1 Kings 20:28 “And there came a man of God, and spake unto the king of Israel, and said, Thus saith the LORD, Because the Syrians have said, The LORD is God of the hills, but he is not God of the valleys, therefore will I deliver all this great multitude into thine hand, and ye shall know that I am the LORD.”

God is not just God in the hills, but also in the valleys of our life.

… In 1 Kings 20, Israel is at war! The Syrians are trying to wipe them out (again!)… and they tried once earlier this chapter already… but lost… because God supernaturally delivered Israel.

If you’re saved, you’re going to require supernatural deliverances in your life time and again, because we are not sufficient for this Christian journey of life at all apart from the grace of God.

“Who delivered us from so great a death, and doth deliver: in whom we trust that he will yet deliver us;”

We are never not going to need God’s grace, and by the time we leave this world (but probably already!), we all as Christians truly realize that it’s only God’s faithfulness to his promises and his divine power that causes us to triumph in the end.

In this chapter, God is so good to Israel when they do not even deserve it, and he’s shown immense grace and mercy to them in delivering them once again from their cruel enemy.

And God’s longsuffering and grace should make us turn back to him, but it never really did for Israel.

Nevertheless, God caused Israel to thoroughly defeat the Syrians the first time… but it wasn’t over, because God told the king of Israel that they would come back!

… like the Syrians in the story, our enemies do not give up so easily!
Big lesson here for every child of God! …Satan, this world, and your weak flesh won’t stop at the first time… the battle is going to be on all the way to heaven.

And you may be riding high in life, you may be in the “hills” at the moment or time past, and you got the victory that time, in that place of your life… and maybe didn’t even deserve it yet God was good.
God is good time and time again.

… but the valley is coming! And we all go through low points in our life, it is inevitable, and will he be as much God in our valley as he was up in the higher places of life?

Satan does not fight fair, and he will go after you when you are down, when you are vulnerable, when you haven’t been in a good place, or are not in a good place in life.

But take courage Christian! In Genesis 28:15, God made a promise to Jacob to be with him in “all places”… and he was. And he will be for you too if you are his child.

And although we truly would all love a Christianity where everything is always going well in our life, where we don’t really need God… yet God is going to let us spend time in “the valley of the shadow of death”… because it’s in the valleys where we learn to trust and depend on him alone, where he makes his biggest necessary changes to our life, and where we do the most growing, and he gets the most glory!

Even looking back at my own life, although the high times were awesome, it’s the valley experiences that have proved the most precious.

Yes, it can seem like God has gone missing, abandoned us, forgotten us… or just dunno where on earth he was for days, weeks, months… years…. but he was and is there all along.

… and so the Syrians figured wrong. Because God is just as much God in the valleys as he is in the hills “and ye shall know that I am the LORD”.

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