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HERE LIES AMAZIAH

Cause of Death
He was captured in a battle when he led Judah against Israel, but he was allowed to live 15 more years. Then there was a conspiracy against him. He fled, but was chased down. (2 Kings 14:17-20).

Last Words
His last recorded words are a war challenge to the king of Israel: "Come, meet me face to face" (2 Kings 14:8, NIV).

Stone-Cold Fact
Between 1998-2002 crude language increased almost 95 percent in the 8 p.m. time slot on TV. Did you notice?

 
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BOOK EXCERPT

Fatal Attraction

By Lynn Lusby Pratt

CBN.comHere Lies Amaziah, son of King Joash, ninth king of Judah.

People used to be able to spell cemetery. But some time ago I began to notice the word often misspelled: cemetary, cematery ... What happened? Well, my idea is the change was due to the influence of Stephen King's Pet Sematary (the book in 1983 and the movie in 1989). We saw the title everywhere -- in bookstores, on TV ...

It's interesting that people didn't go completely with the spelling of the title. But, seeing the title so often may have caused us to incorporate it into our mental spelling files. Little by little our minds began tweaking away from the correct spelling -- one letter at a time.

We are influenced by what we see and hear. Sometimes we don't realize what we are incorporating into our mental files. There's just a little tweaking. That illustrates how Satan operates. Satan's good at tweaking.

King Amaziah didn't start out too badly. He was a pretty decent king. (His story is recorded in 2 Chronicles 25.) The zinger comes in verse 14. He and his troops clobbered the enemy, confiscated their gods and brought them back. King Amaziah set up those gods as his own and worshiped them. Surely not! He started worshiping the gods of the losers? Duh. What kind of sense does that make? It was all downhill after that.

Satan lures people in with something small at first ... small, attractive, seemingly harmless. King Amaziah just took home a few gods. No big deal. He set them up. What's the harm? Then ... oh, well, might as well try a prayer or two. Tweaking. To the next thing. And the next ...

Watch out.

Satan wants you to think it's no big deal to listen to dark music, collect occult paraphernalia, explore psychic phenomena or watch a lot of horror movies.

That's how he tweaks -- one letter at a time -- until your mental files are all messed up.

Then you're his.

Can you spell cemetery?

Can you spell gotcha?

In Memory of Amaziah
"Shall I bow down to a block of wood? ... Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?" -- Isaiah 44:19,20, NIV


Excerpted from Devotions by Dead People © 2004 by Lynn Lusby Pratt, Standard Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission.



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