He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul. He guides me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Psalm 23:2-3.
No matter how many times you trip them up, God-loyal people don’t stay down long; soon they’re up on their feet. Proverbs 24:16 THE MESSAGE.
I have learned how to be content with whatever I have. I know how to live on almost nothing or with everything. I have learned the secret of living in every situation, whether it is with a full stomach or empty, with plenty or little. For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength. Philippians 4:11-13.
And continuing our 351 Old Testament prophecies, promises of God, fulfilled in Jesus Christ, we come to number 193: Character: Righteous & Faithful. Isaiah 11:5: Also righteousness will be the belt about His loins, and faithfulness the belt about His waist. And, Revelation 19:11: And I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse, and He who sat on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and wages war.
I loved in Devotions for Women by Ann Spangler this morning, “Journalist Annia Ciezadlo has covered wars in Lebanon and Iraq. Her memoir, Day of Honey, offers an unusual take on what it’s like to live in the midst of a Middle Eastern war zone. Annia explains that whenever she travels, she also cooks “because eating has always been my most reliable way of understanding the world.” “We all,” she says, “carry maps of the world in our heads. Mine, if you could see it, would resemble a gigantic dinner table, full of dishes from every place I’ve been.””
That thought stuck with me in so many ways. As I began to pray after reading my devotionals, in my minds eye I was talking with God around large broken pieces of pottery everywhere. I had to climb around them they were so big. And everywhere I looked, broken pieces. I didn’t know if that was me or Him so I asked Him. He told me the brokenness I saw all around are His children broken by wrong ideas and beliefs and the broken ways of this fallen world. To pray for them. To let His love bring compassion into my own heart and mind. To love Him and His children and to be faithful in prayer trusting Him.
Can we for a moment picture a gigantic dinner table full of beautiful, colorful dishes from every place and time in our world of cultures, and then picture people sharing food and stories together in communion with Creator God – Father, Son, Spirit? Can we begin to understand how limited our understanding is of eternal life with God? When Jesus returns He will bring restoration of all that is good and heal all the brokenness of us. In righteousness He judges and wages war – against everything breaking us.
I loved in Pauline Dogmatics – the Triumph of God’s Love, by Douglas A. Campbell, this passage about sin: “Death is the consequence of sin and its necessary termination and hence its judgment. In fact, we see this process of judgment playing out in death all the time. Every living thing that exists around us has a shelf life, and even the universe itself will one day collapse back onto itself. In the death of Jesus, however, who has become one of us, we see that this ubiquitous destiny is – to borrow a Barthian idiom – the divine “no” to our sinful condition. That twisted state cannot continue indefinitely. God absolutely refuses to give life to a cosmos that is contaminated with sin. Its existence must end. Death is God’s judgment on things that have been turned from life to evil – and doubtless accompanied by a righteous anger against these things. Because it is right to get angry with sin. Indeed, if we don’t, something is wrong. It is just that our definitions of sin and resulting angry reactions tend to be rather less precise than God’s, and they result, furthermore, in less disciplined responses.”
Jesus, the Son, coming when He did revealed the Father’s love for us by becoming one of us to show us Creator God. His impact is with us still today over two thousand years later and counting until that blessed time when He will return and sin will be no more. And we will finally see what we couldn’t understand through our brokenness.
***THANKS, PRAISE, AND GLORY – Father, I thank You; LORD, I do praise Your name! May I glorify You each night and day, love and adore You, be the door for You to enter others’ lives and free them from sin, grace and glory to usher in, life of eternity, even to begin. Father, I thank You. LORD, I do praise Your name! May I glorify You all of my life. May I glorify You all of my life. Ron Sawhill (Athens, Georgia), personal prayer, 2020.***
