Tag Archives: lie

No Darkness In God

Bible Study, , , ,

NO DARKNESS IN GOD

This is the message we have heard from Him and declare to you: God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with Him yet walk in the darkness we lie and do not live by the truth. (1 John 1: 6-7)

John did not mess around with theological concepts and abstract ideas. He came right to the point. He assured his readers that the one of whom he wrote was indeed the one who came from the Father, who lived on earth as a real human being and who was the living Word, representing the Father in all He said and did.

John and his fellow disciples were eyewitness of the truth that Jesus was a man and yet more than a man. They had seen, heard and touched Him and their lives had forever been changed because He came, not only because He lived and died as a perfect Son, but also because He had a message from God for them.

What was that message? Jesus reaffirmed the message of the prophets who spoke for God against the backdrop of His people’s persistent disobedience over centuries of calling them back to Himself. Their constant refrain was: God is holy! He has no part with anything that is tainted with corruption or imperfection.

Even the effects of Adam’s sin over which they had no control, like the shedding of blood during childbirth was an affront to Him because any form of bloodshed was the outcome of sin. Every hint of corruption or imperfection had to be atoned for by the shedding of blood. Death was the penalty He demanded for imperfection, the death of a perfect and innocent animal as a foreshadowing of the death of God’s perfect Lamb.

John declared that God is light. Like love, light is the essence of who He is. If God were only love, there would be no guarantee that He would act in perfect justice towards those who transgress His laws. To be love without the balance of light would leave us with a wishy-washy God who would gloss over every infringement of His perfection in the name of “love”.

That’s the way some people want Him to be, and even believe Him to be so that they can continue in their evil ways with the assurance that God will do nothing about it. But where does that leave others who suffer at the hands of the perpetrators of evil?

We do have the assurance, however, from the mouth of God Himself that His nature is in perfect balance. He is both love and light. He loved the world of sinners but He could not pass over their sin without demanding just payment for what they had done. When the time came, He sent His Son into the world to live out a life of perfect obedience to Him, and then to die as a sacrificial lamb to atone for the sins of the world.

Where does that leave us?

He calls for a response from us to what He has done, not only to deal, once for all, with our state of alienation from Him when we respond to His invitation to believe in His Son, but also to enable us to live in daily fellowship with Him. That means that we remain in oneness with Him by walking in the light of who He is and what He requires of us as His sons a daughters. There is no value in believing that Jesus is the Son of God and that God raised Him from the dead if we do not follow through with a life of transparency with Him and in fellowship with Him and with our fellow human beings.

Unfortunately, so devious is the human heart that we fool ourselves into thinking that we are okay even when we have sinned. Like Adam, we blame others and make excuses for our sin. We may even acknowledge our sin but . . . taking responsibility for it is another story.

That’s where God wants us to be with Him – not just acknowledging we have done wrong when we are caught out, but coming clean with God. The Holy Spirit never, let me repeat – never – beats us over the head with our sin. Accusation is the devil’s work. Our conscience, if trained by God’s word, will point out where we have gone wrong. The Holy Spirit points us back to who we are – holy and beloved sons and daughters of God whom Jesus has made righteous by His blood.

We do ourselves a terrible injustice of we insist that our deviation from God’s way are “mistakes” or “indiscretions”. God calls it sin. If we are unwilling to acknowledge that we sinned because we chose to, not because “the devil made me do it” or “because of what my father or mother did to me” or for any other reason, we remain in the darkness of self-deception and self-denial, and forfeit the delight of fellowship with the Father.

Painful as it is to have to acknowledge that we are deliberately walking in the darkness, and come back to the way of truth, it’s the only way to keep our faces towards Jesus who is the Way, The Truth and the Life and who will take us to the Father.

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.

Have you read my first book, Learning to be a Son – The Way to the Father’s Heart (Copyright © 2015, Partridge Publishing)? You’ll love it!

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Have you read my blogs on www.learningtobeason.wordpress.com ?

 

 

Anchored In Hope

Bible Study, , , ,

ANCHORED IN HOPE

God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf. He has become a high priest forever in the order of Melchizedek (Heb. 6: 18-20).

When God makes a promise and seals it with an oath, we have the assurance that what He has promised is of great significance. His promises are all unbreakable, oath or no oath, because He is God and He cannot lie. However, the oath is for us, not for Him, to reassure us that He means every word He has spoken.

Our hope of receiving what He has promised is anchored to Jesus, who has taken His own sacrificial blood into the Most Holy Place in the heavenly realms as an atonement for our sin. His blood guarantees that God has forgiven and blotted out everything that was written against us. Our high priest is neither a weakling nor a sinner like the Levitical high priests and the blood He presents is not animal blood which cannot atone for sin.

To go back to the old religious system, which was only a picture of what Messiah had come to do, was as unthinkable and impossible as adults returning to infancy. Why would his readers want to throw away an unshakeable hope that their salvation was secure, to go back to rules and rituals that did not bring them the peace of sins forgiven – forever?

What does an anchor do? It secures a vessel to something immovable so that it will not drift off course and be dashed to pieces on the rocks during a storm. These Hebrew Christians were in the midst of a violent storm – such hatred from the authorities that their lives were in constant danger.

Their circumstances offered them no security. Where did their security lie? It lay in God’s promises – nothing that humans could do to them could separate them from God’s love. Whether they lived or died, their eternal destiny was sure because they had a high priest who spoke for them. This high priest did not enter an earthly sanctuary which was only a model of the heavenly sanctuary. He entered heaven itself to present His own blood to the Father.

Those of us who have believed and received this promise are anchored in hope to the mercy of God in the Holy of Holies in heaven. Jesus is not a Levitical high priest who will die and be replaced by another mortal man. He is a high priest in the order of Melchizedek.

The writer had tried several times to introduce his readers to Jesus’s high priesthood in the order of Melchizedek but he was aware of their immaturity and inability to understand the “meat” of the word. This time he plunged on because he wanted them to understand how Jesus fulfilled the entire system of Judaism, so that they were no longer bound by its rules and rituals. There was no more need for animal sacrifices and all the rigmarole that went with them. These were a reminder of the instructions and teachings – torah – of Yahweh which were intended to show them, in practical ways, how to fulfil the greatest commandment both to love God and to love their neighbour, and how to make atonement when they failed to love.

Unfortunately, what was intended to be a provision for sin had become an excuse to sin. Sacrifices and rituals became a way out for them so that they could go on sinning with impunity. Instead of teaching them the heinousness and infectiousness of sin, they became hardened to sin’s seriousness because their sacrifices were always a way out, so they thought.

When God laid all the judgment for sin on His own Son, and then raised His from the dead as proof that sin’s debt had finally been paid, He showed us just what sins does to human beings. He ordained Jesus to be the eternal and never-to-die-again high priest who is at the Father’s right hand making intercession for us, presenting His blood so that we might be forgiven and so that we might turn away from sin and live according to His word.

Can we have an anchor and a hope more secure than that? Absolutely not!

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 Tragic Trade

Apologetics, , ,

A TRAGIC TRADE

“When Paul and Barnabas finally realised what was going on, they stopped them. Waving their arms, they interrupted the parade, calling out, ‘What do you think you’re doing? We’re not gods. We are men just like you, and we’re here to bring you the Message, to persuade you to abandon these silly god-superstitions and embrace God Himself, the living God. We don’t make God; He makes us, and all of this — sky, earth, sea, and everything in them.'” Acts 14:14-15 (The Message).

O, what a message the world needs to hear! We don’t make God; He makes us.

How can it be possible that millions of people have swallowed the lie that the universe came into being by sheer chance and that we can invent our own gods? Surely the wonder of creation itself should lead us to the Creator! Has anything that we use every day just happened — motor vehicles, aircraft, great ocean liners, buildings, computers, cell phones; you name it — it had to have a designer and a craftsman to fashion it.

Surely any rational and sane-thinking person must realise that there is no such thing as spontaneous change or interim stages in a creation of such complex and intricate function. If any component is missing in a machine, it will not work. Anything in a human body that malfunctions or is not there causes deformity and disease. A single extra chromosome is enough to produce Down’s syndrome.

And what about the unity of creation? How can the entire created order function in such perfect harmony, even galaxies of stars millions of miles apart affecting each other, so that the universe has never gone haywire? Without the laws of nature, humans cannot harness the natural world for their benefit. Scientists could never have put men on the moon without them. The universe functions as one to reflect the perfect oneness of the God who created it.

And what of the gods humans have so cleverly invented? Does a single one of them come anywhere near the nature of the God who had revealed Himself in His Son? Can anyone think that up! We can only imagine what we know. Every god humans have ever invented is a taker, demanding, unpredictable and without love or justice.

Only the God of the Bible, who has revealed Himself to us in Jesus, is a gracious and generous giver and a perfectly righteous and just God. We only need to look at the cross to see love and justice coming together in perfect harmony so that God is free to forgive and restore everything humans have messed up by their irrational and rebellious independence.

We cannot hide behind the excuse that we did not know. “But God’s angry displeasure erupts as acts of human mistrust and wrongdoing and lying accumulate; as people try to put a shroud over truth. But the basic reality of God is plain enough. Open your eyes and there it is! By taking a long and thoughtful look at what God has created, people have always been able to see what their eyes as such can’t see: eternal power, for instance, and the mystery of His divine being. So nobody has a good excuse.” Romans 1:18-20 (The Message).

Why is the world like it is? We brought it on ourselves.

“What happened was this. People knew God perfectly well, but when they didn’t treat Him like God, refusing to worship Him, they trivialised themselves into silliness and confusion so that there was neither sense nor direction in their lives. They pretended to know it all, but were illiterate regarding life. They traded the glory of God who holds the whole world in His hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside store.” Romans 1:21-23 (The Message).

What a tragic trade! And what was the outcome?

“So God said, in effect, ‘If that’s what you want, that’s what you get.’ It wasn’t long before they were living in a pigpen, smeared with filth, filthy inside and out. And all this because they traded the true God for a fake god, and worshipped the god they made instead of the God who made them — the God we bless, the God who blesses us. Oh, yes!” Romans 1:24-25 (The Message).