Theological Commentary: Click Here
Discipleship Focus: Ambition
- Ambition: We all need a goal to which we can strive. When our ambition comes from God, we find fulfillment in our obedience into that for which we have been equipped because our Out is in proper focus. But when our ambition comes from ourselves, we find ourselves chasing after our own dreams and trying to find fulfillment in accomplishments of our own making.
This is a
great chapter to bring the points that I’ve been making over the last few days
to life. One of the greatest struggles
in reading about the Hebrew captivity is to remember that this happened at the
request of the Lord. The Rabshakeh says
as much in this passage. He fully
confesses that Assyria has come out because the Lord beckoned them to come. It’s so hard to remember that such a painful
event actually happened because the Lord desired it to happen.
However,
it is also such a good chapter to realize that just because the Lord brought
forth the Assyrians that doesn’t mean that the Assyrians are behaving as God
desires them to behave. The Assyrians
are challenging God’s people too much.
They are overstretching their purpose and their strength. They may have been called to threaten the
Hebrew people, but they have not been called to actually take and conquer
Jerusalem. The Assyrians had been
called, but their ambition has grown too great.
We can
hear this is the words of the Rabshakeh as well. Do you hear the arrogance from the
Rabshakeh? They want to dominate the
world. They want to take not what they’ve
been called to take but rather they want to take everything. They are over-confident. That’s their ambition growing. When we start listening to our ambition we
start reaching for things in ways that we should not reach. Our ambition grows and our desire to humbly
obey God diminishes.
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