The Lord is going to
use Cyrus to accomplish His will, the restoration of Israel. Was anyone in Israel praying for such an
event? We tend to believe we know how
God can best accomplish things but we always forget to leave room for the
reality that His ways are higher than ours and His thoughts higher than our
thoughts. Are there places in your life
where you're waiting for God to do something you believe He has promised and
purposed and you're expecting it to come about a certain way. Maybe this is the time to step back and ask
Him to show you how He wants to do these things. Isaiah was surely taken off guard by this way
of bringing about the restoration of Israel.
It would be doubtful that he would have come up with such an idea on his
own. The Lord, however, did exactly this
and indeed restored the nation.
Jesus tells two
parables of the kingdom, both of which make clear that His ways are
mysterious. We can explain
scientifically how a seed grows but why that should be so is something we
cannot fathom. Nachmonides, a 12th
century Jewish sage in Spain taught concerning creation that everything, all
the matter for the universe, was initially contained in something like a
mustard seed, except smaller. Jesus used
that analogy for the kingdom 12 centuries prior to that. Creation, like the kingdom of God, is a deep
mystery and we need not understand God's ways but we must have faith that He is
able from something as small as a mustard seed to do according to His
will. All we have to do is have faith
and share that faith, trusting Him for the results.
Paul speaks of the
mystery of husband and wife becoming one flesh as an analogy for the
relationship between Christ and the church and vice versa. If we would understand one half of the
analogy we would understand the other.
How could Jesus love the church given its fractiousness and
quarrelsomeness? He does, however, love
the church as a husband loves a wife and husbands are to love their wives as
Christ loves the church. We get caught
up in the wives submitting to husbands but if husbands loved their wives as He
loves the church then no wife would be unwilling to submit to such a
husband. His love is meant to transform
the church, which means us. Paul sees
the marital relationship being transformed by love and submission. Remember the curse pronounced on Eve, that her
desire would be for her husband but he would rule over her? That desire is to master the man. Paul sees that love transforms and renews the
marital relationship from the curse. The
ways of God are inscrutable but He makes the mysteries known to those who
follow Him. Discipleship and faith come
first then we progress in understanding.
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