Loading...
Search, filter, and discover the perfect illustration for your sermon
Free to browse · Sign up free to unlock most illustrations · Premium ($9.95/mo) for the full library of 50,000+ illustrations
The Greek *ochlos* (ὄχλος), meaning "great multitude," designates not merely a numerical crowd but those without wealth, power, exalted rank, or intellectual refinement.
She was nourished upon the Mosaic Law, moving through a world thick with heathen cruelties and mysterious divine terrors.
Efforts to do good are misunderstood and ill-requited; benevolent plans are ridiculed, motives misrepresented, kindness abused, and hopes of success treated as visionary.
The disciples faced extraordinary demands: sacrifice of domestic ties, loss of property, surrender of their livelihood, and certainty of ridicule and persecution.
When you sit before your meal, you behold a creature that once swam freely in waters or soared through heavens—now placed there by your authority.
The inner life must be sustained by God alone.
This is not mere sentiment but theological necessity.
The question naturally arises: Is not the Christian character a provident one?
Jehovah could have crushed all Canaanites in one decisive blow, yet He withheld this miracle for spiritual pedagogy.
The Church Fathers offered profound interpretations of this triple declaration.
The prophet's promise reaches its climax precisely where the people need it most: not in the initial rush of joy and anticipation, when they rose "on the wings of an eagle," but in the exhausting, monotonous tramp of the actual...
Yet this passage speaks equally to the individual believer's threefold experience.
"He will swallow up death in victory"—a promise echoed throughout Scripture.
The perverse actively attempt to seduce the righteous from their path—a reality that reveals moral agency itself.
First, there is fatty degeneration of the heart—a spiritual ailment where the soul grows thick and sluggish, insensitive to divine truth.
This separation reveals three profound truths about Yahweh's sovereignty.
The guilt of forsaking God rests upon a fundamental truth: man is bound by the law of his nature to obey the Almighty Being who made him an intelligent and immortal creature.
Blake notes this luminous title describes God Himself, not merely His attributes.
For He must reign till He hath put all enemies under His feet.—The reign of Christ establishes this world as His battlefield now; when this conflict ends, His reign concludes also. "He shall reign till," and no longer. Who are...
The prophet employs striking, elevated language to convey God's gracious thoughts toward His erring but repentant people.
Joseph Exell's 1887 *Biblical Illustrator* frames this eschatological promise through three movements.
This admonition addressed the spiritual lethargy of post-exilic Judah and remains urgently applicable to baptized Christians today.
Why tarry the wheels of his chariots?" (Judges 5:28).
The kingdom lay low, fractured by foreign invasions and internal division, yet the surrounding nations—particularly the Philistines—watched with both enmity and fear.