It seems awfully wasteful of God to command Jeremiah to get
a new loincloth, wear it briefly and then go put it in the cleft of the rocks
along a riverbank in order to ruin it doesn’t it? The reality is that He is that “foolish” in
choosing a people and I don’t just mean Israel, I mean us too. There was a time when the nation was bound so
tightly to Him that it was like a loincloth around His waist, that time was
called the Exodus. The prosperity of the
Land separated them from Him, they went astray, forgot their first love, and
became no longer able to serve the purpose for which they were intended, to be
a royal priesthood and a holy nation.
The Lord takes a people for Himself, causes them to cling tightly to Him
and then watches as we become wayward in sin, knowing from the start that we
will not be truly faithful to Him. He
loves us so much that He chooses us in spite of knowing we will not always be
faithful. How far do we have to go in
waywardness before we return? Examine
your life today and return in those places you need to return.
Can you see Jesus’ face when they ask this question, “Are we
not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” His response could have been, “So you’ve got
nothing at all.” What a ridiculous
question and it’s funny that Jesus doesn’t address the issue of being a
Samaritan, His origin was in heaven, period, end of sentence and He never
engaged otherwise with the “knowledge” of people who thought they knew His
earthly origin. They ask Him here the
same basic question the Samaritan woman asked.
They ask if Jesus is greater than their father Abraham while she asked
if He were greater than their father, Jacob, Abraham’s grandson who had given
them the well where she met Jesus. In
both cases, the answer is yes because Jesus preceded both men and whatever they
had to pass along to their descendants came from Him. Her reaction, and that of her countrymen, was
a good bit better than picking up stones to kill Jesus, wasn’t it?
“Present yourselves to God as those who have been brought
from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.” That
would be a pretty good way to start the day each day wouldn’t it? If we are not
under law but under grace how do we define sin without the law? The law continues to have a function in our
lives and it is to point to sin and righteousness, the opposite of sin. I can’t know truly what one is without the
other, like light and dark. Now, I can
be obedient to the Spirit which will lead me into all righteousness, life not
lived in avoiding sin but actively righteous, in ways that Jesus transcended
the prohibitions of the law into something higher, righteousness. The other side of that is that I am not pure
in spirit, there is something else inside me that can convince me that things
are not unrighteous, not sinful, and yet the Word says something different, and
it was given for that reason.
Sanctification, Paul says, is the process of submission to righteousness
leading to eternal life. He means that,
at the end of the road is eternal life.
You can’t have justification without sanctification, if you do, the road
leads somewhere other than eternal life.
No comments:
Post a Comment