THE LORD OUR GOD IS WONDERFUL

The God of all creation is unimaginably powerful and resourceful.

He operates in superlative excellence and precision. The engineering behind the structure of the physical universe and the biological spheres beggars understanding. 

It is commonly said in academic halls that the phenomena in our universe arrived at its current state by happenstance but this is an obvious misunderstanding of the  nature of phenomena and the nature of happenstance.

The universe and all that is in it was made by God and therefore,  every mind-numbing and mind-blowing form and  feature of this universe are attributable to Him.  Any fair observation of the world around us would have to fill the observer with awe and fear of the author of all things.

The salient question is now this: What are we humans to do with the understanding that God exists and is in fact supremely powerful and awesome?

Being sentient entities, we should compare our sentience to the sentience of the creator.  We should try understand the universe and the workings of it structures. The scriptures say, "It is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to find it out". - Proverbs 25 verse 2

In doing our comparison between God and us, we should come to the realization that we have fallen short of the glory of God. We should realise that God is perfect and that we humans have morally lapsed and discover that this is in fact why we are separate from God. 

In other words, we become aware that the universe was made by a brilliant and perfect person but we are also perplexed because we have no direct contact with this person who seems to be hidden from us.

It is here where we discover that God is truly wonderful. We come to the realization that we are separate from God because we, as a race, have rebelled against Him and have tried to set ourselves on a course of self-rulership. 

A cursory look at the nature of the world that we have created for ourselves should inform us that we have not been successful in this enterprise and that without God, we are deteriorating rapidly into a hellish realm of rulership of brute force by some humans over others.

By the sacrifice of His only begotten Son, Jesus, God made a way for us to gain connection to Him again. He has paid the price to restore us out of our rebellion to Him and then has made a way for us to be joined to His family and then made us co-heirs with His Son Jesus Christ in the enterprise of reclaiming as many people as possible into a reconnection with God. 

This is our wonderful God. He wonderfully made us and then He wonderfully saved us and we will see Him with our own eyes and we will behold His wonder and glory.

Amen.

THE LORD OUR GOD IS GOOD

A rich young ruler approached Jesus and asked Him, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  - Luke 18 verse 18

Jesus replied thusly, "Why do you call me good? No one is good—except God alone."

                                        - Luke 18 verse 19

Jesus responded to the use of the honorific, "good", by declaring that it is a title that can only be ascribed to God and yet this man was ascribing it to Jesus even though he did not know that Jesus was God.

Had the young man believed that Jesus was the eternal God, would he not have listened to the wisdom of Jesus to sell all that he had, give it to the poor to lay up treasure in heaven and then follow Jesus?

The lesson from this short narrative is that we should believe that Jesus is God and in doing so, believe that He is good and that we should then surrender all we have to Jesus so that we are under the kingship of the great God who is good. Out of His goodness, we are not only given eternal life but we are given life and life more abundantly.

To get to the place of eternal abundant life in God, we must do what that young man could not. We must believe in the divinity of Jesus. We must believe in His power to save us from our sin and we must trust that He has the power to store our treasure in heaven and we must follow Him.

Amen.

THE LORD IS OUR DELIVERER

The Lord our God has undertaken to extricate us from the kingdom of darkness that we were conscripted into when we, as a race, rebelled against God.

The Lord, in His vast wisdom and understanding, structured a process of practical and legal positions  so as to fulfill the requirements of delivering His people out of darkness and into His marvelous light.

The initialization of these positions was to get His Son Jesus to be born on the earth incognito. While the kingdom of darkness was prepared to stop any redemptive action by God, the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem was a widely celebrated fulfillment of prophetic scripture which evading the attempts by the kingdom of darkness to snuff out the beginning of the ministry of Jesus.

Jesus then grew up and gained stature and wisdom and was able to directly resist the kingdom of darkness. He was tempted by the devil and He deflected the attempts by countering the temptations with scriptures.

He then began to directly confront the kingdom of darkness by healing the sick and casting out demons. After Jesus had set the example of kingdom authority for us, He gave His life up to the cross so that He could die for us. 

The critical juncture in the redemption story had to be carried out without the kingdom of darkness realizing that the death of Jesus was going to be His glorious vindication and victory.

The scripture in fact says : "the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood; for if they had understood it they would not have crucified the Lord of glory"

                              -  1 Corinthians 2 verse 8

It was here at  the crucifixion of Jesus that the redemption story was brought into sharp focus.

Jesus suffered agony on top of agony and ultimately died on the cross in a way that appeared to be an abject  failure but was in fact, a triumph when His death became the propitiation for the sins of mankind. The goal of providing the legal framework for redemption of the human race was accomplished right under the oversight of the rulers of that age. 

He paid the extremely costly price to deliver us out of darkness and to usher us into His kingdom all the while avoiding detection of how the redemption was going to play out.

He delivered us out of condemnation and into His righteous kingdom by His great wisdom and perfect nature.

Praise His Holy name forever.

Amen.

THE LORD IS BLESSED FOREVER

Yes I will bless the Lord

With all my heart

For He is worthy to be praised

He shines brighter, brighter than the sun,

He is worthy to be praised.  (  X 3 )

OUR LORD OF FAITHFULNESS

In human terms, faithfulness seems like an ordinary human trait that some people exhibit and some don't. Faithfulness, however, is a profound function of spiritual significance.

We sometimes take faithfulness to mean marital faithfulness which connotes the idea that a faithful  spousal partner is one who does not stray from the relationship.

We also sometimes take faithfulness to mean that a person steadily and reliably attends to a requirement or need voluntarily. An example would be when person faithfully attends to their elderly neighbour's yard without obligation or prompting to do so.

Those two common uses of the term faithfulness can be joined to derive an accurate definition of the term. Faithfulness is a singular self-imposed duty to a voluntary commitment that ensures its sustenance  and its ultimate fulfillment and completion.

In the bible, our Lord Jesus is described as faithful  to His Father. "but Christ was faithful as a Son over His house—whose house we are, if we hold firmly to our confidence and the boast of our hope."   -  Hebrews 3 verse 6.

Our lord is described as faithful to us. "He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler.” Psalm 91 verse 4.

Our Lord is also faithful in His priestly ministry. "Therefore He (Jesus) had to be made like His brothers in every respect, so that He might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because He Himself has suffered when tempted, He is able to help those who are being tempted"                                                                         - Hebrews 2 verse 17 - 18.

Our Lord's faithfulness is compounded because his faithfulness is eternal and it is backed up by the wisdom and power that only God has.

Praise his Holy name.

Amen.

OUR LORD WHO GIVES LIFE

In the beginning, God made Adam and Adam became a living being when God breathed into him. This is described in Genesis 12 verse 7 as: "Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being."

Adam was a living being and in that state, chose to try run his life separate from God. It was this condition of rebellion against God that separated Adam and the whole successive human race from the life of God. We were equipped with minds and bodies that could operate in the coporeal realm but our spirits, which are the only parts of ourselves that could connect  with God, died.

God, in all His wisdom, began working on the gargantuan project of reconstituting the human race as creatures with living spirits again.

This task was four thousand years in the making. During that time, major portions of human history played out. Empires rose and fell, peoples were enslaved and freed, generations came and went and when finally everything was ready, a baby was born in an obscure village in an animal barn. 

That baby boy was the nexus of all of earth history and was the full preoccupation of heaven for all of existence.

That little boy carried the hope of all creation that we who were dead, could one day be made alive in spirit again and  rejoin our creator who loved us and who moved heaven and earth to redeem us from the thick darkness we were lost in.

Jesus, born in humble circumstance, lived to be the perfect sinless man. Exactly opposite from Adam, Jesus was perfectly obedient to God. Unlike Adam, Jesus could not be enticed by any scheme of darkness to compromise a single article of God's law. 

Having lived a perfect life of obedience to God's word and commands, He nevertheless gave His life up for crucifixion to take the punishment that Adam (and we who were born into His line) deserved. 

At His death, Jesus entered the strongholds of  hell but this cosmological injustice of placing a perfect man into the punishment of hell could not be contained by the flimsy  chains of hell and the crackling eye-searing light of His righteous glory shone forth and the denizens of hell suffered a shattering blow that left them burned and deformed.

The power of the resurrection of Jesus left hell permanently crippled and in disarray and in abject subjugation to the authority of Jesus Christ.

In this verse from John 10 verse 10, Jesus summarized all of world history

The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.

Whereas the kingdom of darkness stole and killed and destroyed God's own people from Him, Jesus came to earth and by  His death,  redeemed us and gave us life and life that was even more abundant than what was alloted to us under Adam. 

Praise the holy name of Jesus. 

Amen

THE LORD WHO BLESSES

The Lord is gracious like a father who loves His children.

He blesses His children in wisdom such that they can be helped towards maturity in God.

He know what we have need of and provides without us even needing to ask.

Blessed is the Lord our father who blesses us.

Amen.