Star Struck

“When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.” (Mt 2:10 AV)

 

There is some confusion with this verse compared to the preceding verse.  The preceding verse suggests the three wise men did not lose sight of the star from the time it appeared in the east until the night they encountered the babe who would save the world.  However, a careful reading of the account will reveal this star first appeared in the east.  Then it appeared again when the three wise men arrived in Jerusalem.  It may be the star did not appear again until the three wise men arrived in Bethlehem and guided them directly to the house wherein Jesus lay.  Some have asserted the meaning of the word star here means the person of the LORD Jesus Christ to prove He can be in two places at one time.  Don’t ask.  It’s a stretch longer than the equator.  What I believe the Spirit is trying to convey here is very simple.  The three wise men spent two years looking for a promised Judean King.  A promise of which they were made aware when Israel was in captivity to their forefathers.  They saw the star while in the east.  They saw it again while in Jerusalem.  And they saw it for the third time when entering Bethlehem.  They rejoiced because they saw the end of their faith.  That is, they saw the star stop atop a house and entering in, saw Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world.  What the Spirit is saying this day is our joy, upon finding our Savior, should be exceeding.  Especially when we consider the journey it took to get there.

Fatherhood is so awesome!  The LORD blessed my wife and me with three great sons.  I will never forget the feeling when they came into the world.  There were nine months of expectation.  Nine months of ultrasounds.  We could see our sons as they were fashioned by the hand of God over nine months.  David’s remarks regarding being fearfully and wonderfully made were like a slide show.  There were the showers held in honor of the baby soon to arrive.  There was the furniture shopping and decorating of the nursery.  Then we had to accumulate a small inventory of every possible accessory modern parenting required.  When I was a baby, all a mother needed was a canopy stroller, bassinette, and some clothes.  Today, new parents have to carry a second mortgage to afford everything the experts tell them they need.  Each step of the way only made the anticipation of our new arrival all the more exciting.  Nothing can compare to the day of our son’s arrival.  The first was an emergency C-section.  After he came along, the other two were scheduled.  There were no surprises.  The date of their arrival was foretold.  The joy that one feels when God blesses you with a child is indescribable.  This joy goes far deeper than happiness.  A feeling of blessedness makes everything else disappear.

This is how the three wise men felt as they cast their eyes upon the One whom they had been seeking for over two years.  What got me thinking this morning is how much our joy can change.  Like the feeling I had when I saw my son for the first time compared to when I see them today.  Is it the same?  It should be.  They may have gotten a bit older and larger, but they are still the same person I exceedingly rejoiced over many years ago.  In the same vein, do we rejoice the same as we did when we received Christ those many years ago?  He is still the same God.  He is still the most compassionate Savior who loves us unconditionally.  He still intercedes for us.  He still comforts us with His presence.  If He has not changed, this means we have changed.  If we do not rejoice exceedingly when in His presence, it is because we have changed and not He.  The same joy the three wise men experienced when they walked into that house should be the same joy we experience every day.  He has not changed.  We have.

The Door Is Ajar

“Even from the days of your fathers ye are gone away from mine ordinances, and have not kept them. Return unto me, and I will return unto you, saith the LORD of hosts. But ye said, Wherein shall we return?” (Mal 3:7 AV)

 

The amazing thing about the underlined phrase is when the LORD said this.  Malachi is the last book of the Old Testament.  For over 400 years, there would be no new word from the LORD.  Israel would return to their land only to disappoint the LORD once again.  When Christ comes, they will reject Him as their Messiah and fall into more hard times.  Yet, this invitation for reconciliation continues.  This invitation is not time-sensitive.  As long as Israel exists, or Israeli people exist, this invitation is still in force.  The offer is the same to the N.T. saint.  As long as we are willing, the invitation to return is always open.  There is absolutely no infraction that would permanently turn the back of God on His children.

Over the years, I have helped many parents with wayward children.  There is something about a father’s love for a child who is wayward that is beautiful to behold.  In thinking of an example to share, there are too many which come to mind.  Never having a wayward child, I cannot relate the same way they have.  Someone from the outside can erroneously assume dad does not take his child’s sin seriously.  If the door never closes, then perhaps that child will never learn their lesson.  I have never seen a father who tolerates a child’s wicked behavior without any consequences towards the child.  There might be a temporary estrangement in place.  There might be financial consequences the child must endure.  There might be some changed locks or repossessed automobiles.  There might be a temporary banishment from family affairs.  But of all the fathers that I have helped, almost to a tee, they leave the front door, figuratively speaking, ajar.  There is always a way back.  There is always a way where a child who may have disappointed his father, can be accepted in the father’s life anew.

This is the nature of our heavenly Father.  The door is always ajar.  He will not force us to return.  But if we do, He will be at the door, waiting with open arms.  The prodigal’s father is a good example.  The prodigal had to make the first move.  He had to desire to return.  Once the desire was met with action, then the father stood with open arms and welcomed him back into his home.  The son never lost his relationship with his father.  He may have felt like he did.  As far as the father was concerned, the relationship was still in force and as strong as ever.  To know our heavenly Father will open the door each and every time we return is a comfort this erring saint holds dear to his heart.  I have disappointed my dear Father more times than I can count.  But I know His mercy fails not.  He has not changed the locks.  He has not removed my name from the mailbox.  My room is still there and my bed is made.  There is food in the pantry and He sits, waiting for me to poor my suffering heart to His earnest ear.  He welcomes me!  He reminds me I am His child for all of eternity and there is nothing that can separate me from the love of God.  So, return I must.  The door is ajar.

All In One

“And the LORD shall be king over all the earth: in that day shall there be one LORD, and his name one.” (Zec 14:9 AV)

 

The Spirit leads this precious prophet to encourage His people regarding the end times.  Between the time of this writing and the fulfillment thereof, Israel will have to go through so very hard times.  At one point, the covenants between the twelve tribes of Israel and the LORD are suspended.  They will have to incur the consequences of their repeated rejection of the holiness of God.  Tough times of correction and challenges to their faith lie ahead.  Even near extermination was on the horizon.  Yet, the prophet knows this will not always be the case.  He knows because the covenants require better days.  The promise above is to a suffering people who have almost lost hope.  This promise is not limited to their reconciliation alone.  No.  This promise is the reclamation of God’s creation to Himself under the person of the LORD Jesus Christ.

We live in a world full of authorities in conflict.  True information is almost impossible to find.  Most resources are controlled by a bias and information shared is usually through a tainted lens.  It may seem like governments are becoming a bit more amorous towards one another.  As socialism spreads to every corner of the globe, it seems as though there might be a pox romano in the making.  However, as James tells us, war stems from lust.  Not political agreement or differences.  As long as there is something another nation wants, there will be war no matter how similar their governing philosophy is.  Homes are broken apart by conflict.  Conflicting goals or interests.  Conflicting values.  But mostly, conflicting authority.  Children are caught in the crosshairs of a battle of the wills.  The time of compromise and unity has long passed.  Chaos is the new norm.  There is no peace.  There is no harmony.  All because authority is in conflict.

The statement is emphatic.  It is absolute.  There is no gray area.  Jesus is coming back and He will be the only authority of record.  There will be one King.  One God.  One government.  One and only one to whom all must account.  Not just some of the earth, mind you.  The entire planet!  There will be no rogue government set up to challenge the King of kings.  No revolution until the thousand years of Satan’s captivity is up.  Then this uprising will end quicker than it started.  When we look at all that mankind is doing, we can be assured this is only temporary.  Talk about peace!  The mind cannot even come close to imagining what God has promised.  The book of Hebrews calls it ‘the rest’.  A very descriptive and accurate term.  Where there is singularity and purity of authority, there is rest.  Where God reigns, there is peace.  This is inevitable.  I may not see this in my lifetime.  But it will happen.  Jesus is coming back and there will only be one King.  And His name will be one.

The Command to Hope

“Turn you to the strong hold, ye prisoners of hope: even to day do I declare that I will render double unto thee;” (Zec 9:12 AV)

 

Or, as some commentators say, prisoners yet not without hope.  Zechariah was a prophet to the captivity.  Along with Daniel, Jeremiah, and others, Zechariah also shared hope with the people of God’s correction.  They may have been prisoners.  But not without hope.  Even though they had disappointed the LORD, this did not mean God had abandoned them.  There was still the hope of the covenants.  They would always be in force.  Circumstances may have been not to their liking, but there was always hope.  This should be the attitude of any saint.  Life is not perfect.  It never will be.  What we have which the world has none, is hope. The statement above is a command.  It is a command to take hold of that which they can because they should have hope.  It is a command of exhortation.  Yes, it is an encouraging statement.  But more to the point, it is a command to be encouraged.

There were many life lessons learned in the middle of a pool.  My father signed us up for swimming lessons as soon as we were tall enough.  I have told the story of my instructor and how he threatened to push us in if we didn’t jump in.  When we started, the instructor had us watch as more advanced swimmers were jumping off the diving board into the deep end.  What an ominous name.  The deep end.  We knew what that meant.  Certain death!  No matter how much evidence of others successfully navigating the deep end, somehow, we thought we would be the exception.  I dreaded the day when this mean instructor would have us line up at the deep end and march towards the diving board.  Half our class was in tears.  At first, we wore life preservers as we jumped off the board and swam to the side.  Then off came the vest.  Terror struck our hearts.  We were prisoners to this man’s sick ideas.  Imagine!  Making the eight-year-olds jump into twelve feet of water and survive.  What kind of nut was this guy?  There had to be a graveyard full of students with his name on it.  The thing is, when we came up for air, the first thing our instructor did was to focus our attention on him and the pole of assistance he offered.  He slapped the water with it and yelled at us to strive towards the wall.  We turned towards the stronghold of the edge.  We were told to take heart because we would be ok.

We construct hope in the wrong fashion.  Hope does not come because our circumstances are resolved.  Hope is necessary because our circumstances are not resolved.  We don’t need hope after the fact.  We need hope before.  We don’t need hope when the need is met.  We need hope when we are prisoners of our circumstances.  What we need to accept is the command to have hope.  The requires we stop allowing our circumstances to be the only lens by which we view reality.  The strongholds are what we need to keep in view.  If Israel would have given up hope while in captivity, there would be no nation today.  They cannot give up hope.  Neither can we.

Trust The Master

“The LORD by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath he established the heavens.” (Pr 3:19 AV)

 

The implication above is that if God’s wisdom could create and sustain all of the universe, surely it can guide us in our path of life.  The complexity of all that we see is infinite.  How do I know?  Because there is no end to documentaries and nature films detailing some wonderous discovery of God’s hand.  The fact man can never stop learning of his material world points to a Creator with infinite knowledge and ability.  I remarked in an earlier post regarding the work secular mathematicians and scientists finished concluding that our universe is so well balanced life can only exist on Earth alone.  If another planet had conditions favorable to life, Earth would not.  When one considers the vast amount of heavenly bodies and how they all must be perfectly in their place for life to exist on one planet, the majesty of God is evident.  Again, the implied question which results from the statement above is: if God can create and sustain such a complex universe perfectly to sustain life, then why do we doubt His ability to guide us through life?

Computers can be a wonderful thing.  One of my favorite subjects while attending High School was technical drafting.  I really didn’t get into architectural drafting.  One of the coolest things was hot a three-view rendering of an object could infer information from one view to another.  For instance: a measurement from the top view and a measurement from the bottom view could intersect in the side view.  However, the days of drafting tables, scales, and calculators are gone.  With today’s technology, entering some information and not all information would suffice.  A computer can extrapolate a 3D rendering so precisely, the designer is free to grab a cup of coffee while the computer is calculating.  The computer can even figure out load variances, tolerance, and a host of other calculations at the same time.  What once took months or years, the computer can do in a matter of minutes.  Our treasurer is an amazing servant of God.  He has our finances figured and projected on a spreadsheet.  Just a few numbers and I have more data than most pastors.  It is astounding.  If our computers can do all this, why wouldn’t we trust them to balance our checkbook?

God has it all in His hand.  To Him, our lives are very simple.  Compared to all He has created, our two-decade-long life isn’t all that complex.  To us, our lives can become very complex.  Health care decisions, financial hardships, marriage struggles, the purpose of life, etc. can all be overwhelming.  To us, they are confusing and complex.  To the LORD, not so much.  When we went to school, if there was a problem, we wouldn’t hesitate to ask the teacher. If we were confused about a lesson or our responsibilities, we would seek out the instructor.  He or she had all the answers we needed.  We wouldn’t think twice about disregarding the counsel of our teacher.  Why, then, do we do so with the LORD?  If He created it all and controls it all, it would stand to reason He would also have all the answers we would ever need.  It boils down to faith.  Do we trust the Creator to sustained His creation and give us guidance to make it along our way?

Searching For Treasure

“If thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures; Then shalt thou understand the fear of the LORD, and find the knowledge of God.” (Pr 2:4-5 AV)

 

The ‘her’ spoken of above is wisdom.  Reasoning with the mind should lead us towards God and not away from Him.  This is why the LORD tells us to come to Him and reason together with Him.  The more we seek truth, the close we get to God.  What struck me this morning are the two phrases I have underlined.  Truth should be treated with respect.  Much like one would treat a hidden treasure.  Something to be searched out and sought after as though it had indescribable value.  That which we seek after often does.  Seeking wisdom as though it is mere academics needed for a final exam does not teat wisdom with the worth it should be afforded.  Wisdom should be treated as the treasure that it is.  What we also want to note is that seeking wisdom as a treasure results in the fear of the LORD and the knowledge of God.  This is a bit backward from the first chapter of Proverbs.  In the first chapter, the fear of God must precede the discovery of wisdom.  This may seem contradictory, but it is not.  One needs the fear or respect of the LORD so that He might show you more that will grow that fear and respect.  But I digress.

Who hasn’t played pirates or hunt for buried treasure?  My siblings and I played that a few times.  Something of value to the ‘pirate’ is hidden somewhere in the house or buried in the lawn.  A map is drawn and clues are given so the ‘pirate’ can find his hidden valuables.  The more valuable the hidden object, the more fun it was to play.  I remember my brother and sister and I used to play this a bit.  The object of the game was to see how much we could frustrate our siblings.  We had a large house, so hiding the object was not that difficult.  The most difficult step of the game was hiding something so valuable our sibling would never give up looking for it.  Our clues and maps were sophomoric at best.  We tried!  Eventually, we moved from that house to a new one, and no telling how many objects the new owners found as they remodeled one room after another.  I am sure there was a G.I. Joe or two hidden in the walls.  Summertime was rather interesting because toys we had buried would surface after a hard rain.

If we are to walk into the knowledge of the Holy, then His wisdom must be the most precious of all pursuits.  The mere fact that God allows us the knowledge of Him should humble the soul.  That God would allow finite and sinful man to know Him is beyond grace.  If we see that wisdom as a treasure of His grace, then we will do whatever it would require to find the treasures of His wisdom.  To know God is to know His truth.  To know His truth requires we work very hard to find it.  If we do not value it, then we will never find it.

Just A Reminder

“And them that are turned back from the LORD; and those that have not sought the LORD, nor enquired for him.” (Zep 1:6 AV)

 

The passage referenced is found in a context too lengthy to long to paste here.  Zephaniah is a prophet to the disobedient of Judah.  They are warned that God will deal with them for all their impertinence if they do not repent and turn back to the LORD.  In the verse above, we see a specific failure of those who dwell there.  A failure of which the vast majority of mankind is guilty.  The second phrase is the one we need to seriously consider this LORD’s day.  Those that have not sought to LORD, nor even bothered to enquire as to the truth of the LORD and salvation that can be found only in Him.  Whether we can tolerate the truth or not, the fact of the matter is, a vast majority of people we meet will spend an eternity tortured for their rejection of Jesus Christ as their substitutionary offering for sin.  Our reaction is usually one of two.  We either do not care, or we assume the majority are not lost.  Either is wrong.

We have a church member who is a corrections officer in a nearby institution.  He is a very friendly and personable individual who regularly converses with the inmates.  One wonders how that goes with those who are on death row.  I can imagine one who holds back emotionally deep relationships with someone who the guard knows is marked for death.  To safeguard deep hurt, the guard might keep back more intimate conversations so that when they do pass, hurt isn’t so deep.  Or, how about those who treat the terminally ill.  A doctor or nurse who must see and treat a patient they know is not going to beat the disease.  There might be an emotional disconnect to keep from suffering too much trauma at the passing of someone to whom they grew close.  As a Chaplain, that was certainly a consideration.  Compassion and attachment need not be mutually dependent.  One can show compassion without vesting too much into the person of the afflicted so when they pass, the survivor can go on.

The vast majority of mankind is marked for eternal death.  They have no idea the fate that awaits them.  In our door-to-door escapes, we encounter all sorts of people.  But they all have one thing in common.  They are lost.  Further, they do not know they are lost.  They march along life thinking all is fine and dandy without any real knowledge their eternal soul is in peril.  Some of us saints do not want to entertain the reality of God’s justice.  But He is just!  He must judge!  Those who will not even enquire for, or after, Him, must stand before the King of Kings.  They must look upon His face with the scars of the thorn of crowns upon his brow.  They must behold the nail-pierced hands that bled for them and give a sound reason why they rejected such mercy and grace.  He must judge!  We can never forget that.  There are countless lost souls all around us who, if confronted, will at least be informed of the judgment to come.  We may not like this task, but it must be done.  We may not enjoy thinking of a God who will send the multitude to eternal torment.  But it will be done.  The question is, how much does it bother?  How much will the reality of God’s justice motivate us to share the good news of mercy?