C. H. Mackintosh, in his Notes on the Pentateuch, discusses church discipline in his commentary on Numbers 5:3 - "that they defile not their camps, in the midst whereof...
In Revelation 5:8-9, after the Lamb has taken the book that could not be opened by any other, the four beasts and twenty-four elders fall down before Him and...
The "chariot of the cherubims" is part of the design of the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Solomon. This chariot is not mentioned anywhere else in scripture. Neither does there seem to be...
Yesterday I read Ezekiel 14:21, which states, "For thus saith the Lord GOD; How much more when I send my four sore judgments upon Jerusalem, the sword, and the famine, and the noisome beast, and the pestilence, to cut off from it man and beast?" Of these four sore judgments, three make perfect sense to us today. The sword is war, famine is lack of food and/or water, and pestilence is disease in epidemic proportion. All of these are present concerns. However, we do not much think of the "noisome beast" as a threat. Of course, these beasts might come in the form of insects. However, we are seeing more conflicts from larger beasts. Today's newspapers report of a rash of alligator attacks in Florida. After only 17 deaths from such attacks since 1948, three people have been killed in separate incidents just this week. If God removes His protecting hand from us, we may have more to fear than we think from the "noisome beast."
When Moses was distressed because of the greatness of the task of leading the children of Israel through the wilderness, God commanded him to gather seventy elders to help him carry the burden (Numbers 11:16). Moses gathered the seventy round about the tabernacle and the spirit that was on Moses rested on the seventy (Numbers 11:24-25).
Near the Orissa state capital Bhubaneswar in India, Bimbala Das wore a silk saree while Hindu priests chanted a mantra for the wedding ceremony. The groom, a cobra that lives in a nearby ant hill, failed to attend the ceremony. A specially prepared brass serpent stood in for the real groom. Das, who is 30, had been very ill until she began taking milk to the cobra. She credited the snake with her healing and fell in love with her benefactor. The villages welcomed the wedding as a sign of good fortune and made a great feast on the wedding day. Das has moved to a hut close to the ant hill where her "husband" lives. Hinduism venerates snakes and especially King Cobra who is worn by Lord Shiva, the god of destruction. Das is not the first woman to marry an animal with the blessings of the Hindu priests. Earlier this year, a woman in the area was married to a dog. The brass serpent was used in the Bible for the healing of the disobedient Israelites (Numbers 21:4-9). However, when the Israelites later made an idol out of the brasen serpent, it became a sin to them and Hezekiah destroyed it. He called it Nehushtan, meaning, a piece of brass (2Kings 18:4).
The Lord is clearly interested in beauty. Some form of the word is used 76 times in the Bible. We are told that God "hath made every thing beautiful in his time" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). He so highly exalts the proper concept of beauty that He often associates it with holiness (Psalm 29:2; 96:9; 110:3). Unfortunately, men tend to pervert beauty as they do all that they touch. God reminds us that outward "beauty is vain" (Proverbs 31:30) and human "beauty is a fading flower' (Isaiah 28:1). Men corrupt beauty and make the "beauty of a man" a focus for idolatry (Isaiah 44:13). Eventually, man's perverseness causes his "beauty to be abhorred" (Ezekiel 16:25). The very concept of what is beautiful is no longer recognizable.
