Moses is surely remembering the episode with the spies that
cost him the chance to enter the Promised Land when he says, “If you say in
your heart, ‘These nations are greater than I. How can I dispossess them?’ you
shall not be afraid of them but you shall remember what the Lord your God did
to Pharaoh and to all Egypt…” They must
not make same mistake again and fail to enter the Land because of fear. Egypt was the greatest nation on earth at the
time, no nation was more powerful and yet God delivered His people without a
single arrow or blow being struck in battle.
The kingdom of God advances because of His mighty hand and His
outstretched arm, not because of anything we do in our own cleverness or
power. Do we dare believe that or do we
depend on our own devices and strategies? Two things need to be conquered in us, fear
and dependence on anything other than Him.
Nathanael is another who fell in love with the idea of Jesus
as Messiah at the smallest provocation. Initially,
he is skeptical of the claims of his countryman, Philip, because of the
description, “Jesus of Nazareth.” Can anything
good come from Nazareth? Does it really
matter that Jesus wasn’t from Nazareth? The
reality is that we make judgments based on all the wrong things, we allow our
prejudices to control our thoughts and we sometimes fail miserably to see
things aright because of our presuppositions.
Nathanael’s initial impression concerning Jesus, “Rabbi, you are the Son
of God! You are the King of Israel!” was right.
The most important thing we can do is to keep that in the center, never
lose sight of our first love of Him.
Paul says the basis of Christian ethical conduct toward
other people is to remember, exactly what Moses told the people in his day,
remember what the Lord has done for you.
Paul says to show “perfect courtesy” towards non-Christians because you
were once there, you once didn’t know the truth and you lived based on a
lie. The compassion God showed to us in
our ignorance is to be the model for our conduct but also our attitudes towards
those who do not know the truth, who are still trapped in servitude to the lie,
whose hopes are not in things eternal. Every
conversation we have, every Facebook post by an atheist who hates the very idea
of Christianity should arouse in us two things, praise for the One who saved us
and compassion for that person.
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