12. Problems in the Land

Meditations in the life of Abraham : 12. Problems in the Land

Gen 12:9,10  Then Abram set out and continued toward the Negev. Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe.

Now the main thing I want us to remember is that Abram has only an embryonic faith. He knows very little of the Lord. He is on a major learning curve with the Lord for the rest of his life. So far, back at home, he had come to an awareness of the Lord speaking to him and telling him to go to Canaan where he would have a family and become a great nation. He had followed that guidance and come to the Land and when he reached the centre of it, the Lord had spoken to him again and declared that this land would belong to his descendants. So far, so good! Perhaps to spy out the whole land he continued on south. Then it happens!

Food in the land starts to run out. Now he has flocks and herds but life doesn’t comprise only meat. We aren’t told what caused this food shortage. All we are told was that there was a famine and it was severe. Now at this point Abram might have been forgiven for feeling slightly peeved: I’ve been brought all this way to this land and as soon as I get here they run out of food! So much for God’s guidance! That’s how embryonic faith might respond.  Don’t be all super-spiritual and deny it; it’s just how most of us respond. If you deny that, you really don’t know yourself – at least when you were a young Christian, and maybe still today.

Be honest with yourself, it IS how young faith responds, and even some of us who have been around a while! Things go wrong and we wonder where God is. Why didn’t He protect me and stop this happening? Perhaps when we first came to Christ we thought everything would be wonderful from then on.  If you have been around in the kingdom of God for a longer time you will know that things often go wrong in the world but the Lord is always there for us. Why is it like this?

Abram’s situation demonstrates that things go wrong in this Fallen World. That is the reason it is like it is; the world is fallen. It is no longer perfect as it was when God first made it; it is now broken by Sin and that means things go wrong, all of which can eventually be traced back to the Sin of mankind. Does God step in and stop these things? No, we know that He doesn’t. He is always there to be called upon and He will always help when asked, but He allows us the freedom to live in a world that works like it does because of our actions, our Sin. More than that, He uses such ‘breakdowns’ to test or train us. How do we respond when things don’t go right? Do we cope gracefully or act like spoilt children and throw a temper tantrum?  I know my ‘natural’ tendency is to feel all miffed by things going wrong. I am a work in progress.

So a famine comes to the land. What should Abram’s response have been? Well probably with the little knowledge that he has, to do what he does, to go south toEgyptwhere they appear to have food. It might be smart to say he should have asked the Lord but one wonders what sort of answer the Lord would have given. It might well have been to say go down to Egypt, but it would probably have come with a reassurance that the Lord was with him which might have given him more confidence in the light of what was to follow. But he doesn’t because he is only a new believer and new believers haven’t learnt to refer every problem to the Lord and listen for an answer. If we see what follows as failure, remember the Lord doesn’t cast him off and doesn’t withdraw His promises of blessing. The Lord has a plan for this man and his descendants and that plan allows for the fact that he is a very human man and will get things wrong.

The reality for each of our lives is that we will get things wrong – many times, but as long as they are not purposeful rebellion against the Lord, He will still be there for us and will pick us up and take us on. It is part of the faith learning process that we get things wrong. It is part of the learning process that we learn to confess our sins and our failures and say sorry. That is all part of growing up in the Faith. It may take us a long time to learn some of these lessons, but the Lord is not in a rush. In the meantime He will allow us to be confronted by things going wrong in the world so that we will have further opportunities to learn to overcome.

Check out your present circumstances. Are there things that concern you, things that are not going right, things that are stressful, things that are indications of the world not working right or people not working right?  Rejoice that here is yet a further learning exercise! Hallelujah!

7. Joseph

7. Joseph

(Warning: In this little series of ‘meditations’ there are simply wonderings about what actually some of the people in the Christmas story felt. They are obviously based on Scripture but they are only wonderings, for we do not know. Yet, if they help us really think into the wonder of what happened two thousand years ago at the time we call Christmas, that will be good.)

The young man awoke with a start. He lay there thinking for a few moments. “It’s happened again!”

He reflected back to that first dream. He remembered it so well even though it had been a year ago.

He had been grieving over Mary. She had let him down; she had let the family down. And then the dream came. It was one of those dreams that stay with you when you woke. In fact it wouldn’t go away. At the time he had thought, “Am I dreaming? Of course I am; it’s a dream! No, have I made it up?”

But it wouldn’t go away and he found the message of the angel in the dream reassuring. But was it real? Was it God speaking to him: “It’s all right; I gave Mary her child; marry her.”  Throughout the day, wherever he went, the dream stayed with him. It didn’t fade away like dreams tend to do. By the end of the second day, he dared utter a prayer: “Lord, I believe you. I will marry her.”

But that had been a year ago.

Since then they had had to travel to Bethlehem to be counted in the census and there Mary had had their child. ‘Their’ child! He didn’t understand it but her story matched his dream and he had come to the place of seeing himself as the guardian of the baby she was carrying.

Then that same night had come the shepherds with their tale of angels. Perhaps I am right after all.

They had found a distant family member who let them have a room in their house and they stayed in Bethlehem until they had been able to go up to Jerusalem to offer the sacrifice. It had been there that the old man and woman and heralded them and prophesied over the child. Again reassurance!

They had intended to return to Nazareth but the family had encouraged them to stay and Joseph had been given some work and so before they knew it several months had passed.

And then, just yesterday this caravan of strange travellers had arrived looking for them. He didn’t know how but as soon as the men saw them and their baby, they knew them and, to Joseph’s embarrassment, had bowed down before the baby. Then they presented them with gifts. What gifts! If they sold off these things they would be provided for, for years! When they had left it seemed like life was rather empty. But these men had spoken of their son in glowing terms. Angels, shepherds, people in the temple, and now men from the East; it all pointed the same way. This son of theirs was someone great. But what did that mean? Joseph wasn’t from a great family – well yes he could trace it right back to the great King David, but that meant nothing today, surely. They were an oppressed people under the boot of the mighty Roman army. Nothing was going to change that!

And then came another dream, another angel with a message. It was as vivid as the first one. “Go to Egypt, Herod will try to kill the child!” There was no doubt about it; he was quite clear.

Where would they end up? Mary roused from sleep and smiled at him. I’m going to have to tell her. Here we go again! Where’s it all going to lead?

Reading for today’s story: Matt  2:13,14

15. Second Chances

(We pick up again the series we started several weeks back)
Lessons from Israel: No.15 : God of Second Chances

Ex 7:16,17 Then say to him, ‘The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, has sent me to say to you: Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the desert. But until now you have not listened. This is what the LORD says: By this you will know that I am the LORD: With the staff that is in my hand I will strike the water of the Nile, and it will be changed into blood.

This narrative that goes on for a number of chapters in Exodus, covering the ten plagues that came upon Egypt, is unique in the Bible and it highlights something here perhaps better than anywhere else in the Bible. It is so obvious that mostly we take it for granted. We have, in fact, referred to it already in a previous meditation. It is the fact that God could have destroyed the Egyptians in one go, without any further warning – but He didn’t. He gave them a second chance, and then a third and so on. It is so remarkable that, as I said, we take it for granted.

Now this goes right to the heart of the argument that we so often hear from atheists that God is a hard, capricious, unforgiving God. What we witness as we read through chapter 7 to 11 of Exodus is the God of second chances, the God who holds back His hand of judgment, the God who gradually increases the pressure and who, every time, allows the Egyptians to learn and to turn – but they don’t. I have commented many times in these meditations in the years of writing them, that I first noticed this many years ago when I did a series of verse by verse studies going through Jeremiah and noted the number of times that God’s word came to Israel and Jerusalem before eventually the captivity and exile came. There was nothing hasty about it at all, just as there is nothing hasty about God’s activity here in Egypt. In fact it is frighteningly methodical and specific, one thing flowing on from another, almost like a giant steamroller ploughing on over the land so slowly, unstoppable by the puny individuals standing before it. It’s almost like the tide coming in, inch by inch, again unstoppable.

But it is only the sin of Pharaoh and his people that cannot see this. Referring to Satan, the apostle Paul said, “The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” (2 Cor 4:4) Referring to the darkness of sin, the apostle John wrote, “whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness; he does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded him.” (1 Jn 2:11)  Both of them understood that submitting to Sin and to Satan blinds men, and Pharaoh is blind! In his case it is clearly pride that had hardened his heart and it is that which makes him blind so he cannot see that he has no chance of winning this contest. How easy it would have been to have let this foreign people go and just carry on ruling his own people, but the trouble is that pride doesn’t like being told what to do and so we hear people saying, “Don’t you tell me what to do; I’m just as good as you!” Pride blinds!

The reality in Egypt may have been that there were ordinary people who did take notice of what Moses was saying and thus were saved when the plagues got worse, because you will see that although initially, everyone was affected by the plagues, as they went on, the nature of some of the plagues meant that individuals could respond and avoid the impact of the plague (e.g. the hail). The incredible truth is that God gives us human beings as many chances as possible so we can never say, when we face Him in eternity, that we hadn’t been given a chance. This is why Peter wrote, “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” (2 Pet 3:9) If God seems to allow unbelievers to get away with mocking Him or bad men simply to carry on doing evil, it is because He is giving them opportunities to come to their senses before they face Him in eternity. Jesus also conveyed this in his parable of the fishes (Mt 13:47-50) showing that good and evil will live side by side until the end – but there will be an accounting. In such ways the Lord gives opportunity after opportunity to people to turn to Him. Never, when they face Him in eternity, will they be able to say they weren’t given a chance – they were, again and again!

Now if this seems to just apply to unbelievers, perhaps we who know the Lord should ask ourselves how many times does the Lord need to speak to us before we get what He is saying? It is all very well to point fingers at unbelievers but, in reality, do we hear what the Lord is saying to us? The seven churches of Asia Minor in the book of Revelation testify to the fact that we can carry on blissfully in our Christian lives thinking all is well, while the head of the church has issues with us. It should not be. May we have ears that are open to Him, that hear Him and respond to Him!

8. God of Strategy

Lessons from Israel: No.8 : God of Strategy

Ex 3:18-20 “The elders of Israel will listen to you. Then you and the elders are to go to the king of Egypt and say to him, ‘The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us. Let us take a three-day journey into the desert to offer sacrifices to the LORD our God.’ 19But I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless a mighty hand compels him. 20So I will stretch out my hand and strike the Egyptians with all the wonders that I will perform among them. After that, he will let you go.

Let’s sum up the lesson here and then work through it in detail: God has plans and God knows what He’s doing! Some silly people like to portray God as an old man, with the inference of senility, but that is not the God revealed through the Bible. Our God is Creator of all things (whether He took hundreds of millions or years or thousands of years is, frankly, irrelevant!). He designed this world, He knows all about it and He has the power to change it when He wants to. He is all-knowing and all-wise. He knows everything there is to know about every person – who they are, what they are like, how they will respond and so on. That is what the Bible reveals to us about God and so we shouldn’t be surprised about anything we find in our passage above.

The Lord has just instructed Moses to go back to Egypt and meet with the Israelite elders: “Go, assemble the elders of Israel and say to them, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers–the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob– appeared to me and said: I have watched over you and have seen what has been done to you in Egypt. And I have promised to bring you up out of your misery in Egypt into the land of the Canaanites, … – a land flowing with milk and honey.” (3:16,17) Those are his ‘marching orders’. Go and tell the Israelite leaders that you’ve met me and that I’ve said I’ll deliver them. But the Lord didn’t stop there because He knew what the response would be because, as we’ve just said, the Lord knows all about us and He knows how we’ll react. Thus we come to our verses today.

“The elders of Israel will listen to you.” That’s a good starting place. There’s going to come more as Moses worries out the questions on his mind, but for the time being that is a good start: the leaders will listen to you! But next comes what he and the elders are to do: “Then you and the elders are to go to the king of Egypt and say to him, ‘The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us. Let us take a three-day journey into the desert to offer sacrifices to the LORD our God.” That is to be the point of confrontation with Pharaoh. It wasn’t a demand to totally let the Israelites go, just to let them go out into the desert to worship their God.

But now God shows that He is a God who knows people: “But I know that the king of Egypt will not let you go unless a mighty hand compels him.” God knows what Pharaoh is like. It isn’t like God is sending Moses into a situation where he is blind to the facts of the situation. Oh no, the facts are quite simple: Pharaoh is a proud and powerful man and his nation is seriously into the occult with all their worship of different ‘gods’ (as will become clear further along in the story) and such people don’t take kindly to being told what to do. Oh no, Pharaoh is going to dig his heels in because he thinks he is boss and he has yet to learn that he’s not!

So is God going to give up at that point? No He’s not! God is a planner and a strategist. God, as we’ve now said a couple of times, knows people and knows exactly how they will act, so nothing in the following chapters is going to come as a surprise to Him. We’re going to see that it comes as a surprise to Moses but that is just because Moses isn’t very good at listening!  Now don’t be upset at that; just ask yourself how good at listening to God you are. How many times do we have to hear something preached or something prophesied before we take it in?

No, at the moment Moses is more concerned about why it shouldn’t be him doing this, and because of that perhaps, he doesn’t fully take in all that the Lord is telling him – but the Lord can live with that, because He knows Moses as well! Yet God has a simple strategy to deal with Pharaoh’s intransigence: “So I will stretch out my hand and strike the Egyptians with all the wonders that I will perform among them. After that, he will let you go.” There it is! Simple! Pharaoh will refuse, I’ll do some stuff, and he’ll let you go! From God’s perspective it IS simple because He is Almighty God and Pharaoh is just a puny man. The outcome has been decided before it all starts. If only Moses could have understood that from the start it would have saved him a lot of heartache. But then the same applies to us.

When we enter a course of action at the Lord’s command, the outcome is decided before we start – if God has said it. Yes, there may be a number of bumps along the road, but God knows about them and He’s taken them into account. The reason He allows them is first, because He’s given free will to silly people, and so there may be opposition along the way and, second, because He wants to teach us some stuff along the way. We are going to get changed along the way and become more like His children. It’s all part of the learning process. What fun! Well not always! Learning is a bit hard sometimes when the Lord has to free us from our silly ways of thinking. Still, He knows us, and He still loves us. Rejoice in that when you don’t cope with the bumpy road along the way! He’s got a strategy and it does take all that into account. Don’t worry; you’re going to get there! God isn’t committed to failure.

3. God for us

Lessons from Israel: No.3 : God for Us

Ex 3:7.8 7The LORD said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. 8So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey–the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites.

The Bible always gives a very accurate picture of mankind. One of the psalmists identified the folly and completely wrong thinking of mankind when he wrote, “The kings of the earth take their stand and the rulers gather together against the LORD and against his Anointed One. “Let us break their chains,” they say, “and throw off their fetters.” (Psa 2:2,3) That was the same folly that Satan got Eve to take on board which was akin to the man in one of Jesus’ parables who said of his master, “I knew that you are a hard man.” (Mt 25:24). The truth which contradicts these lies and misconceptions is seen in our verses above as the Lord explains to Moses what this encounter is all about.

Note what He says: “The LORD said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering.” In this declaration the Lord speaks of three things about Himself – He has seen, heard and, as a result is concerned.  Sometimes when tough times go on we think the Lord doesn’t see what is happening – but He does; He sees everything and He hears everything. Yes, the Lord had seen and heard all that was happening to Israel in Egypt. So why hadn’t He moved before? The answer has surely got to be because He was waiting for the right time to arrive when Israel would be ready to be led out of Egypt.

They had come to Egypt in Joseph’s time and they had prospered there. They probably though it was a great place to be because they were doing so well, and thus they settled there. The only trouble was that it wasn’t the place of God’s choosing for their future, it wasn’t the best place possible for them. No, He had, “a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey,” lined up for them, a place free from idol worship (of which there was a lot in Egypt) and free from the domination of ungodly leaders (which there was in Egypt). Even as their circumstances got harder they coped with it and we have an expression that fitted – ‘better the devil you know rather than the one you don’t.’ It is clear from their grumblings, even when they eventually left under miraculous circumstances, that they still had hankerings to be back there. Human sin expresses itself in a variety of ways, and the one that stands out most in this study is our ungratefulness or our inability to accept that God knows best and, even more, God wants the best for us!

But going back to our verses above, note that God doesn’t look on dispassionately. He saw and heard what was going on and he was “concerned about their suffering.” God feels for His people. Again and again in the Gospels we see Jesus moved by compassion (e.g. Mt 9:36, 14:14, 15:32, 20:34). He felt for people and what he felt moved him to act. God doesn’t just stand watching dispassionately. He feels for us.

But it doesn’t stop there. He doesn’t just stand at a distance feeling bad about us; He comes and does something: “So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land.” The reason He has come to Moses using this burning bush to attract his attention, is because He has come to do something about the situation. Now in the next meditation we’ll focus on how He does that so often, but for now we just want to focus on the point that He does come to help us because He is for us!  This is the truth that the Bible testifies to again and again. When the apostle Paul says, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Rom 8:31) it’s a rhetorical question and he is basically saying, “Because God is for us, who can be against us?”  Have you ever really taken that in? God IS for us! God is FOR us! God is for US!  Everything about salvation says that God has delivered us from the bad old life and has delivered us into a new life of goodness and blessings.

In the same way, in today’s verses, the Lord was speaking of delivering Israel out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. He doesn’t merely deliver us out of the bad and then leave us! No, He has got something much more wonderful to take us into.  We often quote Paul saying, “he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son,” (Col 1:13) but let’s emphasise here the fact that we have been taken out of one place (darkness under Satan’s rule) and been placed into another place (the kingdom of the Son). In this new place we experience forgiveness, no condemnation, adoption as children of God, a new power source that brings us into the experience of knowing love, joy, peace, patience etc. etc. (Gal 5:22,23) And the world talks about being in fetters?  Who has them in fetters? It is not God! He comes to deliver us from the fetters of Satan and Sin. Scream it from the housetops – God is for us!

1. God of Initiative

Lessons from Israel: No.1 : God who Takes the Initiative

Ex 3:1-4   Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. 3So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight–why the bush does not burn up.” 4When the LORD saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!” And Moses said, “Here I am.”

The purpose of this new series is to examine the life and activities of the nation of Israel as they related to God and see what we can learn about God and about ourselves. Our starting point is, in fact, before they were constituted a nation and we go right back to the time of their slavery in Egypt and will watch them being delivered and then escorted to Sinai and then on into nationhood.

Our story starts with Moses who, for forty years has been a shepherd in the wilderness. They aren’t even his sheep because he was, “tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian.” Moses had once been a prince in Egypt but now he was a nobody, looking after someone else’s sheep with no hope for any change in the future. If you look at a map you will see Midian is located to the east of the stretch of water that separates off the Sinai peninsular. It is a very long way from Egypt and a long way from anywhere. More than that, “he led the flock to the far side of the desert and came to Horeb, the mountain of God,” and Horeb, it is thought, is another name for Sinai, which means he was now right on the other side of that water. He’s about as far from anyone as he can be. This is not the most hospitable of places on the earth. This is the last place you would expect anything special to happen, but how wrong can you be!

It is at this point that the turning point of Moses’ life came, although he was not yet aware of it for, “There the angel of the LORD appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush.” Now when God sends an angel it doesn’t always mean that he is seen in physical form and when the angel speaks it is as if God speaks and so often the two are referred to interchangeably, so all Moses sees  are flames of fire. Yet there was something strange about what he saw because normally where there are flames they burn up whatever it is that is burning, yet we read, “Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up.” That naturally brought a reaction in Moses: “So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight–why the bush does not burn up.” If that wasn’t spooky enough, it now really gets spooky: “When the LORD saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!” Suddenly there is a talking bush, and what makes it worse this bush knows who he is! I suspect Moses was somewhat flabbergasted at this point, “And Moses said, “Here I am.” We have just heard Moses’ first words to God, and there are going to be plenty more of them before we finish the whole story as we progress through these mediations.

Now there is something so obvious about all that we have just noted that many of us miss it, but it is a crucial point in Scripture. Very simply it is that God is an initiator. The history of Israel – and indeed of the Church – begins with God. The existence of both has a little to do with man and much to do with God. Wherever anything significant happens in the Bible, it is because God has taken the initiative and God has acted.

The whole of Creation (Gen 1 & 2) is all about God acting and bringing everything into being. In Genesis 12 the story of Abraham starts with God’s call to Abraham. Getting the family of Jacob (Israel) to safety in Egypt, starts with God speaking prophetically to Joseph (Gen 37). Now, hundreds of years later, God takes the initiative with Moses to have Israel delivered out of Egypt. But it’s not merely to take them out of Egypt; it is also to take them in to the Promised Land of Canaan.

When we come to the New Testament, hundreds of years had passed since God last spoke from heaven, as He waited for just the right time to send His Son, but when the time was right, Jesus came. God initiated the plan of salvation. After Jesus returned to heaven, there were days of silence until the day of Pentecost arrived and God poured out His Spirit and the Church was created. Again and again, things happen because God initiated them. Christianity exists because God clearly took the initiative and brought it about. Yes, He used humans, but the real cause of transformed lives was because HE moved. Throughout the history of the Church there have been times that we call times of revival. These are simply times when God takes the initiative and moves powerfully on His Church and upon people and many are saved.

Do you remember what Paul said to the Philippians? “he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Phil 1:6) Yes, they were the work of God. HE had begun it, HE had brought them salvation and HE was now working in their lives. When we read the Bible, see the hopeless state of mankind again and again, and then see God taking the initiative to bring salvation. We’ve just seen it with Moses, and we see it in the Church and in our own lives. Praise and worship Him!

32. God’s Time

ADVENT MEDITATIONS No.32

32. In God’s Time

Matt 2:19,20 After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, “Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel , for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.”

Have you ever had a time in life when everything seemed to go wrong and you were left wondering whether you even had any future at all? Life is full of upheavals that sometimes we would prefer to call catastrophes. One minute everything was going fine, and then either gradually bit by bit, or even perhaps suddenly, it all started changing and you were left alone and in despair.

Well, the Bible is full of such incidents. Moses, the Prince of Egypt, was one such person. There he was; his future certain, as an adopted prince of the king of Egypt . But he’s aware that he’s different; he’s aware he’s an Israelite by birth, and one day he tries to help his birth-people and ends up killing an Egyptian. He has to flee the country and for the next forty years he is looking after sheep in the wilderness hundreds of miles away. Without doubt he must have given up any hope of any meaningful future. He would simply die as an unknown shepherd miles from anywhere. And then God turned up, and he became one of the most significant men in history!

But it doesn’t have to be forty years to feel you have no future. After the pain of personal failure, any period is too long. We don’t know for sure just how long Joseph and Mary and their baby were in Egypt, but they must have been wondering about the future, wondering what had happened. A year ago they were happily engaged in Nazareth, and now here they are hundreds of miles away in a foreign land with a tiny baby to look after. The visit of the angel to Mary was probably now over a year back and in a year your memory begins to dull, and when everything has not worked out as you expected, you can be left wondering was it all a dream – but then there is the baby!

How long will we be here? Will God speak to us again? Will it ever be safe for us to return? Surely these must have been some of the questions going through their minds. One long day followed another. Did Joseph get a job or did they just live off the gifts the wise men had brought them? This is not their land. These are not their people. What are we doing here? And then God spoke. The trouble about this is that we can go weeks or months just wondering and then, it’s as if He came suddenly, and He spoke. There is usually no warning. He just turns up and speaks. A few hours before you might have been wondering if you’ll ever hear from Him again, and then without any fanfare He speaks – and it all starts over again! Is this Him or is it wishful thinking. Joseph has another dream and the angel appears again but now to tell him it is all right to return home; it’s safe now!

Do you see this? So often we just read this story with so little thought. Oh, Joseph had another dream; how nice! Yes, but that was after days and weeks and months of uncertainty. If you think the Christian life is one of daily conversations with God, you are half right. You can talk and talk and talk (it’s called praying) but sometimes it seems like a brick wall and you hear nothing in return. Then – at just the right moment – He speaks. You’d almost given up, but He hadn’t! If you haven’t ever seen how important timing is with God, check it out – Rom 5:6, Gal 4:4, Gal 6:9, Mk 1:15, Matt 10:19, Mt 26:18, Jn 7:6,8. Jn 7:30. Oh yes, it’s all about right timing and God knows when it is, so rest in that knowledge today. Your times are in His hands. Be patient and rejoice in that!

31. Harms Way

ADVENT MEDITATIONS No.31

31. Out of Harm’s Way

Matt 2:14,15 So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

The world in which we live today seems increasingly unstable. Three or four years ago, terrorist threat became a very real feature of modern life and that has continued. In the past years the forces of nature have also wreaked havoc in many parts of the world, and it seems that no area of safe from possible natural catastrophe. Fear has become a very real part of many people’s lives as society has changed out of all recognition from fifty years ago. Where is there some source of stability?

As we look into these verses today and yesterday, we find our answer. Hollywood has produced various films where rogue government groups hunt the hero. This could be one such story and the rogue authority is Herod. He is shortly going to have every child under the age of two killed in an attempt to purge the land of a potential competitor to his family dynasty. Very soon the land is going to be very unsafe for this little family; their lives are under a very real threat, even if they don’t realise it fully yet.

And that’s where God’s intervention comes in. God has bound Himself to permit us free will – and that includes allowing evil men to be evil, so the murder of the infants will happen. As terrible as that is, it cannot be avoided. This is what sinful men do! However, while the plans of Herod are being made, the Lord speaks to His servant, Joseph, in a dream, knowing that this is a man who has proved that he listens and obeys. Possibly God was speaking to all the other parents with young children, but few if any heard.

Where does Joseph and Mary’s security come from? It comes from hearing God’s words of guidance and protection and responding to them. Note the twofold aspect of that. God speaks AND they obey. God could have spoken and they refused to go. In such a case Jesus would have been killed! No, their security came from obeying what God said to them; it was that which put them out of harm’s way. Does God not move sovereignly to protect His children? Yes He does, but more often than not, it seems that He wants our co-operation. The story of Peter’s escape from prison, from the plans of a later Herod (see Acts 12), is a classic example of this. God’s angel told him what to do and opened up doors for him, but he still had to get up, get dressed and follow the angel, step by step, out of the prison. Do you see this? Our security is not some passive thing, whereby we just sit back and let God pander to us. He wants us to be an active part of His plans and so He involves us in our deliverance from harm.

Is this easy? Is this easy, this listening to God and responding to Him? In as much as it requires us to learn to listen to Him, and the old natural ‘us’ would prefer to reason out our own lives, no, it’s not easy, but this is how it works! It’s what we’ve been saying again and again: this Christmas story is not a comfortable soft and mushy children’s story; it is an account of how God actually moved in the affairs of men and women, and it challenges us who call ourselves His children, to walk in the same way as them – the way of faith. When we learn to do this, we can be at peace, in the strong assurance that God is for us, and He who knows all things will lead and guide us – as much as we will allow Him to lead and guide! Maybe you have a steep learning curve ahead it you – but it’s worth it! Go for it!

30. Dream On

ADVENT MEDITATIONS No.30

30. Dream On!

Matt 2:13 When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt . Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”

There are two forms of belief that are equally bad. There is the belief that there is no God, the belief of atheism that flies in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, but there is also the belief that there is a God but He stands outside of this world and has nothing to do with it. Now although all Christians, hopefully, would deny the latter belief, many in fact live as if it were true. In how many churches, and in how many Christians, is there the belief that God talks to his people? Again, many will say that He does, but live like He doesn’t! That is tragic, so we must look at these verses carefully.

Already we’ve seen dreams as a form of guidance twice in the Christmas story. Joseph is with Mary as the result of a dream. He committed his life to her on the strength of a dream. The wise men didn’t go back home via Herod as the result of a dream. Now Joseph has another dream, warning him to take the family south, out of the country into Egypt, before Herod comes searching for the child.

Now consider this more fully. How easy would it have been for Mary to say to Joseph, “Oh, don’t be silly, you’re just worrying unnecessarily. It’s probably because of what those strange men from the East said. Let’s just go home.” How easy it is to write off or find reasons to counter such things. This is the thing about divine guidance; most of the time there is room to doubt it. That’s what faith is about. It’s about responding simply to what God says, and that requires a belief, first of all, that it was God speaking. This is what makes the Christmas story so uncomfortable – when you stop to think about it. It’s about people who get tenuous guidance and base their lives on that. It reminds us that Christians are called to life by faith, not by sight (2 Cor 5:7) and as one well-known preacher said a number of years ago, “Faith is spelt R-I-S-K!”

As we come near to the end of the year, the challenge that this story brings us, again and again, is will we be like these people in this story, will we simply respond to the simple word from God? In one sense, all else is secondary. It’s come up before in this story, and we need to hear it again – and again! Will we give ourselves to what God says? Sometimes we will hear His fresh word very clearly, and in those times it will be relatively easy to do His will. When we’ve had a ‘mountaintop experience’ and the presence of God has been very real, at that point it seems very easy to say, yes, I’ll go, I’ll do it! But what about those other times, the times that are, realistically, the majority of the times, when we are walking alone in the valley – for that’s what it feels like! At those times will our faith be expressed in keeping on faithfully doing the things He’s spoken in His word, the Bible, or the last thing He spoke to us at the last mountaintop experience?

Jesus once put it very simply: “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8). What he was saying was, when he returns will he find us full of faith, being who we’re called to be, doing what we’ve been called to do, with an ear open to heaven? Joseph heard God through dreams. That was the way the Lord seemed to use most with him. What is it or what will it be with you? Will you hear through His word, through the preaching, or through the quiet nudge of the Spirit? Dream on, read on, listen on, continue to be sensitive – or learn to hear through one or more of these ways. There’s nothing more important than hearing God – except obeying what you hear!

Walk of Shame

WALKING WITH GOD. No.35

1 Kings 14:27,28 So King Rehoboam made bronze shields to replace them and assigned these to the commanders of the guard on duty at the entrance to the royal palace. Whenever the king went to the LORD ‘s temple, the guards bore the shields, and afterward they returned them to the guardroom”

Perhaps one of the world’s greatest deceptions, being played out on a daily basis, is the deception that says, “I’m all right.” when in fact the individual knows deep down that they are not ‘all right’. The life that is being played out to the surrounding observers, family, friends or workmates, does everything it can to portray someone who is happy and in control. Life really begins when we face the truth, “I’m not all right, and I need help!” Until we come to that point, we are in fact living a life of shame. Something deep in us tells us that what we have is second best, or that we have failed, or that we need to try harder, or whatever else our past demands.

Rehoboam was king of Judah and Benjamin, a reign he had inherited from his father, Solomon. Under Solomon the nation had been great but as the years passed Solomon drifted away from the Lord and, as we’ve seen previously, the Lord took ten of the tribes from his son so that Rehoboam is left with only Judah and Benjamin. And then we read these awful words of indictment of Judah : “Judah did evil in the eyes of the LORD. By the sins they committed they stirred up his jealous anger more than their fathers had done. They also set up for themselves high places, sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree. There were even male shrine prostitutes in the land; the people engaged in all the detestable practices of the nations the LORD had driven out before the Israelites.” (1 Kings 14:22-24) and Rehoboam did nothing about it!

What we next read is, “In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt attacked Jerusalem. He carried off the treasures of the temple of the LORD and the treasures of the royal palace. He took everything, including all the gold shields Solomon had made.” (v.25,26). The king of Egypt was the Lord’s way of disciplining Rehoboam and Judah; it was a humbling process. We see this sort of thing again and again in the life of Judah or Israel. While they remained close to the Lord they were secure and had peace and freedom from attack from their neighbours. When they turned from the Lord, He allowed or sent their neighbours to attack them, as a means of bringing them back to Himself, exactly in accordance with the Law (Deut 28:25)

But Rehoboam is like so many of us. He wants to carry on as normal and pretend everything is all right, so we read, “So King Rehoboam made bronze shields to replace them and assigned these to the commanders of the guard on duty at the entrance to the royal palace.” (v.27) but bronze is not gold. Solomon had made these incredible solid gold shields for ceremonial purposes. They symbolized the wealth and prosperity that his wisdom had brought. Now an enemy was taken them and so Rehoboam, trying to maintain a semblance of normality, replaces them with bronze shields, because bronze is all he has left! Every time Rehoboam goes to the Temple, the guard takes the bronze ceremonial shields to accompany him. This is almost the equivalent of our Queen going to the State Opening of Parliament in a horse and cart because an enemy had taken her state coaches! This trip to the Temple is thus a walk of shame.

These shields are a constant reminder to Rehoboam of what they have lost. They didn’t have to carry shields but if they didn’t that would make it even worse, even more obvious what has happened, and so, to try and make things look normal, they carry these bronze shields. If you didn’t know any better bronze shields probably looked quite good and perhaps the next generation thought they were great – but they were not gold! Oh yes, then next generation may have come to accept them and think they were good, but Rehoboam knew the truth. He knew this was a walk of shame, he remembered the gleam of the wonderful solid gold shields of his father’s reign.

Gold or bronze? What are you living with? The Christian life is supposed to be gold. Gold represents holiness, purity, goodness, all the attributes of the Lord’s presence. That is what is supposed to be in our lives, but in its absence, like we’ve seen previously with Jeroboam, we provide substitutes to try to pretend everything is ‘all right’. Years later Jeremiah brought this accusation from the Lord, “They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.” (Jer 2:13). It was an accusation that said you have provided substitutes for Me, substitutes that are not up to the job! That’s the truth. No substitute can ever replace the reality of the Lord’s presence. That is what we need. Accept no substitutes!