Monthly Archives: January 2022

FAITH FOR THE FUTURE

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FAITH FOR THE FUTURE

These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect (Heb. 11:39-40).

How would you have liked to have been in the shoes of these who died trusting God but having no idea what their future held for them? They knew nothing of the finished work of their Messiah, which was effective for them as well as for us except that they did not know Him.

They had never seen the face of God in a human being who was God and who came to earth to reveal the Father. They had never seen the Father’s love in action, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind and opening the ears of the deaf, casting our demons and raising the dead. They did not know that God Himself would pay the price He demanded for the debt of sin. They had no idea that He would conquer sin and death, defeat the devil and rise from the tomb, never to die again.

They had no indwelling Holy Spirit, a gift from the Father to be with them forever and to make Jesus real to them in their everyday lives. They had no written word to light their way, to nourish their spirits and to reassure them that God was with them when life was tough and when the enemy of their souls harassed them and tried to lure them back into sin. They had no past with Jesus to secure them to their unknown future.

Like their ancestor Abraham, they had the promises of God to guide them towards their future like a distant light in a very dark cave. To this they clung and faced their tormentors and certain death because, in the depth of their hearts they were sure that death was not the end. Like a shipwrecked man in a vast ocean, they had a single lifejacket that kept them afloat and they refused to let go.

Did they know that they were not alone, that there was an army of people who would join them in their search for the permanent dwelling God had promised to those who remained faithful to Him? What lay ahead for those who refused to trade the temporary pleasures of sin in a short and transient life for an uncertain future?

It was their confidence in the promises of God that secured for them their place in His hall of faith. That alone was enough to gain them a standing in righteousness which no amount of good works would secure. It is trust in God’s word alone that pleases God. Just imagine that! He values our trust in Him far more than anything we can do to try to gain His favour. When we take Him seriously, believe what He says and act in obedience to His instructions, we become fully accepted and reckoned as righteous.

It is on this basis that God releases us from the penalty of our past because Jesus paid our debt and secured the forgiveness of our sin and a place in His family. However, if we don’t believe Him, there is no way that we can ever enjoy the benefits of what He did for us. How tragic that there is a world of people for whom Jesus died but they either don’t know it or they refuse to believe and receive His forgiveness because they think they know better.

We must never be like the philosopher, Bertrand Russell who said, “Forgiveness is a beggar’s refuge. We must pay our debts.” How sad that his pride prevented him from enjoying a place in God’s family which is reserved only for those who believe what He says.

Is belief in God’s forgiveness a form of escapism? It might be if it is based on wishful thinking but it cannot be if it is based on the historical fact of the execution of a righteous man and the indisputable reality of His resurrection. All these who died in faith, choosing to remain loyal to God despite the treatment they received at the hands of people hostile to Him, await the resurrection promised through Jesus. They share in the hope that believers in Jesus carry in their hearts.

We are all in it together.

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

A BETTER RESURRECTION

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A BETTER RESURRECTION

There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released so that they might gain an even better resurrection. Some faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated – the world is not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground (Heb. 11: 35b-38).

What a register of nameless, courageous people! What faith!

We cannot even begin to guess who these people were. A few names come to mind of those whom we can identify by the things they suffered. Many remain anonymous as far as the world is concerned, but never in God’s eyes. It’s one thing to trust and obey God when He has an assignment in mind. It’s quite another to believe God – with nothing but His promise for a future life to go on, no reward for believing Him in the present, and no hope of a fair deal in this life.

Their faith carried them beyond this life into the life to come. They had no guarantee that the promises they put their confidence in were true. They did not even have a written document to substantiate in what they put their faith. No one had come back from the dead to affirm that there was something better for those who loved and obeyed God. Their hope lay in what they knew of God from their own experience.

The world’s bitter persecution and murderous hatred of God’s people is evidence of Satan’s enmity against God which he channels through ungodly people to those who have allied themselves with the Almighty. We are a world at war. In the beginning, Satan challenged God for His place in the universe. Beaten though he was, he has not given up the challenge and will not until he and all who follow him are forced to bow and to confess that, after all, Jesus is Lord!

We continue to live in the environment of war and the evidence of it is everywhere. From the subtleties of religious prejudice and the outright promotion, even legislation in favour of everything that contradicts God’s holy standards – abortion, prostitution, Satanism, homosexuality and same-sex marriage, etc. – to the murder of Christians, simply because they believe that Jesus is the only Saviour, the war goes on.

Why did believers still cling to God’s truth when they had to pay such a high price for refusing to recant? Some suffered death in unspeakably cruel ways, and some still do today, but they refused to give up on God.  What held them to the conviction that there was something better for them up ahead? A better resurrection. Why are people still willing to face cruel torture and death today rather than recant their faith in God?

God has built into the human spirit the conviction that there is an afterlife. Some religions have fabricated fanciful ideas about the idyllic existence that awaits them beyond death. Some go through elaborate burial rituals to send the departed spirit on its way. There are a few who deny that there is anything beyond death – but that does not change the hope that exists in them whatever they choose to believe. These are all efforts to deny the truth that there are only two destinies awaiting the human race, with or without God.

Because He is our Creator, we are all accountable to Him, whether we choose to believe it or not. What we believe or do not believe cannot change the truth.

He has also set eternity in the human heart . . . (Eccles. 3: 11b).

God created human beings – people who are both body and spirit. Without our bodies we are disembodied spirits, not human beings. His plan of restoration includes the resurrection of our bodies, not the perishable state we are in now but an eternal and indestructible body like the resurrection body of Jesus. He is the firstfuits of the resurrection and, because He conquered death, we shall live again in our eternal bodies, human and complete as God intended from the beginning.

Our lives on this earth in these mortal bodies is transient.

The life of mortals is like grass, they flourish like a flower of the field; the wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more (Psa 103: 15).

Human imagination cannot venture into the realm of what lies ahead beyond the grave. This is God’s realm and He has not told us in detail what to expect. However, He had told us to anticipate something unspeakably wonderful for those who love Him, and that is enough to hold us when everything in this life turns sour. We may not all have to suffer for our reward which is the gift of faith, not of suffering. Some may gain it through suffering, others through persevering faith in everyday circumstances. The question is, “Do we love Him?”

However, as it is written: “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived” – the things God has prepared for those who love Him – these are the things God has revealed to us by His Spirit (1 Cor. 2: 9-10a).

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

THE POSITIVES OF FAITH

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THE POSITIVES OF FAITH

And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell about Gideon, Barak, Samson and Jephthah, about David and Samuel and the prophets who, through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, and gained what was promised; who shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of the flames and escaped the edge of the sword; whose weakness was turned to strength; and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies. Women received back their dead, raised to life again (Heb. 11: 32-35a).

In this glorious hall of faith, there were many who experienced massive victories in the face of overwhelming odds.

During the time of the judges, when the Israelites had no strong leader after Joshua’s death, the lure of the paganism of the Canaanites around them sucked them back into idolatry and brought God’s anger upon them. Their enemies overran them time and again. When they cried out to God for mercy, He heard them and sent deliverers like Gideon, Barak and Jephthah to drive back the enemy. Gideon, for example, triumphed over the hoard of Midianites with a measly three hundred men because God fought for them.

David and Samuel were giants in the history of God’s people. Samuel’s birth to a barren mother was a miracle to begin with. Against all odds, he led Israel in a time of apostasy, and kept the Canaanites at bay although he was not a military man. He appointed David to be king at God’s command after Saul’s failure to live up to his anointing.

David’s faith is legendary. As a stripling teenager, he ripped wild animals apart to protect his father’s sheep. He brought down the Philistine champion with a sling and a single stone. He rose in the ranks of the Israelite army to become a great warrior and loyal supporter of Saul in spite of Saul’s jealousy and murderous hatred. During his reign, he extended the borders of Israel to its greatest in Israel’s history by defeating the surrounding nations. He became known as “a man after God’s own heart” and the model of all of Judah’s kings.

God raised up great prophets after Samuel to walk beside the kings as advisors and confidantes. Some were valued as partners by godly kings. Others were imprisoned and even murdered because their message was unpalatable to evil men who insisted on polluting God’s people and God’s land with filthy idols.

Some had a powerful influence on kings and rulers in foreign governments where they were taken as exiles. Daniel served in the empires of Babylon and Persia from teenage to old age as a wise administrator and loyal subject to pagan kings. His faith in the God of Israel, however, took him through exposure to possible death more than once but he did not flinch. Whether he lived or died was irrelevant. He remained faithful to the God he served. He and his companions were miraculously rescued time and again, and Daniel even led the great Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, to faith in his God.

Elijah and Elisha served God in the idolatrous northern kingdom of Israel, moving among the people to call them back to Yahweh. Elijah took on the wicked Jezebel and her four hundred prophets of Baal in a contest of faith on Mount Carmel. He stood alone against them but God was there. God sent divine fire so hot that it burned up everything, reducing even the stones of the altar to ash before the eyes of the watchers.

These two prophets raised dead boys to life through their faith in God.

God was alive and active among His people in response to the faith of those who loved Him because He loved His people and because they needed His intervention. Through their faith He revealed His authority and power to His people over the false gods they worshipped although they turned their backs on Him time and again.

The history of God’s people is alive with God’s involvement with them. If ever a people should have known that the God they served was real and was with them, it was the Israelites – and yet, they turned away from Him to worship the gods of wood and stone. Was it because they preferred the sinful lifestyle their idol gods stood for? Their God demanded a standard of righteousness and holiness that was unattainable except through faith, and most of them had no appetite for Him.

But those who did, few as they were by comparison, made it into God’s book of life and were the recipients of His miraculous partnership with them because that’s who He is, the God who is still with us and for us if we are for Him.

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

THREE HUGE EVENTS

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THREE HUGE EVENTS

By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as on dry land; but when the Egyptians tried to do so, they were drowned. By faith the walls of Jericho fell, after the army had marched around them for seven days. By faith the prostitute Rahab, because she welcomed the spies, was not killed with those who were disobedient (Heb. 11: 29-31).

Three huge events! Whoever heard of people crossing a sea on dry land or a city falling without a shot being fired? What about a pagan prostitute helping the enemy because she believed in the enemy’s God? But it happened.

The Israelites were in a bit of a spot. A few million of them and they were cornered on a stretch of beach on the shore of a 5,000-feet-deep sea. On both sides were mountains, and behind them the advancing army of Egyptians, determined to force them back to slavery in Egypt.

But they had a God who was watching. He stepped in with some rather miraculous interventions! He put Himself between the Egyptians and the people all night in the form of a fiery pillar. That should have been enough to scare off the Egyptian army after everything they had gone through in Egypt. Funny how people never learn!

Then, without warning, the wind began to blow – nothing unusual in the desert except that this wind blew in the right direction, cutting a path through the sea and drying up the sea bed. It blew all night. When the sun rose the next morning, the Israelites were astonished to see dry ground in front of them. Not only was that, but the path through the sea almost level, not 5,000 feet down. At Moses’ command they began to walk – right through to the other shore.

The Egyptian soldiers thought they could do the same, but they were on the wrong side of God. They didn’t reckon with the need for faith. The only faith they had was determination to get the Israelites back but their kind of faith didn’t work. The same water that protected God’s people, wiped them out and left the people free of their enemies – for good.

And what about Jericho? This was no ordinary city in those times. The first city God’s people encountered inside the border of Canaan was Jericho. It had to be heavily fortified because it guarded the entrance to Canaan from the eastern border – the Jordan River. It was impenetrable from below, with a vigilant people inside to boot. The Israelites had no chance of breaching the walls. They had no military equipment, an untrained and untested mob.

From a human point of view, their case was hopeless – and the Jericho-ites knew it.  The first day it was a joke. They poked fun and shouted insults at the motley crowd of ex-slaves marching silently around the city walls. The second day they crowded onto the city wall to watch the spectacle and to throw rubble at them. The third, fourth and fifth days drew fewer and fewer spectators. On the sixth day, hardly anyone bothered to watch.

On the seventh day something changed. Instead of dead silence, the priests began to blow their shofars. The eerie sound echoed across the hills and bounced off the city walls, sending shivers of fear down the backs of the people barricaded inside the city. What were these strange people up to? They soon found out when the silly army ended their seventh lap around the city with a mighty shout. With an ominous rumble increasing to a roar, the city walls disintegrated right in front of their eyes. The walls they thought were protection melted like butter in the sun.

They fled in every direction but it was of no use. The same people they mocked turned into merciless killers, destroying everything until the city lay in ruins and the inhabitants lay in silent heaps, a bustling city turned into a historical relic in one short day. Impossible in the natural but terribly possible with God.

What about Rahab? She heard about the goings-on in Egypt – news travelled fast, even in those days – and she knew in her heart that the God of these Israelites was not like the gods of the Canaanites. She didn’t know much about the people or about Him, but she knew enough to be afraid. She wanted to be on His side rather than against Him. She put her confidence in the promise of the spies and waited.

When the walls of the city collapsed, the piece where her house stood remained intact. Imagine that! It stood like a defiant pillar in the middle of the ruins. No one bothered to watch as the “traitor” escaped with her entire family – unharmed while everyone else perished.

None of these miracles were possible except for God! History? Yes, but it’s worth trusting Him, don’t you think? He’s still the same God today.

If God is for us, who can be against us? (Rom. 8: 31b).

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

THE PINNACLE OF FAITH

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THE PINNACLE OF FAITH

By faith Moses’ parents hid him for three months after he was born, because they saw he was no ordinary child, and they were not afraid of the king’s edict. By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt because he was looking ahead for his reward. By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the king’s anger; he persevered as seeing Him who is invisible. By faith he kept the Passover and the application of blood, so that the destroyer of the firstborn would not touch the firstborn of Israel (Heb.11: 23-28).

Moses got the longest slot in this faith hall of fame. He deserved it, of course, because he epitomised the qualities and characteristics of faith in the era of the Old Covenant – and that before the covenant prescriptions were even given. Let’s look at this man’s track record and the reasons for his endurance.

It started with his parents, Amram and Jochebed. Few of the others’ parents were mentioned. Moses had a remarkable mother. She recognised something special in her new-born son, not just because he was an unusually beautiful child but because he had an aura about him that she could not escape. Save him, she must. She obeyed the king’s edict, but not to the letter. “Throw the boy babies into the river,” was his heartless instruction. Instead, she put him in the river – in a little waterproof boat, and sent big sister Miriam to watch.

Sure enough, the Pharaoh’s daughter was captivated by the adorable Hebrew baby. She fell in love with him and claimed him as her son with his own mother as the wet nurse. For Jochebed, everything was going to plan. While she suckled her son, she fed God’s promises into his mind, singing the songs of her homeland and her faith for as long as she could while he was under her care.

Moses absorbed his heritage along with his mother’s milk. When he left home to live in the palace as an Egyptian, he was a thorough Hebrew at heart. Perhaps Jochebed even instilled into his mind the seeds of a deliverer which he never forgot. When the time came, he took his opportunity but it was not yet God’s time. Having completed his training as an Egyptian prince for forty years, he had to undergo training in survival in the desert for another forty years. Eighty years under God’s tutorship; his task must have been of utmost significance for such a long apprenticeship.

Jochebed defied the king’s edict because she recognised something others had not seen – a calling on Moses’ life. When Moses was ready for the next phase, he defied the king’s anger because he saw what no one else was able to see – the God who had called him to be a deliverer. Once he had received his call in the desert through an encounter with his unseen God, he kept his eyes steadfastly on Him, and not on the circumstances which were bad enough to put a lesser man off. 

Moses not only saw God, he also saw the future and, because of what he saw, he was not tempted to lay hold of the trinkets life in Egypt offered him. Even the richest of treasures were transient – part of this life which would come to an end and all the earthly comforts, riches and pleasure with it. O yes, he would not forfeit his reward by identifying with his own people, a rabble of slaves though they were, but the reward he saw ahead was a lasting one – beyond this life and forever.

Moses realised something else – God had a lamb for their protection. He observed the Passover by faith in the blood of a lamb which would save them from judgment. Did he see by faith another Lamb – slain from the foundation of the world for the sin of the world? 

We would do well to embrace what Moses valued more than anything the vast wealth and ease Egypt had to offer:

1. He embraced his Hebrew heritage because his ancestors had received God’s promise. They would inherit a fruitful land and become a great nation. He chose to be part of them even though getting there would be uncomfortable and costly.

2. He chose to ignore the king’s anger. He confronted the king under a greater authority than the ruler of the most powerful nation on earth. He was no longer under his jurisdiction but under God Himself. Moses would crush Egypt’s gods, challenge the king’s power, force the king’s hand and lead his people out with the king’s permission. When the Pharaoh changed his mind and pursued his people, he used his delegated authority to do a mighty miracle and destroy Egypt’s army once and for all.

3. Moses did all this because he saw and believed in the reality of the unseen realm and the invisible God who reigned over all the kingdoms of the earth. This was the secret of Moses’ faith. He kept his focus on the God with whom he had spoken. He trusted Him; he obeyed His instructions to the letter; he relied on Him for leadership, for wisdom, and for mercy when His people defied him. He clung to God in times of crisis. He pleaded for his people when God’s anger threatened to exterminate them. He was so intimate with God that he became known as a friend of God.

All the way it was just Moses and God. It’s no wonder he had the longest slot in this resume’ of God’s greats. He deserved it, don’t you think?

Where do you and I fit in? Would we even get a mention in a historical record like this? For what would you like to be remembered?

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.