The good news here is that not only did God create the
world, He is still active in it. The Lord begins by declaring, “I am the Lord,
who made all things, who alone stretched out the heavens, who spread out the
earth by myself…”, all things in the past tense. He continues that same sentence though with a
tense shift to the present and finishes with the future tense. Our faith is based not only in what He has
done but what He is doing and will do.
The surprise announcement is that Cyrus, the Persian king who would be
known as Cyrus the Great, in whose reign the empire embraced all the previous
civilized states of the ancient Near East, expanded vastly and eventually
conquered most of Southwest Asia and much of Central Asia and the Caucasus, was
to be an instrument of the redemption of the nation. As great as Cyrus was, ruling over the
greatest empire in history to that time, he too was only a man who could be
used by the Lord for His purposes and to benefit His people. The sovereignty of God knows no bounds.
The parable of the sower seems to indicate that the sower
isn’t discriminating, wastes seed. He
throws the seed in places where anyone could tell you wasn’t going to produce a
crop. God is constantly sowing seeds in
places such as that in our lives and in the world. We are called to do the same in His
Name. I believe that we never know what
effect the sowing of seed produces, what is now unproductive soil can be made
productive by the work of the only one who knows how and why things grow and
produce. Through all things, the Lord is
at work emending the soil of our hearts and sometimes they suddenly are
receptive to the seed but who knows truly whether the earlier sowing hasn’t had
a role in preparing the soil for its present state. When we come to Him in faith, we become
partners with Him in preparing the ground of our hearts to receive more and
produce more. We are no longer like
Cyrus, unwitting instruments, we are to be partners in His work.
There were those who taught that the body was meaningless in
the grand scheme of things, that it would not last unto eternity so what was
done with the body was similarly unimportant so long as the soul wasn’t
harmed. We, as Christians, aren’t
dualists. In that first lesson today the
Lord speaks of having formed us in our mother’s womb and therefore we should
recognize that God created me not as a spirit or soul in the accident of a body
but as a unified whole and what is done with the body has an effect on the
soul, it can’t be separated. Paul’s
admonition is that they are to discipline the body by keeping from sexual
immorality or even crude talk because the tongue has such powerful control over
the rest of the body. Part of preparing
the ground of our hearts is discipline of the body. If we want to see God do greater things in
and through us in the future we have to work with Him in the present to bring
discipline into our lives, seeking righteousness not only in our hearts but in
our lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment