Daily Manna 13-Aug-2016

Topic: Safety is of the Lord 23

Reading: 1Sam 23:7-14, 1Sam 18

Scripture: And it was told Saul that David was come to Keilah. And Saul said, God hath delivered him into my hand; for he is shut in, by entering into a town that hath gates and bars. (1Sam 23:7)

Note: Saul was to witness a consistent retrogression in his capacity as a man, a father and a king, so long as he continued his relentless pursuit of David, a man chosen and anointed by God. David was incontrovertibly special to God, as God confirmed him as a man after His heart.

The life of David gave credence and hope in the fact that when a man is blessed of God, no man can curse him. Balaam tried to curse Israel for the sake of filthy lucre. He was motivated by money, doing his worst in his power to derail Israel. Yet in all his efforts, guile and treachery, Balaam ended up having to take a piece of advice from his donkey to save him from destruction. In the madness of his folly, the prophet was blinded by the allure of monetary inducements to an angel on his path with a stretched out sword, during his ill-fated mission to curse the people of God for Balak, the king of Moab.

Saul hadn’t learnt from history and the relationship between God and his anointed. He deployed all that was within his power, all in a vain attempt to destroy the Lord’s anointed and derail the plan of God. Saul’s strategy included brutal, direct attempt at assassination on two occasions to stab David to death at close range, all under the masked cover of insanity. When that failed, he began to use guile; using his elder daughter Merab as bait to trap David into a reckless venture of aimless wars against the Philistines, knowing that certain death at the hands of the Philistines was imminent.

Saul was cruel. A man that lacked integrity, rewarding good with evil. He was the type of leader who would plot against his own loyal, dedicated men who have spent their entire lifetime serving them through thick and thin. Saul suffered massively from inferiority complex, that saw excellence and bravery as a threat to his throne. No wonder that David testified in Psalms 2:2-3, “The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.’

Food for thought: The imaginations of man in consonance with the rage that pours out of the pit of hell, can never go beyond the boundary of the blood of the Lamb.

Declaration: He that sits in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. (Ps 2:4)

©Author: Rev Fred Aboe