I appreciate the people who follow my musings!

This thought came from the following verse: And there they left their images, and David and his men burned them. (2 Sam 5:21)

(Feel free to read vv 17-21 to get the context; essentially, David and his men, following God’s directions, beat the Philistines, and found the ‘images’ (gods) left behind by the Philistines and burned them.

As a side note, I’m glad that I don’t have a God made by my hands that can be left behind. The God of the Bible is great and mighty.

I was fascinated by this idea of David and his men burning the images… because these images were some of the gods of the Philistines, they probably used very good materials and spent time and effort making these images. David and his men could have kept the images and sold them back to the Philistines, or possibly taken out any precious metals or jewels to use for another purpose. It would have been pretty easy to rationalize keeping them.

It makes me think of another instance in Acts 19 in which the people who had turned to God brought their books of spells and other such things, and burned them. You

I wonder how this would work today – would we have the courage to burn such valuable (albeit wicked) things? Or would be put them up for sale on eBay because “hey, we could use the money to help God’s work”. I doubt if any of us have things as valuable as the books that the people burned – 50,000 pieces of silver is a huge sum of money.

Just a thought.