Sunday Message

You know that God speaks through you if you can successfully pull one message out of the first three chapters of my lineup this week- Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, and Ezekiel.  I mean, here we have the "everything is vain" book, followed by hot love poetry, the going, going, gone of Judah, and a vision of heaven.  But there is a way, because every combination that one can put together, God has put there for a reason.  Or to look at it as the Norse did, everything is part of a single tapestry, and pulling one string has an effect on all other lines.

And the common thread is most easily seen if we look at it in light of, "What message does it have for today's Christian Church?"  And for me, that message is, "How are we, who are to stay in, but separate, from the world, to deal with the idea that the 'things which are common to man' happen to us, too?"  So let's look at Ecclesiastes.  Solomon explains that he is a man who has everything- and wants to find a meaning to it.  "Whatever my eyes desired, I did not keep from them," he says in 2:10.  But it was all in vain:

¹² Then I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom,
    and also madness and folly.
What more can the king’s successor do
    than what has already been done?
¹³ I saw that wisdom is better than folly,
    just as light is better than darkness.
¹⁴ The wise have eyes in their heads,
    while the fool walks in the darkness;
but I came to realize
    that the same fate overtakes them both.

¹⁵ Then I said to myself,

“The fate of the fool will overtake me also.
    What then do I gain by being wise?”
I said to myself,
    “This too is meaningless.”
¹⁶ For the wise, like the fool, will not be long remembered;
    the days have already come when both have been forgotten.
Like the fool, the wise too must die!

 

So, what was the point of life?  He comes to the conclusion in 3:12-13 that God put us on such a world to do good, work hard, and enjoy the fruit of our labor.  He had begun to see that all the rewards you could get in this life were vain- that this life was for obedience to God, and awaiting the reward for that obedience IN THE NEXT LIFE, not this one.  So then step one of understanding why things happen to all of us is: 

Be content with what you have and what you do; the reward is not in this world.

 

 

Part two is in Song of Solomon, a love poem that is really rich in it's description of the progress from emotional love to physical.  But twice in these first three chapters, just as it's getting the hottest:

 

⁴ Scarcely had I passed them
    when I found the one my heart loves.
I held him and would not let him go
    till I had brought him to my mother’s house,
    to the room of the one who conceived me.
⁵ Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you
    by the gazelles and by the does of the field:
Do not arouse or awaken love
    until it so desires.

 

In the poem, the point is not let the emotion, the desire, overwhelm what is right and proper.  And so too, in our message.  Solomon in the first book spoke of having all his desires and saying, "What then?"  In his second, he speaks of the desire before him. Second lesson:

Don't let desire for things of this world lead you astray.

 

Bringing us to Isaiah, where I found the verse that struck me in 1:18:  "Come, let us reason together."  Now he had been talking to a people who were in sore need of repentance, and just couldn't conceive that there was a connection between the half-heartedness of their rituals and the abandonment of them by God.  Isaiah has three messages revolving around the phrase that caught my eye (basically because I remember the Hulk quoting it during Peter David's run).  The first is, God is not going to put up with going through the motions (vv 10-15).  Second, you need to live a life that SHOWS you have faith (vv 16-17).  And finally, through obedience, you access the salvation you cannot earn yourself (vv 18-20).

 

One thing to note here:  we have to put this in perspective.  We were saved AFTER Christ died for our sins.  We KNOW the mechanics of, "though your sins are scarlet, they shall be white as snow".  The audience Isaiah had was six or seven hundred years away from having a clue.  All they could do is have faith, be obedient, and somehow God was going to work it out in the next life.  I thought it interesting that Israel, who had seen the great miracles of God, were called to an even greater faith than we are.  So the third lesson that comes from this is:

 

Reason out that obedience leads to reward.

 

By Jeremiah's calling, things had went from bad to worse.  The society around him was on the verge of collapse- and yet there were those who didn't seem to care.  The part that got to me here revolved around 3:11- "Then the LORD said to me, 'Backsliding Israel has shown herself more righteous than treacherous Judah' ".  What did this mean?  Israel, if you recall, never had the great revivals that Judah did, never had one king take them back to God.  Judah, however, was another story- and just like Isaiah, Jeremiah was watching Judah going through the ritual, declaring themselves to be innocent (2:35 for one), but never really serving God. One question Jeremiah asked really caught me:  "Why do you beautify your way to seek love?" (2:33).  I look at today's society, calling out for "tolerance" and "acceptance", trying to get a bunch of people going all different ways to hold hands and say, "It doesn't matter which way you go."  So tell me, if you tell a line of children holding hands this, how long will they be holding hands?

 

Exactly.

 

Point being, there is the narrow way to the reward of the next life.  Either you accept Christ's sacrifice for your sin, and live an obedient life, or you don't.  Society today is like Judah then- they thought (and think) that the crust of beauty, the appearance of faith, is enough.  And the lesson here is:

 

Be sincere in your faith.  Live your faith.

 

 

By the time Jeremiah got to Lamentations, it had all fallen apart.  He paints an awful picture of degradation, poverty, misery, you name it, coming down on a people who refused to believe they couldn't do it all themselves.  And just when the picture he paints looks like the end of everything, he shifts- slightly- to the future and adds this:

 

¹⁹ I remember my affliction and my wandering,
    the bitterness and the gall.
²⁰ I well remember them,
    and my soul is downcast within me.
²¹ Yet this I call to mind
    and therefore I have hope:

 

For you see, even out of all this, he was brought out because he had not left his faith and obedience.  Should be humbling to a bunch of soft Christians who have a problem with God sending them life's catastrophes small and large, that a man like Jeremiah, whose faith they'll never touch, went through worse than they are.  AND SURVIVED.  Thus the lesson for this chapter is:

 

Nothing that happens in this world to you means God has abandoned you- if you have faith.

 

And that brings me to Ezekiel and his "Man on the Throne" and his "four living creatures".  But it also brings his calling:

 

¹⁰ And he said to me, “Son of man, listen carefully and take to heart all the words I speak to you. ¹¹ Go now to your people in exile and speak to them. Say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says,’ whether they listen or fail to listen.”

 

My friend Shirley had an excellent post this week on people who need to hear this very thing.  Here's a swatch of it:

 

 

 

What causes people who profess Christianity, to keep a quiet, private faith? What causes people who profess Christianity, to be busy in the church, doing everything good under the sun, appearing to have their lives in perfect order, yet not being able to talk honestly about the true condition of their hearts? What causes people who profess Christianity, to teach others, yet never be free to share the private pain within; the deep pain that keeps them from being real? 

What keeps people who profess Christianity, from sharing their testimony of how God came into them and revealed to them their ugly sinfulness, and how He began to heal their hard hearts? How deep and wide is the hole within that causes emptiness and loneliness to be the driving force in their lives, instead of the love of God that heals and fills?

 

 

 

 

 

I answered her with:

Why are so many Christians silent ones? Because they like to enjoy "the peace which passeth understanding" and having "a ready defense of your faith " ready rocks the boat too much. Every Christian should spend one afternoon of their lives defending themselves on an atheist chat board. Sadly, a lot of them will learn things about themselves they won't like.

And the final lesson is:

It doesn't matter what anyone else does about your faith.  It's what you do WITH IT that counts.