I plan to have a short and complete part of the work on the blog
each day along with reflections on my own experiences along the path to Christ
and to His Ecclesia – the gathered body of believers that has taken Him as
their Light and their Salvation.
Confessions
1 - Great are you, O Lord,
and greatly to be praised; great is your power, and of your wisdom there is no
end. And man, being a part of your creation, desires to praise you, man, who
bears about with him his mortality, the witness of his sin, even the witness
that you "resist the proud," — yet man, this part of your creation,
desires to praise you. You move us to
delight in praising you; for you have formed us for yourself, and our hearts
are restless till they find rest in you.
Lord,
teach me to know and understand which of these should be first, to call on you,
or to praise you; and likewise to know you, or to call upon you. But who is
there that calls upon you without knowing you? For he that knows you not may
call upon you as other than you are. Or perhaps we call on you that we may know
you. "But how shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? Or
how shall they believe without a preacher?" [Romans 10:14]
And
those who seek the Lord shall praise Him. For those who seek shall find Him [Matthew
7:7] and those who find Him shall praise Him. Let me seek you, Lord, in calling
on you, and call on you in believing in you; for you have been preached unto
us. O Lord, my faith calls on you—that faith which you have imparted to me,
which you have breathed into me through the incarnation of your Son, through
the ministry of your preacher.
How do we come to God and what can we ever “know” about “Him”? Like
Augustine and like most people, I grew up in a society where talk of God, talk
of Jesus, talk of heaven and hell were ALWAYS in the environment – my family
environment, my neighbors’ environment, my country’s environment – yet it meant
little to me as a child. And when I say it was in my environment, don’t think I
was part of any close-knit Christian community. I wasn’t. My parents were
atheists; I saw them and was influenced by them, but did not grow up with them.
I grew up with grandparents who went sporadically to church. But I did learn to
pray at night, to thank God for the good things I had and ask him for things I
wanted or needed.
My first real impulse the “call on God” came when I was eight years
old and my grandmother died. I was in the care of my grandmother and
grandfather at the time and without her had only my grandfather to rely on. I
looked up into the night sky over McIntyre Street in Bronxville, NY and prayed that
my grandfather not be taken from me until he was 94.
Who was “the preacher” who brought God to mind as the one to turn
to in moments of darkness and need? I am continually drawn to the comparison of
Annie Sullivan in the famous American movie of 1962. The letters of our
spiritual language are not from one person only, however; they are placed in
our hands and hearts by the prevailing culture, the things we learn and hear
all around us. But they are only games until we connect them to what is going
on within us. And that is what I began to do that night.
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