Mom's Old Testament Bible Stories: Heroes and Scoundrels

Mom’s Old Testament Bible Stories

HEROES AND SCOUNDRELS

Shirley Fillmore Ness

AuthorHouse™

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Bloomington, IN 47403

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Phone: 1-800-839-8640

© 2009 Shirley Fillmore Ness. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 11/17/2009

ISBN: 978-1-4490-5041-2 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-4490-5040-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4490-5039-9 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009912187

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Mom’s Old Testament Bible Stories

Heroes And Scoundrels

Genesis

Creation

Adam and Eve

Cain and Abel

Noah

Abram

Isaac

Jacob

Joseph

Reconciliation

Moses

Trials of Egypt

Desert Training

The Mountain of God

Lessons

Desert Adventures

Almost There

Joshua

Tricks

Caleb

Joshua’s Farewell

Judges

Deborah

Gideon

Jephthah

Samson

Ruth

Samuel

The Ark of God

A King–Saul

The Kingdom

David

Trouble

In Hiding

More Treachery

Death of Saul

David Made King

Guilt

Absalom

Solomon

Rehoboam

The Divided Kingdom

Elijah

Naboth’s Vineyard

Elijah’s Chariot of Fire

Elisha

Naaman

Syria

Esther

Daniel

The Fiery Furnace

Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream

Belshazzar

The Lion’s Den

Daniel’s Vision

Jonah

This book is dedicated to my four kids:

Dr. Kathy Buxie, PHD statistics

Rev. Dave Ness, Master of Divinity

Dr. Bill Ness, PHD English Literature

Julie Jamison, Master of Computers

With thanks for all the times they listened to these stories while they were drying dishes when they were young. We had a LOT of dishes.

and

to all the young people and children who will read or have these stories read to them.

Perhaps you will find a Hero to follow. I hope that you get the picture of what God did in the Old Testament trying to bring people back to himself.

It is His world. He created it. He loves it and

He loves YOU.

God Bless

Shirley Fillmore Ness

Thank you to: David for editing

Pictures are by:

Rebekah, age 10

and

Steven, age 8

Stories and quotes are from the King James and NIV Bibles.

Foreword

As a child, my mother told each of her children all of the stories of the Bible, individually, usually while she was washing dishes and we were drying them. These stories planted within each one of us a great respect and love for the Bible. Told in her own words, with great emotion, I received Mom’s Bible stories as one of the greatest gifts ever given to me. Recently, I asked her to write down some of these stories in much the same way she told them to us when we were children. If you want to read or tell these stories to your own children or grandchildren, it will be a blessing to them throughout their days. (Note: I love the way the Bible tells the whole story, not just the nice parts, but younger children may not yet be ready for all the parts of these stories. Use wisdom and just skip over any sections for which you feel they’re not ready.)

Dave Ness

Dave has been a pastor of the Church of the Nazarene for many years. He planted the church in Cordova, Alaska, and pastored in Carson, and Longview, Washington for 22 years. He resigned his church 3 years ago to start Servant Connection working with pastors all over the Kelso- Longview area in Washington. It is a nonprofit ministry devoted to the spiritual transformation of America. Dave has written a daily devotional book called Serving God, and has a web cite: PrayingforAmerica.org He, his wife, Joy, and their two children live in Longview, Washington.

Introduction

I grew up in Mitchell, South Dakota where my father was the YMCA secretary and my mother was YWCA secretary all my growing up years. At home, my mother told us Bible stories, so interestingly that I began to read the Bible for myself at an early age. I found the Old Testament stories fascinating. They explained how others had dealt, both good ways and bad, with some of the problems that I was having growing up. These are the heroes from our culture. The greatest art and music of the past is based on them. Our kids need to know about them.

My husband, Maynard, and I raised four children on our farm about 10 miles north of Fulton, SD. With 6 of us in the family, we had a lot of dirty dishes. My kids hated to dry dishes, so I started using that time to tell them Bible stories. It kept them interested and willing to help. My son later said that he never heard a Bible story in church that he hadn’t first heard at home.

I have taught Sunday School classes to children, quizzing to teens, and adult Sunday school class for 60 years. I love the Bible. It has been a joy trying to put it into language our kids will understand, empathize with, and hopefully, find a hero they can learn from and copy, as it fits their own lives.

Kids need heroes. They are finding too many of them who lead them astray. Bible heroes lead them to a life that is useful, loving, and Godly. Christian young people need to know about these Jewish Heroes who kept the faith, so that God could bring Jesus into the world. Jewish young people need to know their own history. All of us need heroes.

Mom’s Old Testament Bible Stories

Heroes And Scoundrels

A hero is someone worthy of trying to copy, someone who can do things you thought you could never do, someone who does wonderful things in life. When people have physical abilities, mental abilities, spiritual abilities above and beyond what most of us can accomplish, we tend to make them our heroes. It is good to have heroes who inspire us to be more than we thought we could ever be. We see many of them in the Bible. We are going to look at some of them in this book. I hope you enjoy seeing them as I do.

The first Hero of all in the Bible is GOD. We start out with Him because who else could ever look out on total darkness and envision a world with stars, galaxies of stars, suns, moons, and an earth with creatures on it?! And if you could imagine it, how could anyone build it? Yet, God did. He only had to speak it into existence. So who is this God with such power?

The entire Bible is trying to show us this God. In the Old Testament, He is the creator God. He does not have a body like we do. God is Spirit. God is three in One, much like we are. We have a spirit, mind and body. God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He has always been. He will always be!

God is LOVE. (I didn’t say that love is God.) God is Love! Don’t get it confused. God is Holy Love. Love that loves unconditionally, not because the loved one is worthy, but because the lover is worthy, and has ability to love so much. Love that does whatever is best for the one who is loved, even if it hurts the lover. Love, like what is described in I Corinthians 13.

Who could build a universe, lose it to the enemy He had created, and find a way to win it back that cost Him his own human life? But God did! All other religions have a god who must be found and appeased. Our God is the only one who came to His creation in love and saved it.

WHAT A HERO!!

Genesis

Creation

In the beginning, God. God was always there. Before anything else, there was God. He will always be.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. We didn’t create Him. He created our world, our universe, all the animals—us.

We don’t know when it all began, but one day, God looked out and decided to make something. Everywhere He looked there was deep, dark space, darkness, water everywhere.

God said, Let there be light, and there was light. Everywhere God is, there is light, so when God gave it His attention, there was light.

God was just getting started. He made a firmament—the sky with all its stars and galaxies; dividing the waters; creating the earth; dividing the water on the earth; and calling up the dry land.

God knew that the things He would be creating would need food, so He made grass to grow, trees to produce fruit, each with its seed in itself so it could produce more trees; and grass.

On the fourth day, God created the sun, moon and stars, the seasons, day and night. God said that it was good.

Now everything was in place to create animals, so He started in the ocean, creating fish, whales, etc., then moved to dry land and created cattle, creeping things, birds and every beast of the earth. Not all the varieties that we have today, but original ones of each kind. God looked at it and said that it was good.

God had one main idea: to make a man who would talk with Him, walk with Him, depend on Him, be His friend, and love and serve Him. So, on the sixth day, God formed a man in His own image—a spirit and mind, in a body made of dirt.

Now, we know that God is Spirit. He doesn’t have a body, but He gave man a body to live in while he is on earth. He formed man out of the dust of the earth. Then He breathed into man’s nostrils the Breath of Life, and man became a living soul! God looked at all He had created and said that it was very good!

God was satisfied with his creation. It had taken Him six days to do it. But we know that the Bible says that a thousand years is like a day to God, so we really have no idea how long it took. God rested on the seventh day from His labor, and told man to rest on the seventh day, too. God wasn’t tired, but He knew that man needed that day of rest.

God’s universe is mathematically correct in every way, and everything works together in harmony. Every body has its own special system and reproductive way so the entire universe will continue as God planned it, unless something messes it up.

God’s creative genius shows in all the systems, in everything: birds fly, trees produce fruit, fish have gills and swim, people walk on the earth and take care of everything in it, just like God told them to. We have a job.

A scoundrel is a mean, worthless, uncaring person. We are talking about heroes. Adam and Eve weren’t heroes; neither were they scoundrels, but you can’t understand the rest of the Bible unless you know about Adam and Eve, so here is their story.

Adam and Eve

God planted a garden eastward in Eden. There He put the man that He had created. He named him Adam. God told Adam that he could eat of every tree in the garden, but he was not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the middle of the garden, because if he did, he would die.

God brought all the animals to Adam and told him to name them, so Adam named all the animals. We don’t know how long Adam and God walked together, but we know that in the cool of the evening, God came down and visited Adam.

Adam noticed that each one of the animals had a mate. There was a male and a female of every kind, but there was no one for Adam.

God said, It is not good for the man to be alone. He put Adam into a deep sleep, and took out one of his ribs. Around that rib, He formed a woman, and when He woke Adam up, He presented him with his helper, this beautiful woman.

Adam called her woman because she was taken out of man—not out of his head to rule over him, or out of his feet so he could walk on her, but out of his side to be his companion and helper. He named her Eve.

Woman came from man, and ever after, man came from woman, so God had made a loving circle of humanity, each depending on the other.

Adam was so excited to have Eve. He adored her! With Eve there, it didn’t seem so long from evening to evening when God came down to talk to them.

But one day as they were walking in the garden, a serpent came up to them and began to talk to Eve. He said, Did God say that you can’t eat everything in the garden?

Eve answered, We can eat of every tree in the garden, but not of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden. God said, Don’t even touch it, or you will die!" (Adam had probably added that part about not even touching it, to keep her away from it.)

The serpent answered, Oh, you won’t die. God knows that you will be like gods. You will know good and evil. (He tried to make God out to be a liar).

Eve was very naive and listened to the serpent. She touched the fruit, took a bite and saw that it tasted good. As she was eating it, she gave some to Adam, who was standing there with her, and he ate it, too.

Now, here was Adam’s chance to be a hero, but he blew it. Adam knew what God had said. He wasn’t tempted by the serpent, but he didn’t want to make Eve mad at him, so he just let her do what she was tempted to do, and went along with it. He put Eve’s wishes before God’s commands, and fell into disobedience right along with her. If he had led her away or said something to her, perhaps she would not have led them both into sin, but he wimped out.

As soon as they had disobeyed, they looked at each other and realized that they were both naked. Their robes of righteousness had burned up with their disobedience. They scurried around and made themselves some slapped together clothes out of leaves.

That night, when God came down to talk with them, they hid. God knew what they had done and where they were, but He called to them, anyway: Adam, where are you?

Adam and Eve came out and God asked them why they were hiding. They answered that they were naked, so they hid.

God said, Did you eat of the tree of which I told you not to eat?

Adam said, That woman, YOU gave me, gave me of the tree, and I ate.

Eve said, The serpent tempted me, and I ate. Each was blaming someone else. Not me! Not me!!

God told the serpent, "Since you let Satan use you, you will have to crawl on the ground on your stomach all your life from now on. You and the woman and her children will be enemies. You will try to bite them. BUT ONE OF THEM WILL STEP ON YOU AND CRUSH YOU! He was speaking to Satan. This is the first promise from God that He had a way out for them, a way they could come back after their disobedience–a Savior.

To Eve, He said, Childbirth will be more difficult for you. You were equal here, but now your husband will rule over you. (This was not a curse; it was just a result of bringing sin into the world.) To Adam, He said, Because you listened to your wife instead of me, the ground is cursed to you. It will no longer give up its fruit easily.Thorns and thistles will grow. You will work hard to feed yourself and your family, all your life, until you die and your body returns to the dust of the ground from which you were taken. (Notice, they were not cursed, only the ground was cursed, but they had let sin into the world. Now they had to live with it.)

God made coats of skin and dressed them. Then He sent them out of the garden to fend for themselves,