"Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine." We were given the job of exercising dominion
"over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every
living thing that moves on the earth.”
Nonetheless, here the Lord speaks of Leviathan and says good luck with
bringing him into submission. We don't
know what is being referred to here but we know that we do not exert dominion
over all things and that is because of the fall. Sin means we no longer exercise the kind of
dominion God would have us exercise, instead we exploit the natural order to
satisfy our desires. Here, the Lord says
that all under heaven is His, that should be an important part of our ethics of
creation care and dominion, it doesn't belong to us, we are caretakers and
stewards of the property of another.
While this isn't the focus of God's lecture, that focus is not ownership
but sovereignty, it surely has something to say about such issues. The one unruly part of creation that refuses
to bend itself to the will of God is man.
While God is sovereign over all things, with us that sovereignty is
exercised ultimately in judgment.
This reading begins with what we believe is the reason
Lazarus isn't mentioned in the other Gospels.
The same ones who killed Jesus also decided to kill Lazarus, to get rid
of the evidence of Jesus' greatest miracle.
John's Gospel was the last written and it is assumed that the other
writers omitted the story of the raising of Lazarus to not draw attention to
him so long as he lived but that by the time John wrote Lazarus had died. Again.
John tells us that Lazarus was "the reason why the crowd went to
meet him was that they heard he had done this sign." Why would they not believe? It is an amazing thing that they could hear
the story, see Lazarus, and determine to kill the man who raised him from the
dead. We will not bend the knee unless
it exalts us to do so.
Paul is a man who understood that God's will was preferable
to his own. Upon seeing the man of
Macedonia beckoning him to come, he laid down his plans and immediately set his
course for Macedonia. It is interesting
that a man of Macedonia beckoned and yet when he arrived there the person to whom
he preached the Gospel wasn't a man at all, but a woman from Thyatira named
Lydia. Lydia was a proselyte who was
prepared to hear the Good News and receive it as true. Her response was not only to accept the truth
but to invite Paul, Silas and Luke to her own home to remain, she was a person
of peace. Are we prepared to change our
plans to suit God's call and need? Is He
sovereign over us?
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