Written Word

My Unusual Journal 65

My Unusual Journal 65

Wednesday, February 29, 2012, 6:28 PM

What Does a Leap Year Mean to You?

So today is February 29… Just what does the date mean to the individual? Has God somehow –miraculously maybe – inserted an extra 24 hours into the individual’s brief lifespan? Are those whose birth date is on the 29^th day of February specially blest in that they age only one year in four while we average shmucks are in a relative sprint toward our demise? No, none of the above.

To be very practical about it, the leap year with its extra day on February 29 is of little significance to the average person or to the leap year phenom who arrived here at this planetary way station on the 29^th of February. No matter how men add to or subtract from the calendar, they can neither lengthen nor shorten their allotted days in this life.

As a symbol however it is a useful reminder of that very fact: No matter how men add to or subtract from the calendar (or whatever other mental and mathematical gyrations they go through), they can neither lengthen nor shorten their allotted days in this life. God has assigned to each person their number of days and years – and even seconds and nanoseconds – that neither a healthy lifestyle nor one of debauchery can alter.

For instance, God, who has known from forever what we would do and when and how we would do it, has even foreseen that a man named Joe Thurston would commit suicide at 25 years of age, thus apparently shortening his lifespan considerably. We mortals cite this as some kind of proof that God cannot know how long we will live nor can He know any matters depending on man’s will, which will is capricious and unpredictable.

But God does know and God does foresee all things that happen in His universe. Why do you think that some persons, who had every intention of ending their own life, have been saved at the last second from doing what they firmly meant to do? They could not die because they had not used up their allotted days. It is clear: The will of man and the evil designs of demons cannot thwart the divine will.

In some cases God in mercy seems to spare a sinner’s life so that the sinner can get right with God. But God deals with the sinners of today as He dealt with the obstinate people in the days of the Israelites of old. God remonstrated with them, pled with them and begged them to change their ways so He could bless them. Did their constant backsliding throw a time warp into the machinery of God?

I have said it more than a time or two and I will repeat it here: God’s will is irreversible and He does not “change His mind” for man or devil. What He did when He endured the spiritual prostitution of the Israelites of old and the overflowing sinfulness of today’s generations is what He always knew He would do. He knew He would in mercy plead with men and women so urgently that they would misconstrue mercy for weakness; but His gracious nature will not permit Him summarily to consign sinners to hell after He has been rebuffed by them ten times or a hundred times – grace is limitless.

But while grace is in a sense limitless, it really does finally end in a major and tragic disaster of all time for the sinner when he is cast into hell. Meanwhile grace continues to flow freely for those who trust in the same grace. And, like the source from which it sprang (love), grace will continue to be limitless for those who have come under its comforting flow.

Now that you, whoever you may be, know that God’s piteous pleas for you to come to Him do not derive from weakness or a need for you – He will forever be God with or without you – run quickly to the Savior. If you could see a display of how fast and furious the seconds and milliseconds are racing to the end of your allotted time, you would not hesitate another one of those fleeting seconds; you in turn would be running to the side of the Savior.

My Unusual Journal 64

 

My Unusual Journal 64

Tuesday, February 28, 2012, 3:23 PM

Note: My writing career is marked by struggle. I am forever struggling to convey to my readers what God gives to me. Not that everything I say is that esoteric or “deep”; it is just that I am looking at the Word of God as oftentimes being relatively simple whereas we try to give it more so-called depth so that we can appear to be persons of profound knowledge and wisdom.

In this, post 64 of My Unusual Journal, I have looked at a previous post (#45) in this series and felt it did not fully express what I was trying to say on the matter of True Eternal Security. Therefore I have rewritten it and added to it in an effort to do what God wants me to do: Write the vision [message] and make it plain… so that he may run that readeth it [and proclaim what he has read].”

Please stay with me on this. Don’t reject what I am saying if it seems to veer away from what you believe. Hear me out.

What Is True Eternal Security? (Revised)

We were tainted with sin before we were born. For one of many confirmations of this statement, read Psa 51:5 (NIV): "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me."

As a part of Adam we became sinful with him. Consequently, it would seem that, if we can inherit sin, we can also inherit the righteousness of our forbears, but not so. When Adam was made righteous by the sacrifice of an animal (Gen. 3.21), we did not become righteous with him. Righteousness cannot be inherited. Sin can. A clean vessel can be made unclean by an unclean object's touching it. An unclean vessel cannot be made clean by touching a clean object.

This evokes the illustration that Haggai used in demonstrating how easily a person might be defiled. "If one carries holy flesh in the skirt of his garment," he asked the priests who were experts in the law, "and touches with his skirt bread, or pottage, or wine...or any kind of food, does it [that which he touches] become holy?"

The priests answered, "No."

Haggai then asked them, "If one who is unclean by contact with a dead body touches any of these [the pottage, wine or food], does it become unclean?"

"Yes," they responded. Haggai had made his point. It is easy for a person to become defiled, but he has to make a deliberate effort to cleanse himself. This was true in the day of the Old Covenant and it is true now in this era of the New. But to become sanctified or holy requires contact with the Source of holiness.

A case in point is Jesus’ touching a leper and making him clean. (Mat. 8.1-3) The leper had come into contact with the Source. But we cannot surmise that, because Jesus was God, He did not ever become ceremonially defiled in His life prior to his officially entering into His ministry. Becoming unclean was an involuntary way of life with the Israelite just as becoming physically dirty is an involuntary way of life with any person, Jew or Gentile. Like any other man, Jesus had to wash away physical uncleanness as the occasion demanded. Like any other Jew, He had to go through the ceremonial ritual of cleansing Himself as the occasion demanded.

But on this occasion Jesus could not in any way be defiled by this symbol of sin. It would appear that ceremonial uncleanness was a symbolic matter that Jesus had endured previous to His public ministry for the sake of being human and being a Jew. I assume that during Jesus' life, prior to His full entry into His life's work, He would avoid contact with any unclean thing, including a leper. That was required of the ordinary Jew. But after His baptism and public approval by the Father, it is difficult to imagine His avoiding a leper, the symbol of sinners in general.

Jesus came with the express purpose of healing the sinner, and in so doing He would not shun the doubly cursed leprous sinner. It could in no way besmirch His righteous Self. Further, in this instance we see that Jesus in His divinity could not be considered even ceremonially unclean. On the contrary, He can transfer His wholeness to all who want it. Instead of His receiving uncleanness from the leprous (sinful) man, Jesus imparted His own sinless nature to him. He touched this doomed outcast of society and made him whole and completely sin‑free!

We today are living in the midst of sin. It is all around us and we may occasionally come into contact with an unclean object. It would defile us, so we continually come to our only Source of holiness that He may impart His righteous nature to us. The following Scriptures wrap it up:

"… Jesus, who went before us [into heaven], has entered on our behalf. He has become a high priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek." (Heb 6:20 NIV)

            Continue the same thought in Heb 7:23-25 (NIV):

"Now there have been many…priests, since death prevented them from continuing in office; {24} but because Jesus lives forever, he has a permanent priesthood. {25} Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them."

We do not jump in and out of the body of Christ. No sin, if we do not continue in it, will send us hurtling to hell. Christ did not die that we should live in terror of every unwitting misstep we might make. He died to give us life and peace and security. We have that life and peace and security in Him if we do not abuse this grace. To take proper advantage of this wondrous grace when we sin, we must acknowledge our sin, turn from it and trust in His unfailing grace. Christ is our eternal security if we maintain our faith in Him.

“Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ…”  (Php 1:6 KJV)

 

It is not possible for any outside force to condemn you to hell. "Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world." (1 John 4.4) Believers are like a tenant that has a lease that cannot be broken by any force of darkness. Even if he or she should do something that is contrary to the terms of the lease, they are not thrown immediately into the street, suddenly homeless and shelterless. They are advised by the Lessor (God) of their violation and allowed to continue their residency under the original terms of the lease.

            God is by no means seeking for a reason to evict us from our place in Christ. It is not consistent with sound logic that God, in the person of Jesus Christ, would suffer such pain and horror of soul for us and then quickly leave us to our sinful selves at every sinful crook of our finger. Remember this: none of us fully knows what Jesus experienced during His hour of Passion; we have not yet plumbed in our minds the extreme suffering He endured for us and we have not yet mentally grasped the unfathomable depths of God’s love for all mankind, saved and unsaved.

The following are traits we so greatly need: 1) If we would only show Him at least a little LOVE (yes, it may be relatively pitiful and weak, but our trust is in HIS righteousness, not ours) as He has shown His love for us, 2) refuse to buckle under the severest of tests and trials, 3) continue to trust in God’s love and power, even when we have failed in this way or that so horribly, 4) we should never give up on God or on our own selves trusting in God.

If we do these minimal things required of us, He will never, never forsake us. As a matter of fact all these requirements can be summed up in this: All He asks of us is that we believe in Him despite the odds that are high against our enduring to the end. If we trust God, He alone will take care of our eternal security.

Forget your shortcomings and sins; deliberately ignore your own intrinsic worthlessness – trust and keep on trusting in the only Person who can never fail. That is all anyone of us can do. That, my friend, is true Eternal Security. True Eternal Security does not encourage you to sin; it is merely there to help you when and if (scratch that: you will sin in some way) you do sin.

True Eternal Security does not falsely assure you that it is completely impossible for you to be lost; it simply says that God will do all He can short of compelling you to have faith in Him. If you persistently, consistently and obstinately refuse to be corrected by God, at long last He will have to let you go. But He is not considering that awful contingency now. God’s best efforts are now directed solely toward taking you to heaven. Work with Him.

God Has Foreseen Our Sins after Grace and Cleansed Them

No one can commit a sin that God did not see before the one who sinned committed it. Would it not stand to reason, then, that the blood of Christ, which flows forever to cleanse sins that are presently uncommitted, cleanses (not merely will cleanse) all of these uncommitted sins? I am not subscribing to Unconditional Eternal Security because I believe this future cleansing is in effect only where the faith of the one who sins does not fail.

This may not give us the gratuitous gift of never ever falling, but it certainly should give all believers a vast sense of security. It makes us know that, when we do unintentionally sin, it is not recorded against us because our High Priest Jesus Christ is continually interceding for us and presenting His own atoning blood to the Father on our behalf. That is how we can testify to living above sin every day. The sinful deed is forgiven before its enactment because the Father foresaw our need and graciously forgave us before we could cry out, “Lord, forgive me!” We need only to trust in the blood of Jesus no matter how great our failure may be. Our difficulty lies not in the “greatness” of the sin we have committed, but in the constancy of our faith in the Rock Christ Jesus.

If we refuse to not believe in the blood of Jesus – “Lord, to whom shall we go?” – and if we maintain our trust in the efficacy of the shed blood of Christ – it is impossible for us ever to lose our salvation.

I can live with that!

My Unusual Journal 63

My Unusual Journal 63

Monday, February 27, 2012, 11:54 AM

‘Predestination’ Is a Cop-out That Judgment Will Reject

“And they’ [the attendant soldiers] crucified him, and parted his garments, casting lots: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, They parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture did they cast lots.” (Mat 27:35 KJV)

This is not predestination; the soldiers were not predestined to do what they did nor are you and I. The Spirit of God sees not only everything in the universe that He created, but everything that occurs in the element of time, which He created. It was God that created the whole space-time continuum, a closely related duo, as the medium in which the universe could exist. Space, which is one-half of the duo, makes it possible for objects to be simultaneous (existing at the same time) yet widely dispersed without piling up in huge mountainous heaps of big and small events in one pinpoint location. Time, the other half of the space-time continuum, makes it possible for any and all events to occur at widely dispersed intervals and not for all events to happen at once (can you imagine what a cosmic traffic jam that would be!) At this stage in man’s odyssey through space and time the two (space and time) are co-dependent: one cannot exist without the other. Eventually time will be relegated to the trash heap of eternity and, since the two entities are so closely bound together, I suspect that space will suffer the same fate, but, please, don’t ask me to expound further on the subject of space-time. I cannot.

Now back to the matter of predestination: As God can see all things in space, so can He see all events that happen within time. God saw from an eternity ago everything that has happened and everything that will happen throughout the duration of time from its inception at the birth of the universe. But that does not make an individual commit a sin or do anything good or bad simply because the individual was predestined by the fact that God saw him, in the beginning of the universe, perform the particular act. What God sees (present tense) from eternity past (if we may use the past tense to describe an eternity that has no past or future) is what you are doing at this moment. If you are on the verge of doing something wrong – or merely thinking on the carnal pleasure that would accrue from doing the wrong – and decide you don’t want God to see that as a part of your future record, don’t do it and don’t even entertain the thought of doing it and God will not see it. You are determining now what God sees from an eternity ago. Your future is in your own hands.

I know you have a dozen questions that are begging for answers. Well, so have I; but God has the habit of giving me just what I need for the moment and then temporarily shutting down the flow of inspiration. Sure, I often don’t understand fully what He has said to me, nevertheless I know He expects me to run with the message and the understanding He has given me. This is what I am doing now: running with what God has deigned to give me. The message – and the partial understanding I have of it – will help me and it will help you if you will have it so. Quit blaming fate or a less than favorable hand with which you were dealt. Accept full responsibility for your thoughts and deeds and ask God to help you to make straight paths for your feet (Heb. 12.13). Grace is helping our infirmities NOW. Use this grace (divine favor) NOW; it is longsuffering and patient and there will be no excuses accepted in the great day of reckoning.

My Unusual Journal 62

My Unusual Journal 62

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

There Are Two Testaments - How Could the Same God Write Both?

We who follow God in this day have noted the difference between the demands laid on the Israelites of old and the believers in Christ of this day. When we take a first cursory glance at the Old Testament Law and the New Testament guidelines and compare the two, they appear to be so very much different from each other. We are made to see apparent differences between the Old and the New Testaments/Covenants that God made with His people. (In this instance, when speaking of the Old Testament [Mosaic] Law, we are not including the Moral Law, also known as the Ten Command­ments, which are a sort of preamble to the Mosaic Law.) The Ten Commandments and the New Covenant can quite well coexist in our way of thinking; they are much alike in what they enjoin the children of God to do. It is the ceremonial law of the Old Covenant that apparently clashes with the NT Law of Christ.

Although the requirements for being a disciple now may seem to be simpler and easier than in the time of the ancient Israelites, we find on taking a second and closer look at what seem to be two laws, that the “law” of today is simply a form that is more refined, more comprehensible to humans and more pleasing to God than the first (Old Testament) law. The Jamieson, Fausset and Brown Commentary refers to the New Covenant as a “purer and more spiritual” form of the Old Testament Law, which it undoubtedly is.

Any law of God, Old or New, necessarily expresses the will of God, and there is only one overall will of God communicated to mankind. This God-to-man communication occurred first in the Mosaic Law and then, centuries later, in the New Testament Law. The latter was the fulfilling of, and an expanding on, the Old Testament Law. To restate: There is only one God and therefore only one law expressing the one will of God. There are, within that one law, a myriad of details covering this or that aspect of our life, service and communication with God. The Old and the New both comprise the one will of God working toward one end: bringing together and perfecting a people for God.

The Law is the Law, whether Old or New, and both Old and New are one, one, ONE in being an expression or displaying of the great God Jehovah. When Moses told the Israelites in his day, “And it shall be our righteousness, if we observe to do all these commandments before the LORD our God, as he hath commanded us” (Deu 6:25 KJV), he was speaking of the old Law that was then in force. You will note, at least in this case, that Moses emphasized only the doing of the Law and not its effect on the heart and mind. But I cannot get into that now.

We in this day are not required to keep the old ceremonial law for two reasons: 1) Jesus fulfilled it in His life and death, and 2) the New Testament Law does not literally demand of us the various sacrificial rites contained in the Old Testament Law. As stated above, Jesus fulfilled them in His own life and death.

The Israelites of old and the Gentiles (all who are not Jews) of today who comprise the great majority of the present day Church, seem to be a mismatch unrelated to each other, but God in His peerless wisdom knew exactly what He was doing. When Jesus arrived on the scene, He pointed out the dissimilarities between the Old and the New Covenants in His Sermon on the Mount. At the conclusion of the Sermon the Scriptures make this note: “…when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine: For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.” (Mat 7:28-29 KJV)

If the people had only known and accepted Jesus for who He really was, the fullness of the Godhead bodily (Col. 1.19, 2.9), they need not have been surprised; Jesus was the human love expression of the Godhead come down to dwell among men as the human Son of God. He was the Creator of all things and the embodiment of the will (law) of God. He was Himself the Law in human form.

You may demur: “Jesus couldn’t be the personification of the Mosaic Law! The Law was harsh and unyielding and the Jesus portrayed by the Bible was a gentle, loving Person.” There are a couple of things you forget, my friend. The old Law had more than a smattering of grace in it; it was a sacerdotal system, that is, it was based on offerings and sacrifices offered by a priest as mediator. The whole system in turn was predicated on the fact that all men are sinful and need to sacrifice for their sins in order to come before the righteous God and holy Creator. In the Old Testament the priests were men who eventually died and had to be replaced. In the New Testament there was only one Priest and He was/is Jesus who lives forever. That is undeniably grace; but admittedly this grace is an island surrounded on all sides by the fear that the worshiper of that day could err in his various rituals and be struck with the judgment of an offended righteous Deity. That is a very sobering thought. But let’s continue this discourse.

Here is the larger picture: The two covenants or laws were representative of God and each emphasized one or the other side, judgmental or soteriological (redemptive). It seems that God wished to stress His love in the New Testament and His wrath and judgment in the Old Testament. But they all – wrath/judgment and love/salvation – are of the same essence of God.

We have shown how the old law had flashes of grace and mercy while calling attention to God’s strict righteousness. On the other side of the coin Jesus, who was love personified, also spoke more than a few times about judgment and the accounting that all men must give for their sins. (Mat. 11.21-24; 23.33) At this point in the schedule of God we cannot have a God who is all love without judgment nor are we left with a God who is all wrath and no love and tender concern for His children. The point is this: we who follow after Christ and righteousness do not from henceforth have to live with the fear that the wrath of God will come crashing from the skies like a thunderbolt – or come insidiously in a deadly disease – to execute punishment on us for our sins. There can be no judgment for sins where there are no sins; and we who believe in Jesus are forever free of sin. When we do sin in this area or that, the blood that Jesus is offering to the Father immediately washes it away and we are freely justified (Heb. 9.24). The sin does not appear on our record and we can continue to live in God's presence, which we could not if there were sin of any kind defiling us. Surely, surely, this is grace unbounded!

Is this too much to ask of your faith in Christ? Think on this: No one can commit a sin that God did not see before the one who sinned committed it. Would it not stand to reason, then, that the blood of Christ, which flows forever to cleanse sins that are presently uncommitted, cleanses (not merely will cleanse) all of these uncommitted sins? I am not presently subscribing to Unconditional Eternal Security because I believe this future cleansing is in effect only where the faith of the one who sins does not fail. This may not give us the gratuitous gift of never ever falling, but it certainly gives all believers a great measure of security. We need only to trust in the blood of Jesus no matter how great our failure may be. Our difficulty lies not in the “greatness” of the sin committed, but in the constancy of the faith in Christ of the one who committed the sin.

If we refuse to not believe – “Lord, to whom shall we go?” – and if we maintain our trust in the efficacy of the shed blood of Christ – it is impossible for us ever to lose our salvation.

 At this point I have not by any means exhausted the mystery of the Old and the New Testaments, but I believe I have accomplished what I set out to do. I have presented to you the one true God of the Bible – of the Old and the New Testament. God is still a God of wrath, but we who believe in Him will never face that wrath. He is also undoubtedly a God of love and salvation, but those who steadfastly refuse to believe in Him will never experience that love and salvation that are both immeasurably great and eternal.

Love and Grace and Deliverance

Love and grace and deliverance... That is quite a combination, and one follows the other as surely as day follows night. Love is preeminent because God is love and nothing comes before Him. Nevertheless, the quality of grace has been around as long as love. Yet love is preeminent, not in length of existence, but in a hierarchical sense. Without love there would be no grace, and without grace there could be no deliverance of any sort for sinful mankind.

We agree, of course, that God has always known all things – every vagrant breeze that has moved gently across the Sahara to soothe a weary traveler’s fevered brow, every word that has ever been spoken or will yet be spoken, every sigh emanating from a broken heart. If God does indeed know all things, grace must have flowed from an eternity ago because God always knew man would sin. Nevertheless, grace still did not spring up of itself. It had its “origin” in the love of God.

There was only one cause for this grace to be generated in the heart of God. The cause was sin, and owing to the continuance of sin and its corollary problems, grace still abounds. Without the sustaining element of grace we would all be dead forever – without hope of resurrection. It is grace that moves God to deliver His believing children from their many troubles. Grace moves Him to rescue them from their many predicaments and dangers.

But there can be no rescue if there is no danger from which to be rescued. As we look at the experiences of the Israelites in their wandering through the desert, we see that God delivered them many times only because they encountered many dangers and needs along the way. God was walking with them even when they could not sense His presence. All they could see with their myopic eyes were the dangers or the massive needs confronting them. But they were not, nor are we, cast into a forlorn, dreary land to survive on their own. As with Israel, God has us there for the positive effects the experience will work in us.

In order to be healed, you have to be sick. To experience God's deliverance from any situation, you first have to be in the trying situation. Both of these premises mean that the God you say does not want you to experience illness or loss, has to let you actually experience illness and loss so that He might heal you. I agree with that assertion and, if it is true, why can we not take it a step further and assume that God could let you get grievously ill or go through an extended period of poverty in order to show His great power in delivering you from those two negative conditions?

Now to get extreme in our imagining, why should we think it a reproach to God's reputation when He lets a saint die while trusting God? To me that shows the power and glory of God as much as an astounding healing or a sudden change from rags to riches in which God turns a sow's ear into a silk purse. Have we forgotten who our God is and how He delights to work in a myriad of ways to show His power and glory? He has absolutely no limits to the ways in which He can operate. Ironically, it seems that we are limited in our faith, thinking that God can only operate in spectacular miracles. We need to take the restraints off God and let Him be what He wants to be when He wants to be and how He wants to be.

When I was a youngster, I remember seeing the saints at our church who were facing hard trials of their faith through illness or financial need or whatever it  might have been – I can recall that these individuals would go up to the altar after service was over and kneel there until an elder could come and pray for them. Some would state what their situation was and some would not. They just kneeled there until a man of God – any man of God, their faith was not in the man, but in God – would come and quietly pray for them. Some were healed and some were not.  Some were delivered from their trying hour quickly and some had to endure for a while until God would rein the adversary in.

As I have said, there were healings, although they were usually not done instantly, but in a few hours or a few days or a few weeks. There was not a great clamor (at least in our church) for instant healing or on-the-spot deliverances such as we hear today. Were those days better than now? Not unless God was greater then than He is today. God is God and He will always be what we have the faith for Him to be. If we really have faith for instant healings or other similar miracles, they will be granted, but God does not always give us that type of faith. We conjure up what we refer to as faith, but what we are actually doing is flying in the face of the will of God. We are demanding instant gratification when He has decreed a long, slow process of healing or deliverance.

As we walk through the burning sand, under the scorching rays of the sun, which seems to be a fireball filling the heavens, God is there despite our lack of sensing Him. He watches over us as a master refiner subjecting the metal to a white-hot fire, purging us of all dross so that in the end we will come forth as pure as gold that has been tried in the fire.

Israel did not get deliverance when there was no opposition. How could they be delivered from nothing? Similarly, miracles, which include various means of deliverance, do not happen for no reason. God doesn’t toy with His awesome power like a kid playing with its toys. God doesn’t have to test Himself to see if He really has all power. He knows it; it is His by the nature of His being God. He will deliver and He will work miracles for us believers in order to show US His invincible might. But, as stated, first there has to be a need for the deliverance, whether the deliverance is miraculous or not.

There are three things that have to come together in your life before God will show His power of deliverance: 1) you will have to know an extremity of some sort; 2) you will have to feel distress generated by the extremity; and 3) you will have to cry out to God from the midst of your distress. When God sees your need, takes note that you are hurting and deigns to hear your urgent cry, He will bestir Himself to work the type of deliverance that is best for you and in the time that coincides with His will.

There are some deliverances for which we have to wait and wait and wait. That is when your faith is tried to the utmost. If you think you have the faith that is “strong” enough for immediate deliverance (because “God doesn’t want me to suffer”), when the deliverance does not come immediately, you are cruelly disappointed.

As a people (please do not ask me to what people I am referring),we gladly accept the health-wealth  point of view because it is what we all want. We are told that a loving God certainly does not want His followers to suffer and to be poor. You have got to be kidding me! It is hard for me to believe that any veteran disciple of Christ could accept such Pablum. There is not one of the biblical heroes of faith who did not encounter adversity of some sort.  Even the most unbelieving psychoanalyst will tell you that a moderate amount of suffering that is endured in the right frame of mind can be beneficial for a person. That makes my point: As children of God – a God who loves us – we can expect that God will in love allow us to suffer in the right amount that will make us grow and prosper spiritually or in any other area of life.

It's all right with you when you have the faith to picture yourself enclosed in a fortress where nothing can break through to hurt you. But can you conceive of a time when God allows adversity to come through just severe and long enough to work some facet of His will in your life?  Can you accept physical affliction as a part of God's will or are you just another Christian who has not matured enough for this advanced point of view?  And then there is the possibility that God will choose to call you home by the very affliction from which you think He should deliver you. Are you mature enough and is your faith strong enough to accept God’s will in the matter?  This is the type of situation that clearly is not a class in Faith 101; it is an advanced study for the serious disciple of Christ

God is a God of love and grace and deliverance and He tempers the fire of affliction and regulates just how long it should last. It usually will not kill us – if it did, would we really want to buck against His will? – and it will not hurt us ultimately. It is like a good old-fashioned spanking administered by a loving parent. The parent knows when to administer the chastisement, how physically severe it should be and how long it should last. And the misbehaving child will not die from the punishment although he hollers to high heaven that he is being killed.

Take your discipline like a good child of God and keep your faith alive and well. Submit to His will, secure in the knowledge that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” Bear in mind that God still works miracles of deliverance. Who can say what He has in mind for you?

           

Post Script

Perhaps God is preparing you be a divinely called Intercessor for saints and/or unbelievers who are in dire straits of any kind. Of course all saints are by their very nature intercessors or persons who pray for others in need. But some saints are called by God to be special intercessors. It is their responsibility to take on the extreme cases that defy faith and God and love and submission to the divine will. I confess I am not a “special intercessor” although, like all believers, I am required to intercede fervently for my brothers and sisters and those who are lost in sin. And for that type of praying, we must empathize or “feel” the hurts and needs of our fellow creatures.

I will close with this excerpt from the end of My Unusual Journal 2 (6/14/11:

But it [effectual, fervent prayer] doesn’t come without a price. It hurts – and what did I expect; a foot-stomping glory hallelujah occasion? That may come later when he/she and I (both of us) come out of our grueling test. But even now while I am in the furiously burning fire with my partner in pain, there is a deep down joy and praise for what God has done for my brother and me: my brother now has a colleague who can pray for him the effectual, fervent prayer that he needs – and I, what do I have? I have the sense of fulfillment that comes only from reaching out in love to a fellow creature in their direst hour and enduring the trial of their faith with them. And be assured: The bread I have cast upon the waters will no doubt return to me in my own time of grief and pain. (Ecc 11.1)

And, thank God, it certainly has!

The Evidences of God Are All Around

There is a hope deep within the human psyche that surely there is something more to existence than this. It is not what psychologists would term a rational hope; it is not founded on facts contained in abstruse mathematical calculations or things presently seen. Many a scientific theory has originally been based on mathematical calculations; and in the scientific field it is a very good way to operate. Nevertheless, life does not consist only in materiality -- the things one can perceive by one of the five senses -- nor in a complex interrelationship of numbers.

Purely human logic can give only a certain type of hope. It can predict a future with fewer illnesses and much greater conveniences, but it can never, of itself, foresee a tomorrow that has no pains, no adversities and no sorrows. It can never eliminate the tortured thinking with which some minds are cursed. The power to reason in solely human terms is a severely limited type of reasoning. It never attains the ability to do away with all the negatives of life.

Consider this: the beasts of the field don’t have a hope of a better day. When adversity besets them, they endure it because they know no other way to behave. And they never try to commit suicide. Only a greater intellect does that! Their only reaction to distress and pain is to whine and mope; and eventually they will die like the animals they are. That is all there is to life for them. It’s not what we would call a life. But their limited ability to reason prevents them from giving it a thought. There is a "box" around their minds and they can't think outside of it.

In a sense, a solely humanistic hope takes mankind only a step higher than the beasts. Man has a hope of better things in the materialistic realm, but, other than that, he is no better off than his dog, on which he lavishes so much attention. Man and beast – both have their day in the sun and then are no more. But man, in his allotted time and because of his greater intellect, experiences more grief. His superior brain observes more, ponders more and is more open to malfunctioning than the simple brain of his household pet.

Evidently hope (the loss of which brings on despair) comes only with a higher intellect. But mankind has blighted this bright glow of hope with a perverted type of reasoning. Man with his bulbous brain has concluded that hope of a heavenly tomorrow is irrational. Since it is irrational, there is no hope. Such thinking allows the attendant despair (always waiting at the heels of hope) to rush in to fill the vacuum.

We have to assume, then, that the hope buried in the human consciousness cannot come from any theorized evolution of the brain. Reason, of which dominant man makes his boast, precludes that idea. Reason is cold and based on known facts. Based on what man knows of himself and the world around him, it is unreasonable to have hope of an illusive brighter tomorrow. Human nature cannot sustain such hope. No amount of legislation can alter human nature nor can it change flawed human genes that mold the personality of an individual.

A Reason for Hope

Some persons are born with a load of genetic baggage (garbage) that makes their lives a continual torment. They are incapable of enjoying the bright glow of tomorrow’s hope. The average person uses his “mind” to control all the negative thoughts that arise in his mind, but what do these unfortunates do when the mind itself is malfunctioning?

The one who believes in God, of course, knows, beyond human logic, that there will be a brighter tomorrow. He is confident that this life is not all there is to existence. Note this: the hope of a better future did not come just when the believer was converted. We were all born with a vague sense of the hope, but somewhere along the way, from birth to the amassing of mounds of knowledge, we have managed to kill off the hope. Secular reasoning tells us it is not logical.

We might suppose that a brilliant thinker and scientist would be so impressed with the wonders of the cosmos that he would acknowledge there has to be a God. Therefore there would be reason to hope for a perfect future, as a perfect God will not long endure imperfection in any of His works. We would further assume that this thinker and scientist would become a worshiper of the God who is part of the one same package: God and universe; therefore, no God, no universe. But that would be making assumptions without taking into account the stupidity and arrogance of mankind.

Why stupidity? Because there is such an overwhelming amount of sheerly circumstantial evidence. Legal cases are not usually won on circumstantial evidence alone, but a skilled attorney can win where there is a voluminous amount of such evidence. We have within us and all around us and stretching out to infinity a crushing weight of circumstantial evidence of God’s existence. It is so preponderant that any second-rate lawyer could prove God’s existence before an impartial jury without difficulty. He could do so even without the physical appearance of God Himself.

Why arrogance? Because when man acquires such great knowledge of the universe within, around and above him, by some reverse logic he comes to think of himself as part of the Creator rather than part of the creation. The total package is still the same of God and the universe, and without one there is not the other, but arrogant man foolishly crosses over the boundary between creation (universe) and Creator.

When he, the created being, has unearthed even a small part of the mysteries of the universe, he has begun to get a greater technical knowledge of the One who made the universe. The knowledge is circumscribed and superficial, as any amount of technical data about God would have to be. Yet the creature’s growing familiarity with these things that are above his head, leads him to a relative contempt of all matters pertaining to the divine. He thinks that, by going beyond the universe and immersing himself in the theological, he has become by some magical osmosis one with the Creator. This is sheer stupidity and arrogance and a perilous venture onto very thin ice.

There are some scientists who have bowed before the existence of a Creator, but the majority have stubbornly maintained that they do not know of a Creator. Neither affirming or denying, they are like a bird dog that has chanced into a bevy of quails -- quails all around it -- and gets confused by the massive amount of “evidence.” So the confused dog doesn’t know what to do with all the evidence – the very thing for which it had assiduously been seeking. But man is supposedly more intelligent than a bird dog.

Mankind should realize that every scrap of new information about a medical cure or an astronomical discovery or the ingenious workings of the human brain is affirmation of there being an infinitely more complex Creator behind it all. The very reason in which man makes his boast insists there had to be a Creator who originated and sustains it all. But man stands there claiming no knowledge of a Creator while a whole bevy of “quails” surrounding him gives the lie to his claim.

It seems to me, with my untutored mind, that if there were any credibility to the theory of evolution, and if there were no God powering all of creation, I still would have to believe that some great Force fully intended for mankind to be superior to the animals. When you ponder the differences between man and beast the superiority of man is clear. Was it only by chance? Perhaps it was – if you believe that the sun is in the sky by happenstance and that the rain falls and vegetation grows – all for man’s benefit – by no more than a casual change in Nature’s “mood” or a slight hiccup in the evolutionary process.

For you who still believe there is no evidence of a God, I am trying diligently to be unbiased. To me the evidence is clear and unmistakable. Forget the demands of science for hard evidence, “a smoking gun or a dead body.” We can see the hand of God all around us. His hand is in the tissues and cells of our bodies. It is in this envelope of air that surrounds the earth. The atmosphere, if you will. The atmosphere is a kind of gigantic ecosystem containing all that mankind and the subordinate species need to survive. It is a huge recycling system that needs no input from the outside (except the rays of the sun), but recycles all solids and gases for the continuance of life on the planet.

God’s hand is in the mind with which we reason and conceive ideas. It is in the giant redwoods of California and in the seedling that determinedly pushes its way up through the soil toward the sunlight and air above ground. It is in the conception and birth of every species, particularly that of mankind.

I can’t continue in this vein. I don’t have the space and you would not have the attention span. I’ll conclude with this: There is abundant reason for the hope of a better tomorrow.   You only have to look around you, look above you, look within you – and believe.

 

My Unusual Journal 61

My Unusual Journal

My Unusual Journal 61 - Sunday, February 05, 2012, 4:26 PM

The Wonders of Redemption

“Living He loved me, dying He saved me,

Buried He carried my sins far away;

Rising He justified freely forever,

One day He’s coming, O glorious day!”

 

In this song the major components of Jesus’ mission to earth are broken down or analyzed. Jesus did not come to earth on a whim; God never does anything on a mere fancy, particularly His world (not to say, cosmos-) changing  mission to effect redemption for all men and to bring His entire Creation back into what He had originally intended it to be.  If you have never before seen the love, wisdom and power of God flash forth in its full glory, behold it now as we study the lines of this song:

Living He Loved Me

The life Jesus lived among men was one long pilgrimage of love. Many times the people He loved and wanted to save tried His longsuffering love. Many times they blasphemously denied His divine assignment, twisted His words and rejected Jesus before He ever neared Gethsemane or Calvary, which were the high points of His suffering in this life.

Before Jesus could die for us, He first had to live for us in order to give that sinless life in exchange for our tawdry, ragged ones. But His life was not, in a carnal sense, an endless delight. It is true He had peace and joy from His Father to sustain Him, but so do we, yet our life is not so enjoyable that we are loath to leave it. Furthermore you can discard the notion that Jesus’ life was much like ours: 1) He carried the ghastly knowledge of what lay ahead of him; 2) Jesus was not permitted the companionship of a wife and the joys of a normal family life. He had a family, yes. His twelve closest followers were His family – and they could be a petty, contentious group. Jesus had the responsibility of teaching them, by precept and by living example, what it meant to be children of God. There are at least three examples in Scripture of how they disappointed Him at times. Of course there were many more examples that could not be included. It would not be possible to include every significant instance of the disciples’ petty foibles and prejudices in any one package.

And we must not ignore the teaching in the Law under which Jesus lived that demanded full penalty for any offense against one’s brother: Jesus had to precisely fulfill the penalties imposed on sinful mankind for their offenses against a righteous God. That was an impossible task, but Jesus bared His back to the lash of divine justice – and not once did He complain. It was not fair, it was not a just pin our eyes, but an overwhelming surge of LOVE compelled Him to do it.

Under the Old Testament Law if a man smote his brother so that the brother lost an eye, the guilty party had to have his eye gouged out. It was the same with any part of the body: what the perpetrator did to the victim, the same must be inflicted on the perpetrator.

The Law was a look into the Person of God and, by a close examination of the Law, we see that all the offenses we have committed against God must be inflicted on us – and we would still not have forgiveness of our sins. The penalty would have been paid, but the sin would still be on our record. As we learn in the Law and as the New Testament writer of Hebrews reminds us,

“And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission [of sins].” (Heb 9:22 KJV)

God in the Person of Jesus Christ shed the atoning blood for all mankind.

Dying He Saved Me

It is a remarkable fact that the human Jesus carried full knowledge – at least from the start of His public ministry – that He would 1) suffer much in the Garden of Gethsemane, 2) die in agony on the cross, and 3) know the torments of hell after He died because the Father had rejected Him.

All of it, the pain and agony and death on Calvary, were a fulfilling of the Old Testament Law. In fact the Law was a picture of the awesome duties and the immaculate Person of Jesus.

Buried He Carried My Sins Far Away

In the burial of Jesus we see the hope and promise that our sins were buried deep and completely forgotten as viable marks against us. No more can anyone, man or devil, accuse believers in Christ of the “smallest” of sins: they are all under the blood of Jesus and will never be held against us.

Rising He Justified

“…freely [and] forever.” It is as though we had never sinned in our lives previously and from henceforth!

The redemption of mankind in reality is one astounding, incredible feat that embraces 1) Jesus’ life – living He loved me – 2) His death – dying He saved me – His death symbolizing the death of our sinful nature – 3) buried He carried my sins far away – and 4) His resurrection – rising He justified. The song quoted does not include Jesus’ nativity nor His ascension to His Father, but that is also part of the redemption package. It would be difficult to include a full portrayal of every significant detail of Redemption in any one handy parcel. The glory and love and power would burst the package at the seams.