SEEING WONDERFUL THINGS IN GOD'S LAW

God spoke all these words: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.  You shall have no other gods before me."  Ex. 20:1-3, N.I.V.

Four thousand years ago on Mount Sinai God gave to mankind a verbalized edition of His eternal law, the Ten Commandments.  Not only was it the expression of His immutable will, but it was a revelation of His divine character.  And it holds His promise of restoration and redemption for all who will receive it as such.

Yet for millenniums men have trembled at the thought of God and have seen the Ten Commandments as negative warnings from an angry Deity.  Thus the law has been approached as a grave duty imposed upon humanity rather than understood as a positive message of deliverance and restoration from a loving Creator.  However, it is our privilege to say with David, "I will never forget your precepts, for by them you have renewed my life" (Ps. 119:93, N.I.V.).

Let's take a fresh look at these familiar precepts, with the awareness that in them is revealed the heart of the infinite God and His promise of fulfillment for His people.  We may pray as did David, "Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law.  I am a stranger on earth; do not hide your commands from me" (verses 18, 19, N.I.V.).

The best place to begin is just before the Sinai declarations, when God expressed His desire for a relationship with His people.  He said, "I carried you [out of Egypt] on eagles' wings and brought you to myself" (Ex. 19:4, N.I.V.).  It is in this context that we may best understand God as He spoke all these words: 'I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.  You shall have no other gods before me.' "

God was reintroducing Himself to His people, not simply "yelling" at them from heaven.  He declared that He was so deeply interested in their lives that He became actively involved in their deliverance from slavery.  He felt absolutely sure that if they allowed Him to guide them He would lead them so well that they would no longer feel a need to seek guidance from any other source, i.e., "gods."

No wonder David asserted, "Great peace have they who love your law, and nothing can make them stumble" (Ps. 119:165, N.I.V.).

AN INVITATION FROM OUR FATHER

"Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord."  Isa. 1:18, R.S.V.

We all have heard the old adage "Do as I say not as I do!"  You know how it goes.  Mom yells at the kids, "Pick up your room!  I won't have you turn my house into a pigsty!"  Take a peek into her room, however, and you'll see an almost unbelievable mess.  "Don't be late for supper!" admonishes Dad, who turns up an hour late himself.

Most of us are conditioned from our youth to expect a certain amount of duplicity from our parents.  We know they mean well, but reality lies somewhere else.  The problem is that we tend to transfer such thinking to our relationship with our heavenly Parent.  We are told, "Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks us to give a reason for the hope that you have" (1 Peter 3:15, N.I.V.).  But we suspect that God doesn't have to have a reason for what He does.  After all, He is God! 


Here's good news: God lives by the same rules that He asks us to.  The law that He desires to write in our hearts also describes His character!  He asks us to live accountably and reasonably even as He Himself does.  Only this wayward planet is out of step with the rest of the universe.  Only sin-darkened hearts perceive God as arbitrary and power-wielding.  And so, in keeping with His nature, the Sovereign God invites us: "Come now, let us reason together."

Our heavenly Parent doesn't yell at us, "Clean up your life!"  He says, "Let Me show you the best way to live!"  And His admonitions are ever coupled with His promise to empower.  "Do as I do!" He encourages us, "I'll help you!"  In the process we begin to know Him.  Gradually we may become even more excited about His friendship than we are about all the wonderful things we are learning.  No longer do we have to see His counsel as arbitrary requirements.  We may gladly receive it as the best information available--and as a chance to become better acquainted with our magnificent God!

I'm glad that God has surrounded us with His loving acceptance so that we may move forward unhindered by the fear of failure.  Failure is just not a word in the vocabulary between friends.  When things go wrong, friends look for answers as they keep reasoning things out--together.

THE INVISIBLE JOB

When he comes who is  the Spirit of truth, he will guide you into all the truth....He will glorify me.  John 16:13, 14, N.E.B.


During my years as an academy student my job was to operate the campus public-address systems.  My boss was a very wise person.  He often told me that I was doing my job best when no one knew I was there at the controls.  "If the volume is turned so low that the listeners are straining to hear, they will say ,'Why doesn't that guy turn it up!'  If it is too high and beginning to feed back, they will say, 'What's the matter with that kid?'  But if it is just right, they will be so engrossed with the speaker they won't even know that you are there.  And that's what we want."

The Holy Spirit's deepest desire is that we see Jesus.  He does not wish for the attention to stop short of the Goal and to focus upon the medium.  He knows that His work is to counteract that of Satan, who is busy telling lies about Jesus.  In contrast, He longs for the confused children of this planet to know the truth about Him whom to know is life eternal.

One person asked, "Why do we know so much about Jesus and so little about the Holy Spirit?"  I suspect that the Holy Spirit would say, "That is just the way I want it."  For it is not intricate knowledge about the nature of the Trinity that brings us salvation; it is the character of God as revealed by all members of the Godhead that leads us to trust.

Christians long to be filled with the Holy Spirit, as Jesus promised we could (Acts 1:5-8).  Spirit-filled Christians, as with the Spirit Himself, will be fulfilling their tasks most effectively when they draw the least attention to themselves and the most attention to Jesus Christ.  The gift of Spirit-filling is not for private religious entertainment.  It is not a form of sanctified ecstasy.  It is not a cause for boasting about new levels of religious achievement.

John the Baptist revealed the high-water mark of his Spirit-filled life when he said, "He must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:30).  This should not surprise us, since this is a perfect expression of the attitude of the Spirit Himself.  The infilling of the Spirit is the infilling of the life of Christ, that He might be revealed to others.

WHY THE DEMONS TREMBLE

So you believe that there is one God?  That's fine.  So do all the devils in hell, and shudder in terror!  James 2:19, Phillips.

Have you ever wondered about the theology of demons?  Have you puzzled about what they know about God and how it affects them?  Have you wondered why they know so much about God, yet still don't repent?  Today's verse gives us one of those rare opportunities to examine the theology of the whole demonic host.

James makes it clear that the demons know God exists and that He is one God--not a scattered castleful of scrapping deities.  But their response to what they know is that they tremble in fear.  We might say, "Well indeed they should be trembling, with their guilty consciences and all.  They've got it coming."  Yet we might wonder why such terrible fear does not lead them to repentance.

But we must recall that they got their instructions about the Father from the "father of lies," Satan himself, not from God.  And the old snake wasn't about to tell them the truth.  Instead he told them that the thing that's wrong with sinning is not that it will hurt anyone but that it will make the Father really angry.  Once one has rebelled, Satan told them, God is keen on vengeance.  There is no hope of restoration, only a fearful anticipation of retaliation and wrath.

The fallen angels clung to this understanding, in spite of all that God could do to tell them otherwise.  Rejecting the clearest portrayals of truth, they damaged beyond repair their ability to apprehend furter truth.  And they fell under the unending burden of Satan's deceptions about God.  Unable to apprehend the gracious truth that alone can lead to repentance, they remain forever in the bondage of fear.

For us as well, it is clearly not enough simply to believe that God exists.  Our entire spiritual life is flavored by who we believe this God to be who does indeed exist.  And if our religious life is haunted with dread of judgment to come, we are either turning our backs on God or we are burdened with Satan's deceptions about who God is and how He relates to us.

Unlike Satan and his self-deceived demonic followers, we may still walk from darkness into His marvelous light--the light of truth about Himself that He longs for us to hear: that He wishes to embrace us, not to terrify us!

SALVATION BY RELATIONSHIP

For as the Father has life-giving power in himself, so has the Son, by the Father's gift.  John 5:26, N.E.B.

Can a light bulb give off light without having a relationship with the dynamo?  Can a baby calf live without having a relationship with its mother?  Can a plant grow without having a relationship with the soil?  Can a God-created human live without being in relationship with Him who has life-giving power within Himself?

The answer to the first three questions above seems so very obvious to all thoughtful people.  In each case, if the relationship is broken, the negative results very quickly become evident.  But what complicated challenges God faces in trying to tell us that the pattern holds true for the fourth question as well!  He did, after all, give us the power to choose to break that relationship.  Yet if, when we break from Him, we were to experience the immediate consequences of the choice, we would be in no condition ever to change our minds.  On the other hand, when God--in an act of mercy--holds off those consequences, we fall for Satan's deceptions and think that we really can live apart from God.

There is nothing that Satan will seek to do with greater diligence than to get us to ignore that life-giving relationship with God.  He will try to distract us with the enticements of the senses or with our handmade endeavours to build our own wall of security against the trouble to come.  Or he will coax us to believe that a heavy involvement with religious busy-ness is a  good substitute for involvement with the person of God.

But here is a very subtle way that Satan can get us to neglect the vital relationship with God that we call faith.  He can entice us to think that faith is simply our acknowledgement of a legal transaction outside of ourselves in which Jesus makes some helpful arrangements with the Father so that we can be forgiven, and no personal connection with God is necessary.  This view sometimes sneaks around under the heading of "righteousness by faith," but it strips all the essential meaning of the word faith.

Jesus Himself, while a man on earth, lived only by depending upon His Father for life.  This was His faith-connection.  His saving relationship.  And the remnant are described as having Jesus' kind of faith--that same vital relationship with God.

HIDING WHAT WE REALLY ARE

Alas for you, lawyers and Pharisees, hypocrites!  You clean the outside of cup and dish, which you have filled inside by robbery and self-indulgence!  Blind Pharisee!  Clean the inside of the cup first; then the outside will be clean also.  Matt. 23:25, 26, N.E.B.


I once bought a large hydraulic jack at a yard sale, and I was excited.  For only $15 I brought home a shiny, hefty-looking piece of equipment that the pleasant lady behind the table had assured me was almost new.  As I tried it out under our car, I bragged about my clever purchase to my wife.  My face became red with anger (and embarrassment) as the jack oozed hydraulic fluid all over the floor and the car sank slowly down.

Jesus is absolutely committed to reality.  He wants everything in His kingdom actually to be on the inside what it claims to be on the outside.  Nothing short of this would allow us to trust each other throughout eternity.  No wonder He spoke so severely to those religious leaders who were veterans of pretense.  Claiming to speak on behalf of God, the Pharisees were giving the people reason to believe that God Himself would be content with an outward show of righteousness, overlooking the reality of the inner condition.  But Jesus was telling all who would hear that His Father, too, was committed to reality.

This raises an interesting question.  If Jesus decries the idea of a person being clean only by outward appearance while in reality being still attached to sin, then what is the difference between an outwardly scrubbed cup and the "robe of Christ's righteousness," as it has often been understood?  Rather than hiding our real condition from the eyes of man (as taught by the clean cup metaphor), the robe of Christ's righteousness is presumed to hide our real condition from the eyes of God.  This idea suggests we can "hide" under the substitutionary merit of Christ's perfect righteousness and the Father will accept us to be what in reality we are not.

But the robe of Christ's righteousness is never intended to be a falsification of reality.  Christ does not provide it either to fool or to change the Father.  The robe is Christ's potent statement of the Father's love and acceptance for the sinner, which--when claimed and worn with pride--will produce actual cleanness within the sinner.  And God need make no provision to hide sins that He is confident He can heal.

HAVING HIS NAME ON OUR FOREHEADS

They shall see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads.  Rev. 22:4, R.S.V.


The hope of the Christian is the second coming of Christ.  It will be a time of rejoicing, for all the sorrows of this life will come to an end.  We will never again be sick, or die, or be separated from our loved ones.  We won't get weary, or confused, or have our houses repossessed.  And our souls will no longer be in jeopardy--that is, we won't have to worry anymore about whether or not we will be saved.

Friends, if we think the matter of being saved is risky business, we have a problem that the Second Coming is not going to solve.  If, in our thinking, being sin-free is in the same category as being sick-free and mortgage-free, our understanding of the sin problem needs updating.  Being sin-free is not ensured by the fact that there is nothing around left to tempt us; it is the condition of the heart that no longer retains any doubts as to God's character.

Our text today describes the redeemed: "They shall see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads."  What does "his name shall be on their foreheads" mean?  May I suggest that God shall be the center of our thoughts?  And this begins now, this side of the kingdom.  Our focus will shift from thoughts of "getting saved" to God Himself.  And since God is life, we cannot help but live when we accept the Life-giver.  Our present mortality is no indication that eternal life has not begun for us.  That vital connection that makes us immune from the second death (the first death is only a sleep) has already been established.

The second coming of Christ is an event that makes visible the already factual union of God and His people.  In heaven we will no longer be sick because we will have been removed from this ecologically imbalanced planet.  We will be mortgage-free because mortgages will have ceased to exist.  But we will be sin-free because the great controversy over the truth of who God is will have already ended in our hearts.

It will be wonderful to see God face-to-face.  But we may "see" Him even now through His Written Word.  We may now be totally sure of who He is, and our lives are thus forever secure in Him.

JESUS CHERISHES CHILDREN

Never despise one of these little ones; I tell you, they have their guardian angels in heaven, who look continually on the face of my heavenly Father.  Matt. 18:10, N.E.B.


Imagine that a local business executive and his wife are coming to your house for dinner.  They ring the doorbell and, without looking up from the stove, you shout, "Wipe your feet as you enter; I don't want any mud on my carpet.  And shut the door!  You weren't born in a barn, you know."  Later, as they eat around the table, you snarl at them, "Chew with your mouth closed.  And remember, if you don't eat all your vegetables, you don't get any dessert."

The scenario is ridiculous, at first glance, because we sense that it simply wouldn't be appropriate to treat a dignified adult in that manner.  But an equally heavy wave of embarrassment should hit us that we find it so easy to speak to our children in this way.  Sensing that it is wrong to hurt the feelings of adults by speaking in bilittling ways, we wonder why we so readily try to control our children's behavior through this kind of despising harangue.

Children apparently suffered these kinds of indignities in the time of Christ also.  Even Jesus' disciples had carelessly picked up the habit of treating children as  half way between humans and animals.  They were convinced that children were not worthy of the Master's attention and that they were doing Him a favor by keeping these not-yet-persons on the outer fringes of Jesus' admirers.

But Jesus knew what was happening in those young minds--that they were forming their most fundamental pictures of themselves.  He wanted to protect that precious self-image within them, knowing that they would need it throughout their lives.

Yet there was another vital concern in Jesus' mind.  He knew that in those tender years the children were building their basic understanding of their heavenly Father--an understanding that would be written deep in their minds and not easily changed by later verbal instructions.  Children form their understanding of God far more through the relationship they experience with their parents than through the concepts spoken to them by those parents.

If parents despise or belittle the children, especially when in the process of disciplining, those children will grow up believing that God treats them in the same way.  Who would love and trust such a God!

CONFIDENCE IN THE MASTER OF THE PLAN

But he knows the way that I take;when he has tried me, I shall come forth as gold.  Job 23:10, R.S.V.

Everything possible had happened to Job.  He's lost his herds, his servants, his sons, and his health.  His wife did not understand him; his best friends suspected him of some secret misbehavior.  Still his trust in God remained unshakable.  "Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him" (Job 13:15, N.I.V.).

Though we tend to admire Job for his courage and fortitude, it was not his own inner strength that got him through his troubles.  It was his understanding of and relationship with God that sustained him.  In the first ten verses of chapter 23 we are given an insight into the kind of relationship that existed between God and His friend Job.

Job begins by acknowledging that he feels as though God has laid a heavy hand on him.  But he does not allow those feelings to overwhelm him or to make him doubt God's purposes. And, far from making him seek distance from God, he wishes that he could be in His very presence!  "I would state my case before him and set out my arguments in full; then I should learn what answer he would give and find out what he had to say.  Would he exert his great power to browbeat me?  No; God himself would never bring a charge against me" (verses 4-6, N.E.B.).

Job knew that God had a "master plan" for his life.  And though at the moment he was completely confused as to what was happening in his life, he had confidence in the Master of the plan!  He knew God to be open and fair.  He also knew that it was not like God to use His power to manipulate people, that God was reasonable (verse 7).  Even through his struggle against his feelings of separation from God, he never considered that God was distancing Himself from him because of some wrong he might have committed.  "He knows the way that I take [He is intimately involved in what is happening to me]; and when he has tried me, I shall come forth as gold" (verse 10, R.S.V.).

In the end, after Job was restored, God told Job's three friends, "You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has" (chap. 42:7, R.S.V.).  God knew He could trust Job because they were friends.

EARTHY RELIGION

If anyone gives so much as a cup of water to one of these little ones, because he is a disciple of mine, I tell you this: that man will assuredly not go unrewarded.  Matt. 10:42, N.E.B.


Many of this world's religions divide all of life into two categories: the sacred and the secular, the religious and the common.  Religious experience includes never letting the two get mixed up.  Things religious have their own vocabulary, their own frame of reference.

But Christianity does not follow this pattern.  There is not a sacred part of life versus a secular part of life.  There are not two distinct ways of speaking and thinking, because for the Christian all of life is sacred.  His relationship with Christ flavors every dimension of living, even the most mundane.

I have known more than one perplexed Christian who has wished for a deeper involvement with the things of God.  These devout people have longed for greater preoccupation with spiritual themes, for more absorbing interest in heaven and the world to come.  Some of them seem to have missed Jesus' surprising revelation that one's readiness for the coming kingdom is measured by some very earthy actions.  In today's verse we hear Jesus describing discipleship in terms of one's readiness to give a cup of cold water to a young child.

Sometimes it is easier to think in religious terms when one is in church or enjoying a group Bible study.  It is easier to affirm one's interest in heaven when other heaven-bound pilgrims are nearby to say "Amen!"  We can quickly recognize certain behaviors as correctly religious--such as giving offerings to the church, singing certain songs, and attending religious meetings.

But Jesus (who urged us to be salt in the earth, not in the church) keeps challenging us to ignore that artificial line between church-life and the life of the world around us.  One who has the mind of Christ--the Christ who lets His rain fall on the just and the unjust--is going to give a cup of cold water to a child because that's the kind of person he is.  He is not going to do it because he can report it during the missionary emphasis period in church or because the child is a member of his church.  It will be the free-flowing expression of his very character, and that's why it can be such a reliable measure of his readiness for the kingdom.