Orphaned and raised by her cousin Mordecai, Hadassah became Queen Esther, the first of many miracles God performed in and through her life. The story of Esther is a narrative of how God provides and preserves us when we love Him. It’s amazing to see how God can use the most unlikely people to hel...

The book of Esther takes place in Susa during the reign of the Persian king Ahasuerus. Hadassah,
whose Hebrew name means “myrtle”, was an orphaned Jewish girl, raised by her cousin Mordecai
who loved her like a daughter. The account begins with Vashti the queen of Persia, publicly
refusing to com...

The works that God accomplished through Elijah were profound and often dramatic, and Elijah’s young prophet-in-training, Elisha, had a front row seat. When it came time for Elijah to be taken to heaven, Elisha was determined to stay close to Elijah. Even though Elijah’s words prompted Elisha to l...

Elisha was known as a great prophet of God. The Bible highlights what he did in small everyday events and how he involved himself in larger national events. People learned not to doubt God because of Elisha’s life. Elisha lived and ministered in Northern Israel. Comprised of most of the original ...

When God says something, He does it. It is so important for us to know God’s Word; this is how we know what the voice of God sounds like. We need to learn His Word and make room for quiet time in our lives to listen to God. God is concerned for us, for the lives of people. He is speaking and acti...

There is what we want and desire, and then there is the LORD’s will. Too often we get these backwards; we think that God’s will is the same thing that we desire, but truthfully, as we live our lives with God, He reforms our desires to be for His will. We go from wanting God to give us what we wan...

One of the greatest kings of ancient Jerusalem was a man named Hezekiah. He was king of Judah after his father Ahaz. Ahaz completely rebelled against the ways of God, and the Word of God, and the Law of God. To me, that makes it all the more amazing that when Hezekiah took over the kingdom, he co...

"The book of 1 Chronicles begins with a genealogy that show the origins of the nation of Israel. It is interesting that the genealogy starts not with the patriarchs of Israel, but with the first man ever created, Adam. This emphasizes the family aspect first of humanity, and then of Israel, more ...

Our concept of authority can be very messed up, thanks to sin. However, let us be clear in our Christian belief that Jesus Christ is the head of our households. There is no person, male or female, who has the ability to successfully be the head of the household. We must yield ultimate authority t...

Being a good person in the eyes of people is one thing, but being a person who honours God and His covenant is something else. People can be fooled, people can have a faulty system of measuring goodness, but God sees and knows our hearts and our every action. He cannot be fooled. So how did David...

Our concept of authority can be very messed up, thanks to sin. However, let us be clear in our Christian belief that Jesus Christ is the head of our households. There is no person, male or female, who has the ability to successfully be the head of the household. We must yield ultimate authority t...

In 1 Chronicles 16, we see how David organized worship to be done before the Ark of the Covenant. After their initial celebration, David ensured that continuous music and praise would surround the Ark and the tent that housed it. The names of the worshipping and attending Levites are recorded her...

We will inevitably make mistakes. Will we admit to those mistakes? Or will we try to justify them? There are so many ways that we instinctually justify ourselves. We can deceive ourselves so easily. This is one of the reasons that we need to be friends with other Christians; real friends, who tal...

"In our reading today, we see Solomon beginning to ready the kingdom of Israel to build the Temple. It was a project that was a long time coming. David, knowing that he wasn’t the king to build the Temple, had instead made many preparations before he passed away. He had gathered money, resources,...

There is absolutely nothing we can do to fix all our problems. We are in a whole bunch of trouble. Trouble caused by sin, both willful and unwitting. As a society and a culture, we have largely forgotten the truth. As a result of our crime, worldwide failure and embarrassing governmental struggle...

God’s response to Solomon’s failure as a king was to split the kingdom. He did so at the time Solomon died and his son took over. Jeroboam was an enemy of his father the king when he was alive, and hid out in Egypt until Solomon was dead. Solomon had been taxing the kingdom so much that it devast...

Jehoshaphat was the son of Asa, and the fourth king of Judah, the nation south to Israel. The Bible says that Jehoshaphat not only did well in the sight of the LORD, but that he delighted in the way of God and restored the knowledge of God’s Word back to the people. In our reading today of 2 Chro...

Every generation must make a decision about who Jesus Christ is. None of us can ride the coat tails of our parents’ or grandparents’ decisions when it comes to faith. King Jehoram, in our reading today, is a prime example of this. Though his father was a king who regarded the ways of God and resp...

The history of King Josiah, the sixteenth king of Judah, is a high point in the declining southern kingdom. Josiah was only eight years old when he became king. His father Amon had died, and he had led Judah in idol worship and pagan practices. After over half a century of this rebellion
against ...

The book of Ezra is full of interesting things, including its history. In the Septuagint, which is an ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, the books we call Ezra and Nehemiah are titled Ezra 1 and Ezra 2. Our English Bibles choose to name them individually, but the content is still the...

There are three kinds of prayer I would like to highlight. First, is a private time when we devote ourselves to personal daily prayer with the LORD. Next, is small group prayer in which we pray with people that we know or even pray for someone on the spot, in our conversations with them. The thir...

The name Nehemiah means “Comfort of Yahweh.” The book covers the period of time when Nehemiah and Jerusalem were in need of God’s comfort. Nehemiah was greatly troubled because the walls and gates of Jerusalem remained broken and in ruins. A city without walls was not only unprotected and vulnera...

Fear is an amazing motivator. We can control people with fear, manipulate their decisionmaking, threaten their perceived future with what “could happen,” and more. That is exactly what the enemies of God tried to do to Nehemiah, in their conspiracy against him. While God knows everything and cann...