Written by Amy K. Hall |
Monday, April 29, 2024
Do you regret your sin? Ask forgiveness because you have truly done something wrong that deserves punishment (just as Pilate and Judas did), but do not wallow in despair. Instead, receive your forgiveness—paid for in full by Jesus—and then rest in God’s sovereignty, knowing that even that sin you regret will, in the end, bring glory to God in some way. The fact that God is using even your sin to ultimately reveal his glory, work for your good, and further his plans for the world does not lessen the seriousness of your sin, but it does mean you can utterly rest from any fear and regret you have over it because God has redeemed both you and your sin.

If there’s one thing we learn from the book of Judges, it’s this: God can—and does—work through anyone and everything, including our sin and failures.
Throughout the book, we see flawed man after flawed man leading the floundering nation of Israel. Each time, God uses even their sin to accomplish his own purposes. It’s not just that their sin can’t derail God’s plan; it’s that God uses their inevitable sin as part of his plan. Of course, using sinners and their sin makes sense since God only has sinners to work with!
Take Samson, for instance, in Judges 13–16. In most ways, he certainly wasn’t anyone we would want to emulate, and he seems to have cared more about his own glory than God’s, yet God moved his plan of redemption forward through Samson, rescuing the Israelites and judging the Philistines through him for twenty years.
Samson’s death illustrates God’s providence perfectly. Through his own foolishness and sin, he ends up being captured by the Philistines, bound in chains, eyes gouged out, entertaining the lords of the Philistines at a giant rally for their god:
Now the lords of the Philistines assembled to offer a great sacrifice to Dagon their god, and to rejoice, for they said, “Our god has given Samson our enemy into our hands.” When the people saw him, they praised their god, for they said, “Our god has given our enemy into our hands, even the destroyer of our country, who has slain many of us.”
They thought they had won—that their god had conquered Israel’s God. Who wouldn’t? How much lower could Samson get? He was thoroughly defeated. But God wasn’t. Though by all appearances God had failed because of Samson’s sin, in fact he had one more judgment to enact against the Philistines in order to rescue Israel, and the situation was progressing precisely the way God intended:
Then Samson called to the Lord and said, “O Lord God, please remember me and please strengthen me just this time, O God, that I may at once be avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes.” Samson grasped the two middle pillars on which the house rested, and braced himself against them, the one with his right hand and the other with his left. And Samson said, “Let me die with the Philistines!” And he bent with all his might so that the house fell on the lords and all the people who were in it. So the dead whom he killed at his death were more than those whom he killed in his life.
Note that Samson had quite different intentions from God here. God was judging the Philistines and saving Israel. Samson was seeking revenge for his two eyes. The gap between these two intentions is ridiculously huge. God was just. Samson was pathetically self-centered. But the gap between them didn’t matter. God used even Samson’s sins to accomplish his purposes.
Even Rebellion Serves God’s Victory
This is exactly what we see happening on the cross a thousand years later. Fallen people sinfully put the Son of God to death, but did those sinners and their sin spoil God’s good plan? No!
Read More
Related Posts:

God often trains men to be faithful husbands and fathers by giving us great examples to follow — the faith of Abraham, the conviction of Moses, the leadership of Joshua, the wisdom of Solomon, the heart of David. Sometimes, however, God trains us for faithfulness by showing us just how wicked men can be. He trains us to love by showing us men who failed to love, to lead by showing us men who failed to lead, to fight by showing us men who refused to fight, to die for others by showing us men who saved themselves. And as husbands and fathers go, few were as corrupt and shameful as King Ahab.

I had never thought of myself as passive. Throughout high school and college, and all throughout my twenties, I had been the driven dreamer and achiever. I thought of myself as the organized one, the proactive one, the disciplined one, the visionary. I was the one who initiated next steps, important meetings, needed changes, group plans, hard conversations.
And then I married, and marriage showed me sides of myself I had never had to see.
A man does not change much by making vows and putting on a ring, but an awful lot changes for a man that day. The apostle Paul tried to prepare us: “The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided” (1 Corinthians 7:32–34). Divided me was not as put-together and proactive as single me had been. And as the pressures rose and the cracks began to show, I suddenly saw just how tempted to self-pity and passivity I could be.
What God Expects of Husbands
Over the first year or two of marriage, the passivity of Christian husbands went from a foreign and somewhat perplexing problem to a profoundly familiar and personal and humbling one. Vision and initiative were easier, in some ways, when they were fenced into certain parts of my life. Now, as two became one, all of life required a leading love.
Will I give myself up for her good again today (Ephesians 5:25)? Will I keep pursuing her, studying her, wooing her? Will I develop and carry out a vision for our family? Will I consistently open the Bible and pray with them? Will I lead our family in loving and serving the church? Will I lean into conflict with patience and love, or will I withdraw? Will I anticipate our family’s needs and preserve space to rest? Will I discipline our children, even when I’m tired? Will I bring up difficult conversations and make tough decisions? Or, like Adam, when God comes calling, will I hide and point the finger somewhere else (Genesis 3:12)?
God expects much from husbands. As my senses have been heightened to my own tendencies to passivity, stories of husbands in Scripture — good and bad — have come alive with greater gravity and relevance for marriage.
Weak and Wicked Example
God often trains men to be faithful husbands and fathers by giving us great examples to follow — the faith of Abraham, the conviction of Moses, the leadership of Joshua, the wisdom of Solomon, the heart of David. Sometimes, however, God trains us for faithfulness by showing us just how wicked men can be. He trains us to love by showing us men who failed to love, to lead by showing us men who failed to lead, to fight by showing us men who refused to fight, to die for others by showing us men who saved themselves.
And as husbands and fathers go, few were as corrupt and shameful as King Ahab.
When we first meet the man, Scripture tells us, “Ahab the son of Omri reigned over Israel in Samaria twenty-two years. And Ahab the son of Omri did evil in the sight of the Lord, more than all who were before him” (1 Kings 16:29–30). The kings before him were a cauldron of evil — conspiring, deceiving, stealing, murdering, and in it all, insulting God by choosing idols over him. Ahab, we learn, was worse than them all.
And his marriage was at the center of his rebellion. “As if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, he took for his wife Jezebel the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and went and served Baal and worshiped him” (1 Kings 16:31). He first mocked God by marrying an idolator, and then — as God warned would happen — he caved and bowed in submission to her and her god.
The facets of Ahab’s wickedness are worthy of much reflection, but here I want to focus on a scene that exposes the allure and peril of his passivity.
Seduction of Self-Pity
When 1 Kings 21 opens, Ahab covets the vineyard of his neighbor, Naboth, and asks to buy it from him — disregarding God’s law that prevented the permanent sale of land (Leviticus 25:23). Naboth doesn’t merely refuse because he wants to keep his land; he refuses because to do otherwise would be to disregard God. Now watch how Ahab responds, crumbling into self-pity and passivity:
Ahab went into his house vexed and sullen because of what Naboth the Jezreelite had said to him, for he had said, “I will not give you the inheritance of my fathers.” And he lay down on his bed and turned away his face and would eat no food. (1 Kings 21:4)
Read More

With this in mind, it’s hard to believe the numbers are exaggerated. In fact, the situation could be much more dire.
The question Evangelicals must answer is this, “Can Christians continue to support Israel’s wholesale slaughter of civilians without losing their soul?” The question should be answered with all haste because a genocide is taking place right before our evangelical eyes. Evangelicals need to come to terms with the reality that the modern nation state of Israel in not biblical Israel. Zionist Israel is a secular political entity unrelated to biblical Judaism.

The October 7 attack on Israel was brutal, barbaric, and criminal. On that tragic day, world opinion was squarely behind Israel. That Israel had the right to defend itself after Hamas’s appalling attack was scarcely challenged by anyone. However, it has become increasingly difficult to characterize Israel’s actions since October 7 as self-defense. Over 13,300 civilians have been killed. And alarmingly, 5,600 of those fatalities are children, 3,550 are women, with another 6,000 people listed as missing.
Some Christians want to argue that you can’t trust these figures since they come from the Hamas Ministry of Health. However, by Israel’s own admission they’ve dropped almost 30,000 tons of bombs on Gaza which is one of the most densely populated urban areas on earth.  That’s equivalent to two atomic bombs the size of the one dropped on Hiroshima.
Dr Ahmed Sabra, A British cardiologist stuck in Gaza right now while waiting to exit via the Rafah border crossing said in an interview with The Gaurdian, “How can anyone be so heartless as to say the number dead is not accurate. I think the number is understated.” Dr. Sabra, is not alone in his assessment. Many humanitarian workers are making the same claim.
With this in mind, it’s hard to believe the numbers are exaggerated. In fact, the situation could be much more dire.
The question Evangelicals must answer is this, “Can Christians continue to support Israel’s wholesale slaughter of civilians without losing their soul?” The question should be answered with all haste because a genocide is taking place right before our evangelical eyes.
Evangelicals need to come to terms with the reality that the modern nation state of Israel in not biblical Israel. Zionist Israel is a secular political entity unrelated to biblical Judaism.
Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, was a 19th century Jew of Eastern European descent who was fully entrenched in the rationalistic philosophy of the Enlightenment.  While political Zionists often cloak their nationalistic ideas in religious and biblical language, their own writings demonstrate that they were uninterested in the religious aspects of Judaism. Herzl, along with the other early Zionists who helped to found the nation of Israel, were wholly committed to political Zionism over against Judaism.
As James Gelvin observes, in the minds of the Zionists, one of the greatest achievements of the Enlightenment was that it freed Judaism from the grip of rabbinic dominance. So, Zionism was not primarily a form of religious nationalism. Rather, it was part and parcel of the secular nationalistic fervor that was sweeping across the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Those who think of Zionism as primarily a religious movement in which the Jews believed it was their right and duty to return to their biblical lands are misinformed. In actuality, the early Zionists considered many places in addition to Palestine to form their new homeland including: Argentina, Uganda, and the Mid-Western United States.
Palestine, was not chosen because the Zionists believed that Jews had a biblical right to resettle the land. Rather, it was chosen because the Jewish history in the land would make it easier to recruit other Jews to the Zionist cause. Recruitment was the most formidable challenge that early Zionists had to confront. And that challenge was substantial.
The Ashkenazi (European) Jews had to resort to deception and violence to convince the Sephardi Jews from Spain and Portugal, and Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East and North Africa to immigrate to Palestine. They used bribery, forgery of documents, and even terrorism to accomplish their ends.
Most of these Jews actually desired to stay in their own countries rather than immigrate to Palestine. However, the Zionists put tremendous political pressure on them to immigrate even using the Israeli Underground to destabilize their communities, and create a climate of fear in their own countries. The Zionists did this knowing that many of these Jews would ultimately lose all their wealth, and all of their assets once they immigrated.
These tactics were deemed necessary by the Zionists so they could establish a critical population mass in Palestine in order for the project to succeed. However, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews were severely discriminated against by the supremacist European Ashkenazi Jews. Even to this day Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews are treated as second and third class citizens in Israel. As a result, they are also more likely to identify and sympathize with the Palestinian people.
It should be obvious that, on the whole, most Jews at that time were not at all persuaded of the necessity of a Jewish state, and many ardently opposed the Zionist project.
In fact, in the early days of Zionism, a group of Rabbis in Munich rejected the idea of a Jewish state altogether on biblical and religious grounds stating that, “The efforts of the so-called Zionists to create a Jewish National State in Palestine are antagonistic to the messianic promises of Judaism as contained in Holy Writ and in later religious sources. Judaism obliges its followers to serve the country to which they belong with the utmost devotion, and to further its interest with their whole heart and all their strength.” Similar statements were made by many Orthodox Jews from all around the world. Indeed, this was the sentiment, not only of Orthodox Jews, but of most Jews at that time.
While not widely reported, Orthodox or Torah Jews still oppose Zionism and call for the peaceful dismantling of the state of Israel. So, it’s important to realize that Zionism, as originally conceived, and as currently practiced, is not primarily a religious project, but a secular nationalistic program. Moreover, it is a militant project.
During the 1930s and 1940s Zionists had three “Hamas-type” terrorists groups: the Haganah group, Irun, and the Lehi group (also known as the Stern gang). These groups committed serial acts of terrorism against the British occupiers, and the indigenous Arab population. They razed villages, bombed markets, hotels, and government buildings killing innocent civilians.
Immediately after receiving its legitimacy from the United Nations in 1947, and after declaring its independence in 1948, Zionist Israel forcibly removed 750,000 indigenous people from their homes and lands. This event is called the Nakba or catastrophe in Arabic.
Forget, for a moment, whether these people are Palestinians or Arabs. We don’t have to go back to biblical times to judge who originally dwelt in this land to determine who has a legitimate right to it by way of inheritance. The people that lived there prior to 1948 were the legal residents of the land under both the Ottoman Empire, and British Mandate Palestine, and they had been the legal residents of that land for multiple generations.
With this in mind, you don’t have to be a biblical or legal scholar to understand that a great injustice occurred in 1948 against the people of Palestine. This process was again repeated in 1967 when 350,000 people were forcibly removed from their homes and land. It seems that nearly every decade since 1948 has had its own Nakba for the Palestinian people, and today 2.5 million Palestinians are confined in an open air prison called the Gaza Strip. Only now, Israel is turning Gaza into a “death camp.”
It’s easy, if not lazy, to accept the official Israeli narrative which says that because Hamas has governed Gaza since 2005 then all Palestinians are responsible for the events on October 7. But upon further inspection, this line of reasoning simply doesn’t add up.
Hamas does not control the ports, the airspace, the fishing rights off the coast, the imports and exports, permitting, small business applications, the influx of food and potable water, the utilities, the boarders, or the checkpoints in Gaza. Israel controls all of these things. Indeed, Israel even controls the collection of rain water in many rural Palestinian territories. So, Hamas cannot be said to govern Gaza in any meaningful way? Gaza, and the Westbank for that matter, are in reality governed by Israel.
Moreover, the civilians in these territories are not only governed by Israel, they are being destroyed by Israel, and Evangelicals in America should be mindful that Christians are dying in Palestine, too.
So, to paraphrase Jesus, “For what shall it profit Evangelicals, if they shall gain the whole of Israel, and lose their own souls?
Jim Fitzgerald is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and a missionary in the Middle East and North Africa. His articles have appeared in American Greatness, American Thinker, Antiwar.com, and The Aquila Report.

Related Posts: