On Meditation
By meditating on the Word, we are orienting our hearts to heavenly glories and eternal truths. We are willingly subjecting our fickle selves to what stabilizes and roots us. Meditation is our unhurried pursuit of knowing God through what God has said. Let us, then, delight in the Word through meditation on the Word.
Nobody wants to have stale devotional times in the Scripture. So let me tell you a secret that’s not really a well-kept secret at all (and nor should it be). If you want your heart to be stirred with delight in the Word, meditate on the Word.
Meditate sounds strange to some ears, because the Eastern practice of meditation involves emptying your mind. That’s not what I mean, and that’s not what the Bible means, by the term “meditate.”
In Psalm 1:2, the blessed man’s delight is in the Torah, and on God’s law “he meditates day and night.” The verb doesn’t mean trying not to think. It’s to deliberately think about what one reads. It’s to ponder, to mull over.
Sometimes you may wake up ready to read the Scripture because delight has led you there. But other times (even most times?) you come to the Scripture by discipline in search of delight. As we reflect on what God has said in his Word, our souls are being nourished by the truth and wisdom of God.
Meditation requires us to slow down. We live in a hurried age, a busy cultural atmosphere. But a hurried and hectic life will not cultivate a healthy spiritual life. Attention spans are undermined by a TikTok way of thinking. The role of the Word in our lives is not meant to be sporadic, occasional, or peripheral.
The blessed man in Psalm 1 meditates “day and night” (v. 2), which highlights the occupying role that the Word has in his mind and life. Meditation requires sustained attention, and sustained attention requires time.
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Here I Am, Send Someone Else
These are not the days for someone else! These are our days. Let us share the gospel and live obediently before the King, which entails even standing for the truth in hard seasons. I think applications abound here. But let us encourage one another all the more as we see the Day approaching. Let us stand together for a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
The Background
No doubt it was a bizarre sight – the bush burning, but not consumed from the fire. And when God called Moses he said the same thing Abraham said to God in Genesis 22, “Here I am!” This is the same thing the prophet Isaiah said in Isaiah 6 when the voice of the Lord said, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Of course, Isaiah followed up his “Here I am!” with a “Send me!” This was not the case for Moses, but we’re pushing ahead of the story too quickly.
In this encounter with Moses, Yahweh recounted that He knew the affliction of His people and that He knew the time had come to rescue them from the land of Egypt, all to which I’m sure Moses would have, at least silently, said amen.
But then we realize that God doesn’t just have lofty indicatives to speak to Moses, but a specific imperative! The Lord tells Moses that He’s sending him to Pharaoh to accomplish His purposes (cf. Exodus 3:10). This doesn’t sit well with Moses, and he offers God four excuses.
The first is feigned humility — “Who am I that I should go?” (cf. Exodus 3:11). The second is that he doesn’t know God’s name (cf. Exodus 3:13). The third is that the people won’t listen to him (cf. Exodus 4:1). And finally, Moses says he is slow of speech and tongue (cf. Exodus 4:10).
In response to each excuse, Yahweh is full of compassionate mercies. True, His “anger was kindled” (cf. v.14) but instead of wiping Moses off the face of the planet, He shows Him grace, in essence “arguing” with him in order to convince him that he will in fact go and achieve this mission that God has for him and His people.
Please, Not Me
I said Moses gave four excuses and outlined those above. But there is a fifth reply Moses gives to God found in Exodus 4:13 — “Oh, my Lord, please send someone else.”
Philip Ryken comments,
This fifth and final objection exposed what was underneath all of Moses’ excuses: a fundamental unwillingness to obey. The real issue was not that he lacked the stature to persuade Pharaoh, or that he was ignorant of God’s name, or that the Israelites would not believe him, or that he was a poor public speaker. God had answered all of those objections. The real issue was that Moses refused to trust and obey.
We could analyze all the reasons Moses had for not obeying the Lord, but at the end of the day, the fact is that he did not want to go. And it’s not that he didn’t want Israel to be rescued! He just wanted God to use someone else. Please send…someone else!
This reminds us of Esther who simultaneously did not want the Jews to be destroyed while also being hesitant to approach the king. But as we know both Esther and Moses did go with the resolve of “If I perish, I perish.” Both were people of faith and were convinced in the end that the reproach of Christ is greater than any worldly treasures or accolades.
Such a Time as This
And this brings us closer (but not quite!) to the point of today’s post. What a time to be alive right? I’m an 80s kid, so the first decade I really fully remember is the 90s.
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Getting Old is not Bad News for the Christian
Because of God’s mercies that are new every morning, and because we are His children, we are growing in our inner selves younger – growing to look more and more like the true children of God even while our outer selves are growing older. Such is the grand and glorious paradox of Christian aging. What does that mean for us? It means that as Christians, we do not have to chase the ever-elusive promise of youth. We do not have to fix our eyes on the vanity of the physical. It means that we can still steward our bodies, but we can not have our entire self-worth and value rest on them.
I recently went to a yearly checkup, and the doc (who looked to be about 16, in my estimation) was explaining to me the results of my blood work, blood pressure, weight, and the rest of it, led her explanation with these words: “When you reach a certain age…”
I knew what she was saying. Blood work aside, I’ve got an ache in my left leg, and I don’t know exactly how it got there. But it’s there, and even when I’m typing these words, it’s kind of throbbing down my side. Stuff like this happens to me from time to time; it’s not a big deal, but it does happen, and it reminds me that I am indeed aging. We all are. The law of entropy which tells us that natural processes only run in one direction – that is in a degrading direction – is applicable to our physical bodies. We are deteriorating creatures.
And yet for the Christian, there is a glorious paradox that comes in aging – one that causes a great measure of joy when you could feel an increasingly measure of sorrow that you cannot do the things that you were once able to do. Here is how Paul would frame this paradox:
Therefore we do not give up. Even though our outer person is being destroyed, our inner person is being renewed day by day. For our momentary light affliction is producing for us an absolutely incomparable eternal weight of glory. So we do not focus on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal (2 Cor. 4:16-18).
There’s no pulling punches here, but rather an embracing of two simultaneous realities for the Christian.
The first reality is that of aging. That our outer person, our physical bodies, are on the downhill.
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We All Know Better Than to Kick the Dog
Written by C. R. Carmichael |
Saturday, October 1, 2022
As representatives of God on this earth, we are not only called to care for the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, but we must care even more so for our neighbor who is of greater value (Mark 12:31; Luke 12:6-7; 15:3-7). And this, as it turns out, is the ultimate lesson of our sacred duty as the designated stewards of Creation.When someone reads the Biblical account in Genesis for the first time, he might be surprised to learn that Adam, who was given dominion over the earth by God, never once strutted around the garden of Eden kicking dogs, yanking cow tails, or even teaching parrots bad words. Humor aside, there is a significant reason why cruel behavior against animals, though common in our time, was never recorded in those early days of Creation.
When God, in His divine wisdom, formed man from the dust, He hard-wired Adam and Eve to be connected to Creation in such a profound way that mankind’s call to stewardship was not so much a duty as it was a great honor. Made in the image of God, man was raised up from the virgin earth and established as God’s representative to “work it and keep it” with the same loving care and intelligent order that emanated from their holy Creator (Genesis 2:15).
Thus, God was very deliberate when He gave Adam the task of naming all the living creatures, which not only spoke to the unique status of man over God’s creation but also cemented a special bond with the birds, fish and beasts under his care (Genesis 2:19-20).
As John Gill explains in his Body of Divinity, God’s creation was specifically made for the use and benefit of mankind, with God conceiving the divine idea that the wholesome interaction between man and nature would provide for their mutual happiness, sustenance and profit:
“…All creatures were made for (man’s) sake, to possess, enjoy, and have the dominion over, and therefore he was made last of all: and herein appears the wisdom and goodness of God to him, that all accommodations were ready provided for him when made; the earth for his habitation, all creatures for his use; the fruits of the earth for his profit and pleasure; light, heat, and air for his delight, comfort, and refreshment, with every thing that could be wished for and desired to make his life happy.”
Even after the upheaval of the Fall, and to this day, the righteous desire to nurture and sustain God’s created world is still an inherent impulse of man that descends from the original stock of our first parents and spreads to all human beings. Though we don’t always show it because of sin, deep down in all our souls is the instinct to be a loving caretaker of the teeming life given to us on earth.
In other words, literally and figuratively speaking, we all know better than to kick the dog.
We Know Better Because Of Our Conscience
The mistreatment and abuse of animals is certainly a tragic thing to see in today’s world. Most likely, we have all witnessed this cruel behavior from our earliest childhood days; and for many of us, it shattered our innocence and made us sick to our stomachs to know that such a thing could be considered a trivial matter―or worse, an amusement.
Whether we have listened to Sarah MacLachlan as she sang over pathetic images of emaciated kittens, or read about a government-funded lab that drugged beagles and locked their heads in mesh cages while infected sand flies ate them alive for “scientific” study, we instantly know that this kind of heartlessness is morally wrong and downright evil.
Happily, as a child, I was also shown the better way. During the hot summers of my youth, I had the great honor of helping my grandfather on his farm and saw his kind husbandry in action. On many blessed occasions I would hop into his old Chevy truck and ride along as he visited the various pastures and barns to check on the well-being of his cows and horses, spy out their possible health concerns, and tend to their supply of good food and water.
On one particular tragic occasion (which I did not witness), the horse trailer my grandfather used to transport his prized Hackney ponies broke free from the truck’s hitch, careened and flipped off the road, and crashed. In the subsequent heap of twisted metal, the bloodied animals were wounded beyond any possible help, and my grandfather was forced to put them down to silence their suffering.
Afterwards, I was struck by the teary-eyed anguish on my grandfather’s face as he recounted the incident. To him, those ponies were more than just an investment of time and money. Though he could not articulate it with words, his obvious affection for those animals told you all you needed to know: these beautiful creatures of God had given my grandfather an unspeakable joy as he lovingly raised them, trained then, and cared for them.
My grandfather was not known as a man of professed faith, by the way. And yet, intrinsic to his very being, he was imbued with a God-given conscience that guided his tender care of the noble beasts in his possession. And such it is with every man and woman if they heed the “inner voice” given to them by God.
We Know Better Because Of The Scriptures
The moral caliber of our relationship with animals, however, does not have to rely solely on our imperfect gut instincts. Thankfully, God has revealed in the Holy Scriptures the profound truth about the sacred interaction between God and His creation, and the corresponding commerce between man and the living creatures of earth.
The Bible, in fact, has made this point crystal clear: God does not look kindly on those who are destroyers of the earth (Revelation 11:18), and nor should we. A person’s kind and thoughtful relationship with God’s creation is a thing of spiritual beauty because it aligns with, and reflects, the same righteous benevolence His Creator has shown to all the life of earth, including mankind.
Placing Adam and Eve in a garden was no trivial matter. In doing so, God established the ideal setting in which mankind could “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). It was, by God’s design, a lush organic world perfectly fit for their visceral use as tillers of the soil and keepers of livestock. The pursuit of money, which came later, was never the original standard of wealth, nor were the cities to which the sons of Cain fled ever an abode that could fully realize their potential as stewards of the earth.
Time and time again, the Bible connects our agrarian sensibilities with wisdom and righteousness.
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