The One Year Bible TLB (137 page)
Read The One Year Bible TLB Online
Authors: Tyndale
Quick, Lord, answer me—for I have prayed. Listen when I cry to you for help!
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Regard my prayer as my evening sacrifice and as incense wafting up to you.
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Help me, Lord, to keep my mouth shut and my lips sealed.
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Take away my lust for evil things; don’t let me want to be with sinners, doing what they do, sharing their delicacies.
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Let the godly smite me! It will be a kindness! If they reprove me, it is medicine! Don’t let me refuse it. But I am in constant prayer against the wicked and their deeds.
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When their leaders are condemned, and their bones are strewn across the ground,
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then these men will finally listen to me and know that I am trying to help them.
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I look to you for help, O Lord God. You are my refuge. Don’t let them slay me.
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Keep me out of their traps.
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Let them fall into their own snares, while I escape.
It is wrong to accept a bribe to twist justice.
June 24One day the seminary students came to Elisha and told him, “As you can see, our dormitory is too small. Tell us, as our president, whether we can build a new one down beside the Jordan River, where there are plenty of logs.”
“All right,” he told them, “go ahead.”
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“Please, sir, come with us,” someone suggested.
“I will,” he said.
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When they arrived at the Jordan, they began cutting down trees;
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but as one of them was chopping, his axhead fell into the river.
“Oh, sir,” he cried, “it was borrowed!”
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“Where did it fall?” the prophet asked. The youth showed him the place, and Elisha cut a stick and threw it into the water; and the axhead rose to the surface and floated!
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“Grab it,” Elisha said to him; and he did.
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Once when the king of Syria was at war with Israel, he said to his officers, “We will mobilize our forces at ____” (naming the place).
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Immediately Elisha warned the king of Israel, “Don’t go near ____” (naming the same place) “for the Syrians are planning to mobilize their troops there!”
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The king sent a scout to see if Elisha was right, and sure enough, he had saved him from disaster. This happened several times.
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The king of Syria was puzzled. He called together his officers and demanded, “Which of you is the traitor? Who has been informing the king of Israel about my plans?”
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“It’s not us, sir,” one of the officers replied. “Elisha, the prophet, tells the king of Israel even the words you speak in the privacy of your bedroom!”
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“Go and find out where he is, and we’ll send troops to seize him,” the king exclaimed.
And the report came back, “Elisha is at Dothan.”
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So one night the king of Syria sent a great army with many chariots and horses to surround the city.
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When the prophet’s servant got up early the next morning and went outside, there were troops, horses, and chariots everywhere.
“Alas, my master, what shall we do now?” he cried out to Elisha.
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“Don’t be afraid!” Elisha told him. “For our army is bigger than theirs!”
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Then Elisha prayed, “Lord, open his eyes and let him see!” And the Lord opened the young man’s eyes so that he could see horses of fire and chariots of fire everywhere upon the mountain!
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As the Syrian army advanced upon them, Elisha prayed, “Lord, please make them blind.” And he did.
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Then Elisha went out and told them, “You’ve come the wrong way! This isn’t the right city! Follow me and I will take you to the man you’re looking for.” And he led them to Samaria!
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As soon as they arrived Elisha prayed, “Lord, now open their eyes and let them see.” And the Lord did, and they discovered that they were in Samaria, the capital city of Israel!
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When the king of Israel saw them, he shouted to Elisha, “Oh, sir, shall I kill them? Shall I kill them?”
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“Of course not!” Elisha told him. “Do we kill prisoners of war? Give them food and drink and send them home again.”
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So the king made a great feast for them and then sent them home to their king. And after that the Syrian raiders stayed away from the land of Israel.
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Later on, however, King Ben-hadad of Syria mustered his entire army and besieged Samaria.
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As a result there was a great famine in the city, and after a long while even a donkey’s head sold for fifty dollars and a pint of dove’s dung brought three dollars!
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One day as the king of Israel was walking along the wall of the city, a woman called to him, “Help, my lord the king!”
“If the Lord doesn’t help you, what can I do?” he retorted. “I have neither food nor wine to give you. However, what’s the matter?”
She replied, “This woman proposed that we eat my son one day and her son the next. So we boiled my son and ate him, but the next day when I said, ‘Kill your son so we can eat him,’ she hid him.”
When the king heard this he tore his clothes. (The people watching noticed through the rip he tore in them that he was wearing an inner robe made of sackcloth next to his flesh.)
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“May God kill me if I don’t execute Elisha this very day,” the king vowed.
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Elisha was sitting in his house at a meeting with the elders of Israel when the king sent a messenger to summon him. But before the messenger arrived Elisha said to the elders, “This murderer has sent a man to kill me. When he arrives, shut the door and keep him out, for his master will soon follow him.”
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While Elisha was still saying this, the messenger arrived followed by the king.
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“The Lord has caused this mess,” the king stormed. “Why should I expect any help from him?”
7:
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Elisha replied, “The Lord says that by this time tomorrow two gallons of flour or four gallons of barley grain will be sold in the markets of Samaria for a dollar!”
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The officer assisting the king said, “That couldn’t happen if the Lord made windows in the sky!”
But Elisha replied, “You will see it happen, but you won’t be able to buy any of it!”
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Now there were four lepers sitting outside the city gates. “Why sit here until we die?” they asked each other.
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“We will starve if we stay here and we will starve if we go back into the city; so we might as well go out and surrender to the Syrian army. If they let us live, so much the better; but if they kill us, we would have died anyway.”
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So that evening they went out to the camp of the Syrians, but there was no one there!
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(For the Lord had made the whole Syrian army hear the clatter of speeding chariots and a loud galloping of horses and the sounds of a great army approaching. “The king of Israel has hired the Hittites and Egyptians to attack us,” they cried out.
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So they panicked and fled into the night, abandoning their tents, horses, donkeys, and everything else.)
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When the lepers arrived at the edge of the camp they went into one tent after another, eating, drinking wine, and carrying out silver and gold and clothing and hiding it.
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Finally they said to each other, “This isn’t right. This is wonderful news, and we aren’t sharing it with anyone! Even if we wait until morning, some terrible calamity will certainly fall upon us; come on, let’s go back and tell the people at the palace.”
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So they went back to the city and told the watchmen what had happened—they had gone out to the Syrian camp and no one was there! The horses and donkeys were tethered and the tents were all in order, but there was not a soul around.
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Then the watchmen shouted the news to those in the palace.
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The king got out of bed and told his officers, “I know what has happened. The Syrians know we are starving, so they have left their camp and have hidden in the fields, thinking that we will be lured out of the city. Then they will attack us and make slaves of us and get in.”
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One of his officers replied, “We’d better send out scouts to see. Let them take five of the remaining horses—if something happens to the animals it won’t be any greater loss than if they stay here and die with the rest of us!”
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Four chariot horses were found and the king sent out two charioteers to see where the Syrians had gone.
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They followed a trail of clothing and equipment all the way to the Jordan River—thrown away by the Syrians in their haste. The scouts returned and told the king,
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and the people of Samaria rushed out and plundered the camp of the Syrians. So it was true that two gallons of flour and four gallons of barley were sold that day for one dollar, just as the Lord had said!
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The king appointed his special assistant to control the traffic at the gate, but he was knocked down and trampled and killed as the people rushed out. This is what Elisha had predicted on the previous day when the king had come to arrest him,
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and the prophet had told the king that flour and barley would sell for so little on the following day.
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The king’s officer had replied, “That couldn’t happen even if the Lord opened the windows of heaven!”
And the prophet had said, “You will see it happen, but you won’t be able to buy any of it!”
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And he couldn’t, for the people trampled him to death at the gate!
Several days later Paul suggested to Barnabas that they return again to Turkey and visit each city where they had preached before,
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to see how the new converts were getting along.
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Barnabas agreed and wanted to take along John Mark.
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But Paul didn’t like that idea at all, since John Mark had deserted them in Pamphylia.
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Their disagreement over this was so sharp that they separated. Barnabas took John Mark with him and sailed for Cyprus,
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while Paul chose Silas and, with the blessing of the believers, left for Syria and Cilicia to encourage the churches there.
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Paul and Silas went first to Derbe and then on to Lystra where they met Timothy, a believer whose mother was a Christian Jewess, but his father a Greek.
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Timothy was well thought of by the brothers in Lystra and Iconium,
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so Paul asked him to join them on their journey. In deference to the Jews of the area, he circumcised Timothy before they left, for everyone knew that his father was a Greek and hadn’t permitted this before.
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Then they went from city to city, making known the decision concerning the Gentiles, as decided by the apostles and elders in Jerusalem.
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So the church grew daily in faith and numbers.
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Next they traveled through Phrygia and Galatia because the Holy Spirit had told them not to go into the Turkish province of Asia Minor at that time.
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Then going along the borders of Mysia they headed north for the province of Bithynia, but again the Spirit of Jesus said no.
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So instead they went on through Mysia province to the city of Troas.
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That night
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Paul had a vision. In his dream he saw a man over in Macedonia, Greece, pleading with him, “Come over here and help us.”
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Well, that settled it. We
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would go to Macedonia, for we could only conclude that God was sending us to preach the Good News there.
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We went aboard a boat at Troas, and sailed straight across to Samothrace, and the next day on to Neapolis,
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and finally reached Philippi, a Roman
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colony just inside the Macedonian border, and stayed there several days.
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On the Sabbath we went a little way outside the city to a riverbank where we understood some people met for prayer; and we taught the Scriptures to some women who came.
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One of them was Lydia, a saleswoman from Thyatira, a merchant of purple cloth. She was already a worshiper of God and as she listened to us, the Lord opened her heart and she accepted all that Paul was saying.
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She was baptized along with all her household and asked us to be her guests. “If you agree that I am faithful to the Lord,” she said, “come and stay at my home.” And she urged us until we did.
How I plead with God, how I implore his mercy, pouring out my troubles before him.
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For I am overwhelmed and desperate, and you alone know which way I ought to turn to miss the traps my enemies have set for me.
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(There’s one—just over there to the right!) No one gives me a passing thought. No one will help me; no one cares a bit what happens to me.
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Then I prayed to Jehovah. “Lord,” I pled, “you are my only place of refuge. Only you can keep me safe.
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“Hear my cry, for I am very low. Rescue me from my persecutors, for they are too strong for me.
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Bring me out of prison so that I can thank you. The godly will rejoice with me for all your help.”
Wisdom is the main pursuit of sensible men, but a fool’s goals are at the ends of the earth!
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A rebellious son is a grief to his father and a bitter blow to his mother.