God is Love

 

[1]

Exodus 20:8-12 King James Version

⁸ Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. ⁹ Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: ¹⁰ But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: ¹¹ For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

 

The only time God spoke to humanity in His official position, He gave the ten commandments to them through the most impressive set of fireworks ever seen.

The fourth commandment is the center of His presentation. In it He identifies Himself as the Creator of heaven and earth and sea. He states that He made these in six days and rested the seventh, which He calls the Sabbath.

Let’s do a thought experiment. God identifies Himself as a creator of heaven, earth, and sea—that is, of our universe. I think in this way. Suppose God enjoys and administers his vast creations. The biggest number the Greeks named was a myriad. So maybe God spends a myriad years enjoying His creation. During this time His marvelous intellect explores other ideas for another, a different universe. Mentally, He plays around with the physics of this new universe, and the creatures He would like to have. His ideas are vast and sometimes quite strange: think of giraffe vs. rhinoceros, humming bird vs. ostrich, sloth vs. human.

God’s excitement builds over those ten-thousand years until He can’t hold it in. He spends a week creating this new universe. Then he monitors carefully how things develop there while He continues running His vast other universes. His overwhelming rule is that of love: the love of God for His creatures, the love of His creatures for Him, and the love His creatures have for each other.

Time goes by. Myriads progress one after another. Envision this happening since time immemorial. There is no first universe creation. God has always been doing this! Then God’s greatest helper decides he can run all these universes better than God has been doing. He has been God’s right-hand angel since time immemorial. He skillfully starts the greatest coup d’état ever attempted. God in love does not kill him outright, but he is driven from heaven. He chooses to take up residence in God’s latest creation. He swiftly defeats its lord—Adam and Eve. Then God lets him develop his insurrection until everyone in all of God’s universes recognizes that Satan is a brutal imposter.

We are in the final scenes of this fierce struggle. Love eventually overcomes evil. Notice that EVIL is simply LOVE spelt backwards with “I” taking the place of the hug, “O”. Without love, life becomes misery or evil.

I awoke this morning with words of the song “The Love of God” running through my mind.

The love of God is greater far
  Than tongue or pen can ever tell.
It goes beyond the highest star
  And reaches to the lowest hell.
The guilty pair, bowed down with care,
  God gave His Son to win;
His erring child He reconciled
  And pardoned from his sin.

O love of God, how rich and pure!
  How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure—
  The saints’ and angels’ song.

When hoary time shall pass away,
  And earthly thrones and kingdoms fall;
When men who here refuse to pray,
  On rocks and hills and mountains call;
God’s love, so sure, shall still endure,
  All measureless and strong;
Redeeming grace to Adam’s race—
  The saints’ and angels’ song.

Could we with ink the ocean fill,
  And were the skies of parchment made;
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
  And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above
  Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
  Though stretched from sky to sky.

Frederick M. Lehman, 1917
v. 3 by Anonymous/Unknown

 

Dear Lord, I love You and yearn for Your final banishment of evil and establishment of Your kingdom of love!

 

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[1] https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Flookaside.fbsbx.com%2Flookaside%2Fcrawler%2Fmedia%2F%3Fmedia_id%3D611018337688184&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=42026be4f25a4ff3dcf7a5f67b18ad81d7193cd05fa28bd9db2cc981f76d4cd8

 

What Angers Christ

[i]

Mark 10:14 Good News Translation

¹⁴ When Jesus noticed this, he was angry and said to his disciples, “Let the children come to me, and do not stop them, because the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these.”

 

Jesus is seldom described as becoming angry. When He saw someone preventing seekers from seeing Him, as in this instance, His divine nature flashed forth through His human nature, and in pure love He stopped the preventing party.

On two other occasions, temple officials were desecrating the temple by profiting from peoples’ desire to worship the Lord as had been prescribed since the time of Moses. When Jesus walked in, He understood clearly that they diverted worshippers’ devotion to God by their cheating. These worshipers were no longer seen as seeking a spiritual blessing but were reduced to secular mercantile considerations. Not only were they robbed of their hard-earned possessions, they were also robbed of a love experience with the Almighty. Their much-anticipated joy was displaced by disgust and resentment.

Again, the divine nature of God in Christ flashed forth with irresistible force. The perpetrators fled in terror for their very lives. They felt a tiny hint of the forth coming judgement when they will no longer be able to flee.

In the first mentioned occasion, the disciples were trying to protect the Savior’s serious business of establishing the Kingdom of God from childish interruptions. In the second mentioned occasions, the clergy was attempting to maintain the sacred purity of temple sacrifices and thus prevent divine retribution as happened when someone brought an unacceptable offering—like Cain had (1 John 3:12), or like Nadab and Abihu who offered unholy fire in their censers (Leviticus 10:1). One is also led to think of Uzzah, who was struck dead when he tried to stabilize the Ark of the Covenant, that appeared about to fall (2 Samuel 6:6,7).

In our Liturgical Service at the La Sierra Church, we have been promoting the biblical principle of the equality of all people in the sight of God. In particular this refers to racial equality and gender equality. We have been discouraged at how slowly this principle of equality is accepted by our own generation. In a recent service where I was liturgist, the liturgy included the following song:

The cantor and people sing “Welcome Our Sister-Brother Creator[ii]” (to the tune of Hymn 44, “Morning Has Broken”)

 

Come, let us join our Sister Creator,
Birthing a new world more than we know.
With Her revealing all of our fullness
We create healing where’er we go.

 

Come, let us join or Brother Creator,
Bringing forth freedom for every race.
All of earth’s colors dancing together,
Celebrate beauty in every face.

 

Welcome our Sister-Brother Creator,
Into our spirits’ life-giving wombs.
Glad expectation grows from our labor
For new creation’s glorious blooms.

 

As I sang and listened to these words, my thoughts were deflected from the love and grace of Christ and his eternal sacrifice for my soul to the unfortunate conflict within the church over the ordination of women. Are we not as guilty as the priests who promoted the sanctity of offerings in Christ’s day or as Uzzah when he went to stabilize the Ark of God?

Lord, give us wisdom to know how to promote what is good without distracting ourselves from You.

 

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[i] https://zimfieldguide.com/matabeleland-south/cyrene-mission A mural from the Chapel at Cyrene Mission in Zimbabwe

[ii] Words by Jann Aldredge-Clanton (2009)

Give Without Compulsion

[i]

2 Corinthians 9:7 

New International Version (NIV)

⁷ Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.

  Ever since I was a young child, I was trained to return a tenth of everything I received to the Lord as tithe. It became part of what I had to do to be a Christian. God would not bless me if I didn’t do it. Then in my twenty-first year, I began to see God and His service in a new way. As salvation strictly by Grace began its gentle but persistent work in all parts of my life, I re-evaluated this aspect of my life, too.

 Pastors have told me that when a church moves from a religion of works to a religion of grace, its offerings go way down. Those who discover that “Nothing we do can cause God to love us more, and nothing we do can cause God to love us less,” means we don’t have to give offerings any more. Since I was in the habit of giving tithes and offerings, I didn’t stop. I continued that habit. Apparently, many don’t—many didn’t have that habit in the first place.

During the years we were “missionaries” in Africa, the mission board removed the tithe from our pay check before they sent me my check. It came out of my pay as a tax. I was “under compulsion.” I didn’t give a tithe during those years, and I personally experienced the loss in my very psyche. It’s difficult to explain, but it made me feel less involved in God’s great mission on earth—to give every soul a chance to be saved—even though I was a missionary and sacrificing in many other ways.

Why give then? After all, God has more than enough? When He set up the Hebrew nation, He designed that 11/12^ths of the nation supported the 1/12^th that were set aside to do the Lord’s work directly. Thus 1/10^th tithe would generously support the 1/12^th workers with extra left over. It is a real privilege to fit into a plan God chose to use. Furthermore, He has promised to bless those who do so far better than they would have been otherwise. Indeed, He has kept that promise in my life.

 I rejoice, Lord, for providing me a chance to participate in Your kingdom in a very real way.

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[i] https://changingwinds.wordpress.com/2016/10/09/to-tithe-or-not-to-tithe-the-moral-question/

 

Unshakable Government

[i]

 [ii]

Hebrews 12:28

Good News Translation (GNT)

²⁸ Let us be thankful, then, because we receive a kingdom that cannot be shaken. Let us be grateful and worship God in a way that will please him, with reverence and awe.

This past week Robert Mugabe, the world’s longest ruling dictator of 37 years, was deposed by a carefully orchestrated, bloodless coup d’etat.  Mugabe had emerged the victor in a bloody civil war that rocked the idyllic, prosperous, and peaceful Southern Rhodesia or just Rhodesia. Hundreds of innocent people were killed after the war by simply stepping on land mines that had been planted throughout the country.

Mugabe started a systematic genocide attempt on the Ndebele people who had put up the strongest resistance to his assuming leadership.  He methodically drove the successful white farmers out of the country and gave their farms to his favorite military generals who had no desire or skill to farm. The net result was that when he took office, the country was exporting food to the nations around: after his policies took effect, starvation overtook the country. The international community has had to step in and feed his people.

The pictures above show how he squandered the limited wealth of his country to build himself a mansion that rivals the mansions of European nobility and royalty. As the country ran out of money, he printed vast amounts of paper money until the Zimbabwe dollar became literally worthless.

[iii]

King Ndebele, a boyhood friend of mine, once wrote, “When the British were here, we had freedom but not independence. Now we have independence, but we don’t have freedom.”

As we see the steady erosion of our rights and freedoms in our own country, I appreciate more and more the promise that we will, in God’s own time, receive the “kingdom that cannot be shaken.”

 Let us indeed “be grateful and worship God in a way that will please Him, with reverence and awe.”

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[i] https://i2.wp.com/truthorfictioncom.c.presscdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/zim5.jpg

[ii] https://i0.wp.com/truthorfictioncom.c.presscdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/zim10.jpg

[iii] http://m.wsj.net/video/20150616/061615zimnote/061615zimnote_1280x720.jpg