Apocryphal Scripture of the Week: (see Doctrine and Covenants 91)
“Let us get up now and fight for our lives, for today is not like yesterday or the day before,
For here is the battle in front of us and behind us, and on one side the water of the Jordan, and on the other marsh and thicket, and there is no room to retreat.
So now, cry out to heaven that you may be delivered from the hands of our enemies.”
(1 Maccabees 9:44-46)
***
So the books of Maccabees basically fill in a gap of Jewish history not covered in the canonical Bible. Between 200 and 100 BC, Alexander the Great’s Greek empire has been divided and as usual, Jerusalem is caught between the tensions of its neighboring nations vying for military control or allegiance with the Jews. Often this included attacks on their religious traditions and pressure to Hellenize their culture.
A family of priests called the Maccabees rebels against these attacks–often violently. One by one, the father, Mattathias, and his sons are killed in the struggles against outward forces, making them martyrs and heroes in the eyes of the Jewish people.
While the exact morality of these conflicts is sometimes debatable (Old Testament ethics and all that), I’ve noticed the occasional high point in how the Jews at this time appealed to God for aid against their oppressors. In this passage I shared, Jonathan, one of the Maccabean princes, is caught in a tough military pinch against a Greek army. After Jonathan’s appeal to his men and to God, they successfully defend themselves against their enemies and live to fight another day.
What stands out to me in Jonathan’s speech is his confident sense of “present-ness.” Though I’m not personally trapped against a river by an enemy army, I feel like I can benefit from his simple reminder: “Today is not like yesterday or the day before, for here is the battle in front of us.”
It can be easy to get absorbed in the past, by events you can’t control or even decisions you can’t change anymore. But the only real way forward is to leave the past behind and focus on what we can do NOW. There are real needs to be met, real problems to be solved, real progress to be made in our lives that can pass us by if we’re not deliberate about how we use our time.
And our confidence in acting now can’t just come from our own abilities, because the reality is we are SO imperfect—and even if we were perfect, there’s only so much we can do to control our circumstances. No, our confidence and trust has to be in God—in trusting that as we seek his help, he will give us the strength to do what needs to be done and to weather whatever harrowing failures we might experience along the way.
If we give our full attention to being the friend, family member, leader, and example that the people in our lives need us to be, then I have no doubt that heaven will deliver us from whatever enemies of distraction, or discouragement, or destructive thoughts we might face.
The Commonplace Notebook 