Nebuchadnezzar was the most powerful man in Babylon, and he has taken some of the Jewish nobility, including Daniel and his three friends Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, into captivity. They are assigned to Nebuchadnezzar’s palace. While they were in his captivity, Nebuchadnezzar has a dream about a colossal statue that represents a worldwide unity. He sees this as a sign to build a physical statue and force everyone to bow to it, which inspires a famous act of defiance about which we will read about today.

Jeremiah, the “Weeping Prophet,” prophesied in Israel for forty years without seeing a single convert. From the time he was about seventeen, when he was called to be a prophet, he devoted his life to speaking the Word of the Lord, even if it was hard or brought him trouble. Regardless of how they responded, Israel needed to hear it, especially when the message was as heavy as it is in today’s passage: Israel had turned her back on the Lord and would never find fulfillment until she turned back to Him.

Isaiah was one of the longest-working prophets in the Old Testament, with a ministry that spanned about sixty years. The things that He said usually succeeded only in making people mad, but that’s the call of a prophet: speak God’s Word no matter how it’s received. The chapter we will explore today recounts how he came to respond to the call that would carry him the rest of his life.

Jonah is a short book, but a packed one. It concerns a prophet of the Lord who was given a Word to deliver to a particularly evil people, so that they might have the opportunity to repent of their sins and be saved from oncoming destruction. Jonah eventually gets to them, after taking a dramatic detour, and sees the Lord’s message accepted...and this fills him with anger. Today we will see how Jonah represents each of us who seek something other than God’s heart so that we may redirect our focus to Him.

KINGS AND KINGDOMS | FENCE WALKER OR FIRE CALLER?

Just as Solomon grew up receiving instruction from his father, he is turning around and instructing his son in the ways of the Lord. In this passage, Solomon shows the importance of obeying the Lord rather than the desires of the heart, and what kind of a fulfilled, abundant life walking with the Lord produces.

In the first Psalm, the ungodly and the Godly are contrasted with competing imagesset against each other. The ungodly man is shown slowly stopping

his forwardmotion and becoming like chaff in the wind, but the Godly man is compared to a tree planted by never-ending streams of nourishment. As we unpack the first Psalm, remember that this dilemma—the decision to follow the pattern of the world or to follow the paths of righteousness—is presented to us every day, and that we must wake up each morning, intentionally pursue righteousness, and submit ourselves to Christ.

When Saul died, David, who had been anointed by God through Samuel to be the next king, had the rights to the throne--ahead of any remaining family that Saul had. But according to the pattern of the day, the throne technically could have gone to Jonathan’s firstborn, who was named Mephibosheth. As David took the throne, Mephibosheth’s nurse thought that his life was in danger and fled with him, injuring his feet in the process. There he lived, crippled and afraid for his life, until today’s passage, when he heard a knock at the door and learned that it was King David--the one who he assumed was most likely there to kill him.

1 Samuel 14:52 tells us about how fierce the conflict between the Philistines and Israelites had become, and that King Saul’s response was to enlist any strong

or brave man he encountered into the army to fight them. But King Saul had repeatedly proven himself unfit for leading God’s people, so God removed His Spirit from Saul and put it into David. The first time that we saw David was when Samuel was anointing him over the rest of his brothers; today we will see him as he takes his first steps toward being the powerful, godly king that he eventually became by standing up to Goliath when nobody else would.

As the Israelites prepared to enter the Promised Land, they were met with the high, thick walls of the fortress city of Jericho. Joshua sent spies in to scout it out, made contact with Rahab, and was about to see God sovereignly grant them victory over a seemingly unconquerable enemy.