2002-01-01
Good Morning Faithful Readers,
Today I am led to begin a new segment of our series on covenants about restoration and blessing. By now, we all know that Christ’s Atonement has rescued us from sure spiritual death and showered us with blessings when we kept our covenant agreements with Him. So, one might ask: what more should be said? The answer to this question rests in understanding God’s will for mankind throughout their history. When God was speaking to Moses, He told Moses what the consequences for disobedience were. That is included in DT 28 in the Torah. Had Moses not been the faithful man that he was, he might have accused God of simply trying to scare him and the others and of being mean-spirited by trying to force the Jews away from the familiar idolatry with which the people of that time were so comfortable. But, Moses was a man of faith, a man who absolutely knew God was sovereign, supreme, the only Source of truth, and a loving and compassionate Deity. That is why he knew that he must convince the people of their need to pay attention to DT 28: 58-59 & 63-66, for example. “If you do not obey faithfully all of God’s teachings that are written in this book and if you do not honor the wonderful and awesome name of the Lord your God, He will send on you and on your descendants incurable diseases and horrible epidemics that can never be stopped….Just as the Lord took delight in making you prosper and in making you increase in number, so He will take delight in destroying you and in bringing ruin on you. You will be uprooted from the land that you are about to occupy. The Lord will scatter you among all the nations, from one end of the earth to the other, and there you will serve gods made of wood and stone, gods that neither you nor your ancestors have ever worshipped before. You will find no peace anywhere, no place to call your own; the Lord will overwhelm you with anxiety, hopelessness, and despair. Your life will always be in danger. Day and night you will be filled with terror, and you will live in constant fear of death.” Whew! That’s a pretty negative message for me to begin a devotion with, but there is an important reason for this.
The Lord wants us all to see the brash contrast between these dire things and what Christ offers us through His death on the cross. Now, does this mean that all the OT people suffered the way the lost in the above Deuteronomy citations do? Of course not. What this difficult-to-read passage does do is to paint the profile of a person lost, rebellious, and willing to reject God. In no other belief system than ours does the Deity reach down to people who start out being His enemies and invite them to come to faith so that they might have everlasting life. Ancient people of faith are blessed in the eternal sense of the word just as modern people of faith are. They enjoy God’s protection, presence, guidance, provision, and eventual salvation just as any person of faith today does. Because there were so many of the ancient Jews who did disobey and refuse to trust in God, the picture in these citations can be seen in the history of the Jewish people throughout their 3000 years on earth. The negative consequences can also be seen in non-Jews who reject God. A loving, wise, just, and compassionate God never gives up on His chosen people, but He does punish their iniquity and put in place a plan for their restoration. That plan was in the works from before the actual creation of the earth [COL 1: 15-20 and 1 PET 1: 20-21]. If God didn’t love us, He never would have had such a plan or implemented it with the sacrifice of His only Son on the cross, the giving of the gift of the Holy Spirit to the faithful, or (in our future) the ending of evil and wresting back into His own hands dominion over the earth from Satan. There never would have been a Lamb of God, his Agent for doing this.
JER 31: 31-34 is proof that God’s plan for restoration and blessing existed and is a real covenant promise that He keeps. As I have said many times before, God repeats frequently what He wants us to remember-things that are important to Him and therefore should be important to us. Such is the case when he repeats His message that what He wants is to our One and Only God, that He can claim us as His people. This message includes His oft-stated desire that we should have His laws written on our hearts and that because of that, everyone should know His will. We can find this message repeated in the following citations, which I hope you will consult: EX 6: 7; DT 6: 4-5; DT 28: 13; JER 31: 33-34; JER 32: 38; EZK 36: 28; EZK 37:23;2 COR 11: 19-20; REV 21: 3. Those are just the ones I’ve found, and there may even be more. While I began this devotion with a very negative warning about disobedience to God, I hope that we can all see that this warning is designed to set mankind on the path toward qualifying to be restored and richly blessed. For the latter is what our loving Abba is eager to do. He wants us to be spiritually restored, to overcome the dire consequences that a lifestyle of sin provides, and to know the warmth of the love He has for us. Before we could appreciate the rich blessings of the Covenant of Grace, we had to know what the alternative to them is. We need to see the great contrast between the pain and suffering of sure death from disobedience with the hope, encouragement, perspective on suffering for our faith which comes with obeying God faithfully and keeping our covenant promises with Him. We need to meditate today on how this changes our lives today and in the future.
PRAYER: O Lord, it is never easy to view the bleak picture that is the life and future of people who reject You and continually sin. Yet, this must be done, so that we can put our lives closer to Your perspective and make wise choices for them. It also helps us to view mankind’s history, so we can see the consistency and fairness of Your judgments on them. It would have been so much easier for you to make us puppets on a string. But instead, Dear Lord, You gave up a piece of Your own power, so that we could have free agency. That way, in Your wisdom You would know that the choice to sin or to be faithful was ours. There are two kinds of suffering in this world, that which comes from continually sinning and that which is done out of courage of faith. The former ends up as conscious and eternal suffering in the lake of fire. The latter ends with our physical death and leads to great rewards for us in our eternal lives with You. When in pain, the choice isn’t easy, but You promised us in 1 COR 10: 13 that You would never allow us to be tested beyond our ability to endure. You give us this contrast to help us to make the choice You most want for us: to be restored and blessed by profound and trusting faith in You. That is one more manifestation of the unparalleled love that You have for each of us. We humbly bow before You to express our worship and adoration, to confess our sins, to offer You utmost thanks, and most of all to praise Your for being the model of faithfulness that You are. In Christ’s name, amen.
Tomorrow, we will take a look at the concept God has for Jerusalem. Hopefully, we will see why it is so crucial that we pray for peace there and what that city is so important to us even through we don’t yet live there. In the meanwhile, know that we walk the difficult paths of our lives with God’s love and protection when we are obedient and faithful to Him. That means we don’t have to should our burdens alone, because God has created Christ with shoulders wide enough to carry them and to grant us peace that goes beyond human understanding. Peter and I send you our love too.
Grace Be With You Always,
Lynn