OUR LORD WHO EXTENDS TIME FOR MERCY 

In Genesis chapter 5 verse 25 - 27, an account of the longest living man named Methuselah is given. The passage goes like this;

When Methuselah had lived 187 years, he became the father of Lamech. After he became the father of Lamech, Methuselah lived 782 years and had other sons and daughters.  Altogether, Methuselah lived a total of 969 years, and then he died.

Methuselah lived until he was 969 years old then died in the year that Noah's flood began.

It is said that by the interpretation of the name Methuselah (which could be read to mean " His death shall send"), the life span of Methuselah was what was holding back Noah's flood waiting for people to repent and seek refuge in the ark.

When Methuselah's life was stretched to the extreme limit, he died and the deluge of judgement began.

To read the text this way points to a tendency of God to wait out the clock for the longest possible time even to the point of deferring Methuselah's death till he was  969 years old so that people would have the greatest possible time to repent.

In our present time, spiritual turbulence can be sensed and as it says in Isaiah 13 verse 4 - 5 ;

Listen, a noise on the mountains, like that of a great multitude! Listen, an uproar among the kingdoms, like nations massing together!

The Lord Almighty is mustering an army for war. They come from faraway lands, from the ends of the heavens—the Lord and the weapons of his wrath— to destroy the whole country.

Here, like the era of the flood, we are under warning that the whole country will be destroyed by the wrath of God. This is a time when people are being called to repent and seek refuge in the Lord through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

The clock is running but what metric is holding back the judgement? 

Is it the lifespan of a man? Is it the number of people accumulating into a particular dispensation category like in Roman's 11 verse 25 - 26 that says;

I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery,brothers and sisters, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in, and in this way all Israel will be saved.

Pray to our Lord for mercy and call upon His name to save us.

Amen.

OUR LORD WHO CONFOUNDS OUR ENEMIES

Isaiah 19 verse 11 to 14 says this.

The officials of Zoan are nothing but fools; the wise counselors of Pharaoh give senseless advice. How can you say to Pharaoh, “I am one of the wise men, a disciple of the ancient kings”?

Where are your wise men now? Let them show you and make known what the Lord Almighty has planned against Egypt.

The officials of Zoan have become fools, the leaders of Memphis are deceived; the cornerstones of her peoples have led Egypt astray.

The Lord has poured into them a spirit of dizziness; they make Egypt stagger in all that she does, as a drunkard staggers around in his vomit.

There is nothing Egypt can do—head or tail, palm branch or reed.

Egypt is a type of  regime of oppression that controls its people by coercion and fear. Such a regime enslaves its people using economic strangulation and intimidation until the people are subjugated.

When the regime of Egypt threatens the inheritance of God, the Lord undertakes to save His people and one of the ways that He defends against Egypt is to confound them and render them unable to make intelligent decisions.

The princes and decision-makers charged with pushing forward the agenda of the Egyptian regime are made dizzy by the Lord and they stagger  in one place, unable to work their way out of their previous mistakes which worsens their plight with each step they take.

Ultimately, their schemes are shipwrecked. They are unable to move forward and the whole agenda of oppression is driven back and destroyed.

God's people are set free and can pursue the destinies the Lord has set for them.

Amen.

 

OUR LORD WHO BRINGS JUDGEMENT

In the book of Micah chapter 1 verse 9, the prophet writes this;

For Samaria’s plague is incurable; it has spread to Judah. It has reached the very gate of my people, even to Jerusalem itself.

The Lord God looked at the transgression of Samaria and saw it encroaching on Israel right up to Jerusalem herself.

This somber situation means that the judgement aimed at Samaria would also come to Israel as well.

Fear the Lord for "he comes down and treads on the heights of the earth.

The mountains melt beneath him and the valleys split apart, like wax before the fire,  like water rushing down a slope."

                        - Micah 1 verse 3 - 4

Amen.

 

OUR LORD WHO PROVIDES FOR HIS SERVANTS

In 1 Corinthians 9 verse 4 - 14, the Apostle Paul says this;

Don’t we have the right to food and drink? Don’t we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord’s brothers and Cephas? Or is it only I and Barnabas who lack the right to not work for a living?

Who serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard and does not eat its grapes? Who tends a flock and does not drink the milk? Do I say this merely on human authority? Doesn’t the Law say the same thing?  For it is written in the Law of Moses: “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.” Is it about oxen that God is concerned? Surely he says this for us, doesn’t he? Yes, this was written for us, because whoever plows and threshes should be able to do so in the hope of sharing in the harvest.

If we have sown spiritual seed among you, is it too much if we reap a material harvest from you? If others have this right of support from you, shouldn’t we have it all the more? But we did not use this right. On the contrary, we put up with anything rather than hinder the gospel of Christ.

Don’t you know that those who serve in the temple get their food from the temple, and that those who serve at the altar share in what is offered on the altar? In the same way, the Lord has commanded that those who preach the gospel should receive their living from the gospel.

In this passage, Paul talks about how He and his fellow preacher, Barnabas,  forfeited their right to be supported by those who benefitted from their work preaching the gospel because they did not want to hinder the gospel.

He, none-the-less, explains that it is the right of any man who shares the gospel to share in material support from their spiritual beneficiaries.

Let us remember to materially support those who tirelessly serve the Lord in His kingdom by  preaching the gospel. Let us recall all those who intercepted our lives with the good  news of the gospel and where possible, bless them.

Amen.

OUR LORD WHO GIVES GRACE MERCY & PEACE

1 Timothy chapter 1 verse 1 - 2 says this;

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope, To Timothy my true son in the faith: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord.

Paul greeted His beloved Son in the faith with the blessing that he would receive grace, mercy and peace from both God the Father and from Jesus our Lord.

This blessing summarizes the primal needs of any Christian walking out their faith in Jesus.

To have grace is to have the freedom to draw near to God even when we are not perfect. Grace provides the buffering that we imperfect people need in order to approach our Holy God and commune with Him especially during the time we are growing in the Spirit into maturity as we are made closer and closer to the image of our Lord Jesus.

To receive mercy is to have the compassion of God afforded to us so that even when we commit serious errors and wreck things in our lives and fall into lack and desperation, the mercy of the Lord our God provides for our restoration to Him and the cleansing of our sins and setting us back on our feet when we stumble.

To recieve peace from God is to have the stormy sea of our hearts calmed and made still. In this indescribable peace, we who believe in Jesus find the quiet space to listen for the still, small voice of our Lord when He calls on us and speaks.

Grace, mercy and peace. Let us bless our Lord and God who gives us these priceless gifts by which we can step up to gain more of our awesome God who in Genesis 1 verse 21,  made the great sea monsters.

Amen.

OUR LORD WHO DOES THE WILL OF HIS FATHER

Mathew 4 verse 1 - 4 gives an account of the first temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. The passage goes like this;

Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”

Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

The Lord, hungry after a protracted fast, resisted the temptation to follow the will of the flesh to gratify itself with bread by quoting Deuteonomy 8 verse 3 that says this;

He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

Here, the principal is established that the paramount sustenance for man is not earthly bread but rather every word that comes out of the mouth of God.

Jesus, in John 4 verse 31 - 34, just after conversing with the woman at the well, discusses food with His disciples. In this passage, the principal of being sustained by the word that comes from the mouth of God is brought into sharp focus;

Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?” 

“My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.

Here, Jesus says that man does not live on bread alone but that His food is to do the will of Him who sent Him. This is an exposition on the passage in Mathew that says that man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

These companion scriptures, when looked at together, bring out the weight of what Jesus is communicating to us.

Firstly, and most basic, physical bread is not the primary sustaining source for mankind but rather, obedience to the word of God is the true sustainance for men.

Secondly, whereas the tempter insinuated that the test for the validity of the title, "Son of God",  was whether or not He could turn stones into bread, Jesus asserted that the true test for the validity of the title, "Son of God", was whether  or not He lived on every word that came from the mouth of God by obeying it.

This revealing statement by Jesus then makes us look at Him again and consider how He obeyed the word that came from the mouth of God even unto death on a cross.

In fact, when Jesus was on the cross and about to die, He shouted, "It is finished" which was referencing the passage in John 4 verse 4 where Jesus said His food was to do the will of Him who sent him, "and to finish his work".

Another thunderous unspoken assertion that was contained in that statement by Jesus was that the tempter himself was disqualified from conducting a test of the validity of the title, "Son of God",  because he had failed his own test of heeding the word of God and had instead  said in his heart, “... ‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God, And I will sit on the mount of assembly In the recesses of the north.

Here the tempter is taken to task for diameteically pursuing his own ambition and his own will rather than pursuing the will of God and thus could not be an authority on what the Son of God could and could not do.

These passages also hint at a hidden dynamic  at work. God is Spirit  (John 4:24) and man is spirit, soul and flesh. What is truly wonderous is that the word proceeds out of the mouth of God who is Spirit, is heard by the spirit of a man, then translated into earthly instructions and then is carried out by the soul using  the physically body of a man. 

It is like being a stepdown-transformer for the will of God to the earth and the implication is that to be in the service of God in this way is to be a conduit for God's will upon the earth and acting as that vessel incurs the sustaining power of the life of God which supersedes mere bread as the sustenance of man.

Bless the Lord our God who sustains us. 

Amen.

OUR LORD WHOSE WORD LIGHTS OUR WAY

Psalm 119 verse 105 characterizes the Word of God this way;

Your word is a lamp to my feet And a light to my path.

When we are immersed in the Word of God, it sheds illumination onto our circumstances, our choices and our direction.

The Word of God stabilizes us so that we are not blown around by every wind of doctrine and it assures us of our standing with the Lord  by reminding us of His promises.

When Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days, He was tempted to turn stones into bread but He countered the temptation with these words;

 “It is written, “‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

This means that the primary life source for mankind is not the food that sustains our bodies but rather every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God because, when obeyed, they bring spiritual life and guidance to our feet.

As Psalm 119 verse 130 says:

The unfolding of your words gives light; it imparts understanding to the simple.

Let us bless our Lord who has given us His word to guide us and shed light for us.

Amen.

Reference Resource:  openbible.info