Again today the Lord speaks into the issue of His
sovereignty. He says to the Israelites,
“I equip you, though you do not know me, that people may know, from the rising
of the sun and from the west, that there is none besides me…” He says that they, His people, don’t know Him
and yet they are being equipped that others may know from the rising of the sun
(the east) and from the west, to the ends of the earth, that there is none
besides Him. Again, He points to the
past, the creation of the universe, and to the future, “Ask me of things to
come…” in order to tell of that sovereignty over all things. The curious response is that He is a God who
hides Himself. In what ways is God
hidden? His ways are hidden from us, we
cannot perfectly know them. His works,
however, are always there on display, the creation of the world, the exodus,
and exile and return of the nation, and for us, the incarnation, death and resurrection
of Jesus. Sometimes when we feel He is
hidden it is best to remember what we know and what we can see.
Jesus declares that one of the reasons God is hidden is that
we fail to make Him known. I would argue
that this is the primary reason He is hidden from view. We are commanded, commissioned and equipped
to share the Good News and yet we spend most of our time thinking and talking
about everything else in the world except the Good News. When we fail to share it we fail to see fruit
and when we do our joy fades. The
partnership with Him in building the kingdom is meant to be a primary source of
continuously experiencing the joy of the hour we first believed. Do we not believe Him? The growth of the church as an expression of
the kingdom is dependent on whether we believe God will use our work to do the
work of growing the kingdom. The church
in the west in our day no longer scatters seed at all. If we want the church to grow there must be a
change in our own behavior.
Paul says we are to walk as wise, remembering that the days
are evil. In contrast, we are to be like
Noah, who likewise lived in evil days, revealing righteousness, living
differently from the world. He sees that
all we do, whether morally or ethically, but equally in our relationships,
reveals the truth. I know it is
controversial, but Paul speaks of wives submitting to their husband who is the
head of their wife as Christ is the head of the church. In that truth, Paul expresses something about
headship even before he gets to instructions for husbands. The way to understand headship, he says, is
to consider how Jesus is head of the church and he has certainly addressed that
issue in his writings. Love, Paul says,
is the way Christ related to and relates to the church. It is, however, a particular kind of love,
self-sacrificial love, laying down His life for the church. If husbands lived in that way towards their
wives, we might see more wives not objecting to submission. The two becoming one flesh goes back to Genesis
and Paul says is a great mystery.
Mysteries take time and attention to de-mystify, not cursory thought
. Let us not be guilty of insufficient
meditation on mysteries.
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