Daniel had been rescued and in this moment we have to stop and ask ourselves a question. What was it about God that Daniel thought praying to God was worth dying for?

Isaiah finds himself in the presence of a Holy God who not only fills the temple, but also fills the world. Isaiah is filled with fear because he knows he's in the presence of God who shakes the foundations of the earth with his holiness and at this point Isaiah believes he's about to die before God.

The story of Jonah is often told as a kids story, a story about a man who ran from God, only to be swallowed by a whale for his disobedience. But the story of Jonah isn't a kids story. It's a dark story, a story that eats human understandings of compassion and just how far God is willing to go in order to forgive.

And it was so. The widow, one who at least one point in life been a Baal worshipper, believed the word that God had given Elijah. She didn't run out of oil. She didn't run out of flour. And most importantly, she didn't run out of hope.

God doesn't need a house to live in. God doesn't need a box to be put into. God has been with the people every step of the way and he tells Nathan to tell David, did I ever tell you that I needed a house, or a palace, or a temple to live in? No. God wasn't interested in David building him a house because instead, God was going to build David an everlasting house.

Hannah is aching from the inside but from her grief and pain, calls on God for deliverance from her struggle, deliverance from barrenness.

Moses says no to God when God offers to make him into a new Abraham and instead chooses to stand in the breach between the Hebrew people and God.

And this Pharaoh, hell-bent on power, finally lets God's people go. His hunger for power had cost him everything, including his own son. The Hebrew people had finally been set free from 430 years of slavery, from 430 years of death and destruction and pain and life being stolen from them.

It had been almost 40 years since Joseph was sold into slavery by his own brothers, his own flesh and blood. His father Jacob was now dead, a father who loved him dearly in his early years.

It had been ten years since God first promised Abram that he would become a nation that would exist to bless other nations and a lot can happen in ten years.