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Thinking About the World and our Place in It

Ezekiel 22.6-12 as paraphrased in The Message.

The laundry list of sin and depravity is long and depressingly familiar because it tracks so closely our own time and culture.  The challenge as the church of God is to not be drawn into the world's way of thinking on these things. Nor to assume that our thinking on an issue—how we treat illegal immigrants is one—is, because it is our thinking, therefore biblical. We may, and often do, allow our own cultural prejudice to creep into our worldview.

Prayer: O Lord God may the Holy Spirit continue to challenge our thinking and opinions on issues so that we do not complacently assume that we are correct in all things.

So Prophesied; So done.

2 Samuel 12:11

Thus says the Lord, ‘Behold, I will raise up evil against you from your own household; I will even take your wives before your eyes and give them to your companion, and he will lie with your wives in broad daylight.

2 Samuel 13:1-2

1 Now it was after this that Absalom the son of David had a beautiful sister whose name was Tamar, and Amnon the son of David loved her. 2 Amnon was so frustrated because of his sister Tamar that he made himself ill, for she was a virgin, and it seemed hard to Amnon to do anything to her.

So prophesied, so done.

One of the punishments for David's murder of Uriah and sin with Bathsheba is that The Lord prophesies that he will raise up evil from David's own household, and in the very next chapter one sees that begin to happen. Amnon rapes his half-sister and is in turn murdered by how half-brother, Absalom. 

Did David contemplate this outcome and realize that it was as a result of his own sin? The text gives no indication that he did, but the reader certainly does since it follows so closely on the heels of the prophecy that this will happen.

This is the nature of sin and we would do well to take the lesson to heart.  Our sin can have a wide effect on other people who are innocent of the sin, but affected nonetheless, as was Tamar here. She experienced the fallout from David's sin.

Make Praise Your Habit

Psalms 64:10

The righteous man will be glad in the Lord and will take refuge in Him;

And all the upright in heart will glory.

The Message paraphrase captures this very well: 

Be glad, good people! Fly to GOD!

Good- hearted people, make praise your habit.

Make praise your habit.  I like that.  A habit is something that happens effortlessly because we do it again and again.  I have a habit of drinking coffee in the morning with my devotions.  I do not get tired of this habit or take it for granted; I love it. I look forward to it.

When praise becomes our habit it will have the same pattern in our lives.  It will flow easily from our lips; we will enjoy it; it will be something  that we look forward to.  We will fly to God and we will praise him with joy.

Preaching to Ourselves

David preaches to himself here. This is something that we do not hear a lot about these days, but it is vital to the Christian life.  Our souls are apt to forget God, to become anxious, to get distracted by life; we need to preach to ourselves to remind us of who God is and what he does.

Here David calls his soul to wait for God in silence because God is his only hope, his only rock, his salvation, and his stronghold. 

This is usually what our soul needs, to be called to remember who God is in the midst of our difficulties.

Notice also that preaching to ourselves results in a wider application.  David calls for the people of God to trust in God. His preaching is applied to all of God's people, which is as it should be.

O Christian, learn to preach to yourself.

Glory Road

2 Corinthians 3:7-11

But if the ministry of death, in letters engraved on stones, came with glory, so that the sons of Israel could not look intently at the face of Moses because of the glory of his face, fading as it was, 8 how will the ministry of the Spirit fail to be even more with glory? 9 For if the ministry of condemnation has glory, much more does the ministry of righteousness abound in glory. 10 For indeed what had glory, in this case has no glory because of the glory that surpasses it. 11 For if that which fades away was with glory, much more that which remains is in glory.

Paul does not want us to miss the glory road in 2 Cor 3.7-11! He uses the word 11 times so that we are sure not to miss it.  The glory road is the path traveled from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant or what Paul calls the ministry of the Spirit. The ministry of death had glory because it pointed people to their need for Christ. The ministry of the Spirit has even more glory because it helps people to have changed hearts and releases them from bondage to the Law to freedom in Christ and overflowing, ever present grace.

The glory road then, is a path from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant to eternity.

"Destroy Them in Wrath"

Psalms 59:13

Destroy them in wrath, destroy them that they may be no more;

That men may know that God rules in Jacob

To the ends of the earth.

Selah.

David calls here for God to be the righteous God that he is and not let evil go unpunished.  One of the things that this accomplishes is that when they see judgment on evil all men to the ends of the earth know that God rules in Jacob.

Imagine a world in which evil went unpunished. In which women were attacked with impunity and their attackers got off scot free.  I would hate that kind of world, so would you. This is why I am so happy about psalms like this one.  God is the righteous judge, he does not allow evil to go unpunished.

Spurgeon: Let even the most remote nations know that the great moral Governor has power to destroy ungodliness, and does not wink at iniquity in any, at any time, or in any place.