Monthly Archives: June 2013

Glory of God

Pastor's Desk, ,

Dear Family

My family and I were driving back from East London a few nights ago, and I happened to glance up at the skies through the sunroof. The air was crisp and the visibility perfect. What I saw literally took my breath away (causing my wife to lecture me about keeping my eyes on the road). The sky was indescribably beautiful – plastered from the one end to the other with a display of stars unlike I had ever noticed before. Wow! My mind raced to Psalm 19 which says “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”

“The heavens declare the glory of God….” What is the “glory of God”? Well, probably many answers would be correct, but I share the following option with you. For me, the glory of God is simply the indescribable, indefinable beauty of His spirit. Not an aesthetic or material beauty, but the beauty that oozes from His character, the very essence of His being. So, as I gaze at the heavens’ declaration, I humanly understand something of that beauty, complexity, wonder, majesty, weight, etc of who God actually is. Moses understood this as God’s goodness, and yes, it is that as well. But who can actually verbalize the glory of God – this eternal glory that is manifested in so many different ways, in so many attributes that He chooses to reveal to us?!

And the wonder of wonders is that the all glorious, Almighty God, chooses to cover us and even infuse us with His glory! The Psalmist in Psalm 8 says of man that God has “crowned him with glory”. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:6,7 “ For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.” And again in Colossians 1:27 “…Christ in you, the hope of glory…”

All around us, all over us, and even in us, the awesome beauty of who He is. Why not pause a while to celebrate the glory of God – who He actually is? Eish!

Paul

Outsiders In – Insiders Out

Bible Study, , ,

OUTSIDERS IN – INSIDERS OUT

“Paul and Barnabas didn’t back down. Standing their ground they said, “It is required that the Word of God be spoken first of all to you, the Jews. But seeing that you want no part of it — you’ve made it clear that you have no taste or inclination for eternal life — the door is open to all the outsiders. And we’re on our way through it, following orders, doing what God commanded when He said,

‘I’ve set you up as alight to all nations. You’ll proclaim salvation to the four winds and seven seas!’

“When the outsiders heard this they could hardly believe their good fortune. All who were marked out for real life put their trust in God — they honoured God’s Word by receiving that life. And this Message of salvation spread like wildfire all through the region.” Acts 13:46-48 (The Message).

What is this thing called “God’s Word”? According to ancient rabbinic teaching, God’s Word is a manifestation of Himself in another form. This means that what God says is who He is in words that humans can understand. His Word, therefore, carries the same authority as God Himself.

Unlike humans who can say one thing and be something else, God’s Word cannot contradict Him and therefore what He says is what He is. He cannot lie because He cannot say anything contrary to who He is. That makes God’s Word reliable, trustworthy and unchangeable and allows us to understand what He requires because He has made His will known to us through the medium of language.

Paul and Barnabas were dealing with two groups of people. The Jews who were God’s covenant people were custodians of God’s Word entrusted to them in a covenant relationship sealed with blood. The Gentiles were associated with the Jewish religion but were considered “outsiders” because they had no claim to the covenant or the promises of God.

Written into the Old Covenant was the promise that the time would come when Messiah would open the door to Gentiles to have a share in the covenant and in the blessings promised to Abraham. Because of Jewish prejudice, this group of Jews and many others that Paul encountered on his journeys, refused to honour God’s Word by believing the message and receiving their Messiah. They pooh-poohed Paul’s teaching and turned violently against him with full intention of killing him.

The Gentiles, on the other hand, gladly received their message and honoured God’s Word by believing the truth and entering into all the benefits of this new life. Part of the Jewish resistance to the message must surely have been their refusal to accept that Gentiles could share in this salvation on equal terms with them.

When Paul announced that, because of their persistent rejection of the good news he was proclaiming, he would no longer waste his time preaching to deaf ears, and offering God’s gift of salvation to people who had no desire for it, they went ballistic. How dare he take what they thought was exclusively theirs and give it away freely to the despised “outsiders”!

But that is exactly what God intended them to do from the beginning and which they failed to do because they did not honour God’s Word themselves and they thought that they were better than everyone else. Instead of embracing God’s grace and gladly sharing it with anyone who would believe, they shut themselves out of the new covenant and all the blessing promised to them through their revered ancestor, Abraham.

God’s Word gives us glimpses into His big heart. When we take what He says seriously and act on it, we both honour Him and we also gain access to everything He has said. What fools we would be to pass that up in favour of our own paltry opinions!