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Showing posts from November, 2021

A Mighty Man (John 6)

It feels like the opening to a Marvel movie: a furious cry steadily rising as the camera pans to a single, crude and bloodied spear waving invitingly over a sizable hill of lifeless bodies - "Josheb-basshebeth a Tahchemonite... wielded his spear against eight hundred whom he killed at one time " (2 Sam. 23:8). Flanking one side, Shammah, who (as this is a classic en medias res Marvel intro,) enters a flashback, standing alone on a deserted plot of the family farm watching his family and countrymen flee for their lives, his feet, in contrast, cemented to the ground, his ground, against the onslaught of approaching Philistines, his family's oldest enemy. His  sword raises and quivers, betraying the mixture of anxiety and rage within him : "Not today--not ever" quietly reverberates from his lips as the scene returns to its beginning, those same words echoing within Josheb-basshebeth's infuriated scream. On the other side, Eleazar, accustomed to standing alone,