Third Banner

The third BAD, is the Banner Accompanying Dejection.

The children of God have been told by God that they will have to attack and defend themselves from enemies who will come against them. God has given them the assurance that if they abide by His rules, if they follow only Him, they will be able to subdue their enemies. The Psalmist reminds us of God’s open promise to His children. If my people would only listen to me, if Israel would only follow my ways, how quickly I would subdue their enemies and turn my hand against their foes. Psalm 81: 13 – 14.

One of the things we must never forget is that God has never hidden His children away from the world. Just as your parents were not ashamed in public to own you as their child, just as they have never ever, under any circumstances, told anyone who asked, that you were not their child, so too with Father God. God called the Hebrew people His children and He was proud to do so. He wanted the whole world to know His children and never told a single person that they were not His, even when they were stubbornly idolatrous and adulterous.

Though the children of God are under the banners showing a people Defeated and Depleted by their enemy, they are still God’s children. The banners are being raised, fast and furious, all to the pulling down of God’s children. They are all a people most confused, devastated and dejected.

When the depleted, limping, bloodstained, bruised and completely battered army return to camp, what can the elders say to them? What words of encouragement and comfort have they for themselves and these defeated soldiers, with zero morale? This is what they say. When the soldiers returned to camp, the elders of Israel asked, Why did the Lord bring defeat upon us today before the Philistines? Let us bring the ark of the LORD’s covenant from Shiloh, so that it may go with us and save us from the hand of the enemies. 1 Samuel 4: 3. The Ark is as their power source, their mighty power pack, which, once it is physically with them on the battlefield, will be their saving grace and power.

A Banner Accompanying Dejection has been stretched out before us. What is your response? What words of reality has the Holy Spirit pained you with? Whatever they are, surely, He has implanted upon your heart and mind that reality of who God is – a God who does not uphold rebelliousness. God is Just and only He will be right in His judgments. To stand under the banner of God’s Reality, yet live as though God’s Reality depends on you, is most absurd and foolish. God is Reality and He cannot but be right in all His ways.

Today, the banner says: We, the children of God, are a Dejected people.