Good Morning!
The joy of the Lord is to be found in Himself. When Jonah runs from God he is running from who he has defined God to be. We do the same in our own lives when we reduce our Heavenly Father to either a capricious Sovereign who does what he wants when he wants, and we are merely cosplayers in his world or a divine being that is so remote that it doesn’t really matter what he thinks or does as long as we can keep him at bay. Saul does the latter when he throws up a sacrifice because he thinks that is what God wants. Job’s friends are consistent with the former as they come up for reasons why Job is going through a dark night of the soul. Both of these take the self-revelation of God and hide it for sin’s sake. As Christians our living aright begins in humbling ourselves and resting in the nature of our Triune God. He is who He is, not who we think He should be or that we want Him to be. The First Commandment is there for a reason. For today’s prayer and worship help we are going to think more about who Jehovah is and why a right understanding of Him is central to a well-structured life informed by the good news of the gospel.
For example, there are two reasons generally speaking why troubles come to a church. Lack of leadership and a lack of communication. When we think about our God we can most certainly never charge Him with either of those weaknesses. He has graciously provided us a complete and sufficient testimony to the world that He made and governs by His providence, which we call the Bible. If you desire to hear what God has said open the Scriptures and read them. They are only hard to grasp for most folks for the simple reason that they don’t like what He is saying. Likewise, there is no person who can downplay or ignore the beauty and perfection of the Kingship of our Lord. He is perfect in all His ways, including the way He has set forth His Church through the offices of minister, elder, and deacon. Last Sunday evening in our second service at Bethany we walked through Joel 2:12-17. In the midst of the prophet’s utterance there we hear that the elders of a church are to be the ones seeking and gathering the people into the house of the Lord. It is one of their key responsibilities as God’s undershepherds. As I noted in my exposition of the passage it is interesting that the call to gather is immediately followed by showing that the first set of people gathered are children and, as the old King James Bible says, “. . . those that suck the breasts.” When Jesus seeks to teach the disciples He calls the children unto Himself, showing how much He loves them, hence also why such focus is placed on the gift of baptism and why we lay that outward sign of an inward reality. Part of our love for God is witnessed in our resting and trusting in His ways and means of order and salvation, not what we desire them to be for our own purposes. Our focus in the life of the church must always have God’s priorities and ways before ours. Knowing God as He declares Himself changes how we approach these matters.
In closing, the reason why that concerns us is that the trouble we face in life is often of our own making. We hate to hear that our culture is built on passing the blame, but we all know it is true. It is natural in the world we have made to see ourselves as the victims of everyone else’s existence. When things do not turn out the way we would like our first response is always to question the way God made the world, though we may not recognize that is what we are doing. If the Lord says, “Do X” and we “Do Y” then we should not act surprised that the consequences of not doing X come upon us. It is often the faithful wounds of a friend that help us to grow in grace and understanding, and who is a greater friend to us than the one who made us and gave us true life in His grace? It is an encouraging thing to consider that a way that God cares for us is sanctifying us through the exposing of our own sin. Jonah ran from the Lord for many reasons, but chief among them was a fear of God helping those who were his enemies. Let us never be afraid of doing good so that good may come.
Blessings in Christ,
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
Pastor, Bethany ARP Church
