Plucking the Eagle's Wings

Plucking the Eagle's Wings

Israel when David was king, and he sought the Lord to understand what had caused the curse. The Lord answered him and said, "It is for Saul, and for his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites" (2 Samuel 21:1). Before David, King Saul was responsible for killing a group of innocent people from the area of Gibeon. The famine that David witnessed resulted from the Gibeonite's bloodshed. Few people understand God's teachings concerning blood. Scripture says, "The life of the flesh is in the blood" (Leviticus 17:11). The Hebrew word life comes from nephesh, which means soul . We could say, "The life-giving force of the body is found in the blood." When an innocent person's blood is shed, Scripture teaches that it literally has a voice that cries out to the Lord. When Cain murdered his brother Abel, the Lord asked Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" Cain replied, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Then God replied, "The voice of your brother's blood cries to me from the ground" (Genesis 4:9-10). In Hebrew, the word blood in this text is plural and not singular. It reads, the "voice of thy brothers blood(s)." Rabbis teach that Cain killed not only Abel, but all of Abel's future children. This is why shedding innocent blood, whether it belongs to an infant or to a mature adult, is so terrible. The very legacy of an entire family is erased, from earth! Descendants from that lineage who will never be born could have impacted the very course of history. Since the blood type of a child comes from its father, God literally heard the secret voice hidden within Abel's DNA as it cried out from the earth. Apparently, in David's time, the blood of the Gibeonites also cried out from the earth. The Gibeonites were Amorite descendants. Israel had sworn an oath not to harm the Amorites, yet Saul broke that oath and murdered many of them. When a person shed innocent blood under the old covenant, the murderer, if proven guilty without a doubt, was sentenced to death. Since Saul was already dead, his sons received the death sentence in order to remove the curse from the land. This seems radical, but blood was offered on the altar under the old covenant to make atonement for sins (Leviticus 17:11). Breaking the Curse under the New Covenant We are now living under a new covenant that was ratified through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Scripture says,

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