God is Good

 

Wednesday, May 3, 2023

“What sorrow awaits the leaders of my people—the shepherds of my sheep—for they have destroyed and scattered the very ones they were expected to care for,” says the Lord.  Therefore, this is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says to these shepherds:  “Instead of caring for my flock and leading them to safety, you have deserted them and driven them to destruction.  Now I will pour out judgment on you for the evil you have done to them.  But I will gather together the remnant of my flock from the countries where I have driven them.  I will bring them back to their own sheepfold, and they will be fruitful and increase in number.  Then I will appoint responsible shepherds who will care for them, and they will never be afraid again.  Not a single one will be lost or missing.  I, the Lord, have spoken!  “For the time is coming,” says the Lord, “when I will raise up a righteous descendant from King David’s line.  He will be a King who rules with wisdom.  He will do what is just and right throughout the land.  And this will be his name:  ‘The Lord Is Our Righteousness.’  In that day Judah will be saved, and Israel will live in safety.  Jeremiah 23:1-6

For the Lord is good.  His unfailing love continues forever, and his faithfulness continues to each generation.  Psalm 100:5

From a human perspective it seems a reckless thing to say God is good.  Amid the terror and tragedy with which we live every day, murder, mayhem, darkness, and loss, how can one possibly think a benevolent God would allow such?  Another log on that fire is something I hear from time to time:  If God is good, why would He even think about crucifying His own son?

The goodness of God is seen in both of those questions, the one about God allowing harmful stuff, and the other one about God causing harmful stuff.  The questions are more about us…individually…we know ourselves to be so much lower than God, and the evil of which we are all capable.  Reframe (more accurately) the questions and they become:  Why do WE do such awful stuff, and How can WE do all that to ourselves?  The answer to both questions is found in nailing Christ to the cross.  It isn’t God who crucified Jesus, it was each of us who was pounding those nails.

Jeremiah recounted what God said about man’s sinful misleading of others.  Instead of walking with God, humankind has always walked in selfishness, and we lead others to do so as well.  That’s what led to the cross.  And as for why God would “participate” in the evil of the cross…how else would God identify with us, love us enough to take our place on that cross, but to willingly give Himself, a sacrifice for our sins?

The bottom line to those age-old questions is that God IS indeed good!  He displayed that for all to see just how much He loved us in all that goodness.  Such are the words penned by Isaac Watts:

See, from his head, his hands, his feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down.

Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown?[1]

For You Today 

It’s easy to blame God for what happens to us, or the darkness and pain of this world’s evil.  It’s easy, but not right.  Nail scars and a thorn-pierced brow make that point…always, and eternally.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

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There are about 2,500 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper explore some of these:   Flat Tire Worship  and  Regaining Perspective   

Title Image:  via Wikimedia Commons   Images without citation are in public domain.

Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©  

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[1] Isaac Watts, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, 1707

Despised and Rejected

 

Good Friday of Holy Week, April 2, 2021

Who has believed our message?  To whom has the Lord revealed his powerful arm?  My servant grew up in the Lord’s presence like a tender green shoot, like a root in dry ground.  There was nothing beautiful or majestic about his appearance, nothing to attract us to him.  He was despised and rejected—a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.  We turned our backs on him and looked the other way.  He was despised, and we did not care.  Yet it was our weaknesses he carried; it was our sorrows that weighed him down.  And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God, a punishment for his own sins!  But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins.  He was beaten so we could be whole.  He was whipped so we could be healed.  All of us, like sheep, have strayed away.  We have left God’s paths to follow our own.  Yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all.  Isaiah 53:1-6

The mixture of ambivalent feelings is not an easy pill to swallow.  But, with age, it can be the key to understanding, even though it can never be an acquired taste.  I have lived through enough seasons of Lent and Passion Week to make sense of the way Christ’s sorrow, and the pain of being rejected, becomes his joy in securing our forgiveness. 

With every shed tear in the garden, slap on the face by his accusors, lash laid on his back, and nail piercing holy hands, the Man of Sorrows receives the weight of my sin, and every sense of my sorrow and rejection.  And to be forgiven of all that, released from the guilt of more than poor choices and victimhood as an excuse for my behavior, is the transforming power to make my life’s experiences, (both lofty and lowy) meaningful, not just endurable.  I, who am Barabbas, am freed, as the Prince of Peace suffers my violence on Golgotha’s hill.  He is despised and rejected by all humankind; I am absolved of even the guilt of knowing that he took my place. 

One who is condemned receiving full pardon is a familiar theme.  Ever since the discovery of DNA, evidence has been used to sort out who did a crime…and who didn’t.  Everything about Isaiah’s 53^rd chapter cries out that Jesus was innocent, yet he received the judgment on behalf of the guilty. 

Isaiah compares all humanity, every one of us, to sheep, wandering, straying away from the purpose and goodness we were created-in, and, created-for, which is fellowship with God.  God, the faithful and righteous judge of our character and behavior knows we are not victims; we chose to ignore Him and follow our own desires.  And, in the next heartbeat, we find God taking on human skin and taking our beating.  With every swing of the crucifier’s hammer landing on three nails, the Lord of Heaven becomes the Passover Lamb.  Mankind, once again in bondage, is having innocent blood cover the household door of his life.

There are many responses to this unasked-for gift from our Creator.  Two of those responses are common, and way, way off-the-mark:

·       Some people take the I didn’t ask for anybody to be crucified for me attitude.  That’s just what Isaiah said, we turned our backs on him and looked the other way.  That’s just staying on the “I’ll be the one in charge of my life – just get out of my way” stance…defiance, self-reliant…still lost, still separated from God!

·       Others, understanding how unjust it is for the innocent to suffer for the guilty, fall into a deep sense of guilt, living the lie of trying to repay the gift.  But that just denies the purpose of the gift, which is to make us whole again, not cripple us with a different weight of unworthiness.

This gift of forgiveness is dragging us up out of the pit of mirey-clay so we can walk, unencumbered by our sins, into the daylight, validating that God does not die on a cross for the worthless worm, but rescues the apple of his eye, women, men, and children who were created in his image, people who are now sanctified to walk right into the presence of the King of Glory, look him in the eye and smile as we’re hugged like the long lost loved ones we are!

For You Today

This Good Friday, remember most that this is a Glory Story!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!  

[1] Title Image: Gustave Dore’ (public domain) via Wikimedia Commons                                                              Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation^©

He Was Crushed...for us - Part 2

[i][ii]

Friday, April 12, 2019

Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood.  For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death.  Only in this way could he set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying.  We also know that the Son did not come to help angels; he came to help the descendants of Abraham.  Therefore, it was necessary for him to be made in every respect like us, his brothers and sisters, so that he could be our merciful and faithful High Priest before God.  Then he could offer a sacrifice that would take away the sins of the people.  Since he himself has gone through suffering and testing, he is able to help us when we are being tested.  Hebrews 2:14-18

In yesterday’s devotion I asked the question how it could be God’s good plan for His Son, Jesus to be “crushed”.  In this morning’s reading the answer is rolled-out so very plainly it shouts here I am; here’s the answer.  So, let’s dig in with the writer of Hebrews this morning and rest in Lent’s unchanging Good News for all humanity, that we’ve sinned, but there is a Savior!

Let’s explore three important facts about being crushed for us as a good plan:

1.   God is Eternal; He never dies

This is the most easily-accepted of the three; God’s eternality makes sense if you hold Scripture as true at all.  The creator of everything must have been there before everything else existed.  We see this naturally; God having placed it in our DNA that He is before all.  Even as children we understand this; we expect our parents will never die.  As God always existed, so he always exists!

2.   Humans, slaves to Sin can’t live

Again, faith in Scripture’s authenticity (and accuracy) opens this fact to us.  In the opening chapters of Genesis, as soon as humans are created they rebel.  Humans, therefore, introduce death to an otherwise perfect environment.  And, as we pass-along in our DNA characteristics of body, defects, hair and eye color, we also pass along Adam’s sin nature; we pass along the ungodlike ability to fear and die.

3.   God came to exchange our Death for His LIFE

As God in Heaven cannot die, the good plan of God to redeem his fallen, but beloved creation (us), is for God to enter humanity, to accept the ability to die.  In short, in the manger and the 33 years that followed, God incarnate took on, in every way possible, our death:

 This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for he faced all of the same testings we do, yet he did not sin.  Hebrews 4:15

But Jesus didn’t just passively take-on, or accept death, He defeated, and will ultimately destroy death.  Hear those familiar words you’ve heard at funerals so often…but hear them now as what began as a newborn in a borrowed birthing-suite rank with barnyard smells, and ultimately culminated in smashing the fear-filled chains of death that were trying to keep eternal God in a borrowed tomb.  This was the other half of God’s good plan – that which he accomplished (defeating death) He gives to all who turn to Him in faith:

Then, when our dying bodies have been transformed into bodies that will never die, this Scripture will be fulfilled:  “Death is swallowed up in victory.  O death, where is your victory?  O death, where is your sting?”  For sin is the sting that results in death, and the law gives sin its power.  But thank God! He gives us victory over sin and death through our Lord Jesus Christ.  1 Corinthians 15:54-57

For You Today

Lent is a time for looking at the big picture – life, death, meaning; this is it, God’s good plan the best gift in the universe – life, eternal!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day.

Go to VIDEO

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[i] Title Image:   Pixabay.com

[ii] Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from The New Living Translation©

He Was Crushed...for us

[i][ii]

Thursday, April 11, 2019

But it was the Lord’s good plan to crush him and cause him grief.  Yet when his life is made an offering for sin, he will have many descendants.  He will enjoy a long life, and the Lord’s good plan will prosper in his hands.  When he sees all that is accomplished by his anguish, he will be satisfied.  And because of his experience, my righteous servant will make it possible for many to be counted righteous, for he will bear all their sins.  I will give him the honors of a victorious soldier, because he exposed himself to death.  He was counted among the rebels.  He bore the sins of many and interceded for rebels.    Isaiah 53:10-12

The process of doing theology is, simply put, attempting to get your mind wrapped around what God has said and done.  It’s as one of my professors at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, Fischer Humphries said:  Theology is thinking about God.  At the risk of presumption, I also believe it includes trying to make sense of the why of what God does.  And if there’s one concept that makes my head hurt it’s that God had Isaiah write that crushing Jesus was the Lord’s good plan.  What?  In my limited human capacity for understanding, it is hard to wrap my hurting head around how crushing your only much-loved son with a savage beating, mockery, wrongful conviction, and an infamous, brutal death, nailed like a naked buzzard to a cross on the town garbage dump could possibly be a good plan.

Now, I know asking a question of God’s motive almost treads on the holy ground of questioning God’s character.  However, this question is not one of How could, you, God; it is more like, please help me understand, God, so I can better worship and serve you.

And I think in order to understand this concept of a Father crushing his beloved son, we need the Holy Spirit’s help to get higher than our earth-bound understanding.  With that prayer offered from my heart, let me take a stab at it.  I believe there are these few necessary pieces to help understand this complex syllogism:

1.     Faith – you must, in order to believe, believe first! 

2.     Faith – you must trust that God is truly good; since, according to Scripture[iii], God is entirely good by nature, every God-deed is incapable of evil.

3.     Faith – this was God’s plan, and its goodness is odd (considering our use of the word “good” usually means “more” or “easier” or “palatable”).  But in God’s loving actions “good” is more equated with true, benevolent, and righteous.  Some not so easy, plentiful, or palatable course-corrections on behalf of a disobedient human family are what God has taken to Himself.

So it begins with faith, and it’s all about faith.  We can easily see in Scripture the holiness of Jehovah.  Virtually every page of the Bible points in some way to the other-ness of God, His holy nature and righteous ways.  No evil may even exist in His presence.  For us to ever have a hope of meeting God without being turned away because of our unholiness, there had to be a cleansing.  And because of the life issue…blood was the cost.  And because unholy blood wouldn’t suffice, it was the crushing of the holy that became God’s good plan.

In a simple illustration with which I live every day, I offer my bride.  Elizabeth got that cleanliness is next to Godliness thing as a dominant gene!  Russell…not so much!  Sometimes it is difficult to wrap my head around why every stick of furniture must be moved at least 412 times during the year to dust under there, but Elizabeth knows what it takes to have a home that actually IS clean and smells fresh without the use of cover-up sprays. 

In the same way, God won’t compromise on holiness requirements.  If you’re going to be “clean” from the inside out, it will never do to count on anything other than (or less than) the sacrifice that crushed Jesus for our rebellion!

For You Today

He was crushed for our rebellion – believe it or not, the only acceptable approach to the throne of God is to receive that forgiveness…and it is only a humble, heartfelt prayer away.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day.

Go to VIDEO

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[i] Title Image:   Pixabay.com

[ii] Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from The New Living Translation©

[iii] Mark 10:18 (and many more)

On a Hill Far Away

[i]

Holy Week

Friday, April 14, 2017

At about three o’clock, Jesus called out with a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” which means “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”  Matthew 27:46^(NLT)

Jesus was a human being.  He was also at that moment a brutally tortured human being.  The physical beating had taken its toll, and Jesus only had moments left in the flesh.  But notice that the physical torture was not the emphasis of the Gospel writer.  It was not the brutality of the Roman crucifixion that was the worst thing Jesus endured.  His greatest cross was the rejection of the Creator by His creation. 

Scripture doesn't minimalize or trivialize Jesus’ physical suffering, but it doesn't dwell on the nails or the beating with whips and rods.  It is the desertion of His friends and loved ones; it is the cross of bearing sin all alone.  A number of years ago I had a week where the dentist had me in the chair for 6½ hours.  A few days later another doctor performed surgery on my toe, while in-between I had to go to the eye doctor who shot a puff of air into my eyeballs to test for Glaucoma.  And all this time I'm on a diet!  Beloved, I know physical suffering! 

But nothing is worse than being rejected by those you thought would ride into the valley of the shadow of death side by side with you.  One wise man said that Jesus was rejected by man for His holiness and by God for our sin.  When your physical suffering is more than you think you can stand, remember Jesus has been there, and worse...and He cares.

It says that Jesus cried with a loud voice.  The original language makes it stronger.  You might translate it, He screamed like an animal!  This was a scream of horror.  What was that about?  Many Bible scholars contend that this was the exact moment that God ...laid on Him the iniquity of us all.[ii]  This was the moment when Jesus became a curse for the sins of all time, of all men[iii].  Luther called it the happy exchange, meaning Jesus took our sins, and gave us His holiness. 

Why the scream?  In this moment Jesus first experienced what it was like to be lost and separated from the Father.  He had never before experienced the consequences of sin.  He was the perfect Lamb of God, and he became sin for us.  This is why the cross is lonely; nobody could do that other than the only Son of God. 

And this is why the cross can help you.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner of the former Communist Soviet Union.  In a dark moment of his prison experience, after much torture and deprivation, he was working a section of road with a shovel, and had reached his end.  He just stopped working.  He knew that could mean instant death from a guard's whip or gun, but he just couldn't go on.  Instantly, another prisoner saw this, and made his way towards Solzhenitsyn.  When he came alongside, he took his cane and made the sign of the cross in the sand.  Seeing this, Alexander looked into the smiling face of his Christian fellow sufferer and found hope to go on.[iv]

For You Today

When the way seems impossible, and you can't go on, look to the cross.  Jesus did; He endured in faith, and God exalted Him. 

Jesus was not the first to say My God. 

·       Isaiah said:  my God shall be my strength."[v] 

·       Zechariah said:  my God shall come...[vi]

Jesus was also not the last to say it. 

·       Paul said:  my God shall supply...[vii]

What’s important when life gets difficult is if YOU are ready to say MY God!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road…have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO

NOTES

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 ^I Title image: By Propiedad de la Agrupación Local de la Pasión Viviente [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

[ii] Isaiah 53.6b (KJV)

[iii] 2 Corinthians 5:21, Deuteronomy 21:23

[iv] James W. Moore, When All Else Fails...Read the Instructions (Nashville, Dimensions For Living,       1993), 35,36

[v] Isaiah 49.5b (KJV)

[vi] Philippians 4:19 (KJV)

[vii] Zechariah 14.5b (KJV)

When It Hurts So Much

 [1]

Monday, December 7, 2015

Go to VIDEO here

But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed.   Isaiah 53:5^(NLT)

A bone-chilling reality hit me last week as I was watching coverage of the San Bernardino tragedy; the newsperson gave the statistic:

In the U.S. we have more than one mass shooting every day!

I tended to think about these high-powered killings as isolated incidents we encounter occasionally.  But, last Wednesday, day #336^th of 2015, San Bernardino became the 354^th mass shooting of the year.[2]  And while that was unfolding there was another mass shooting taking place in Savannah, Georgia.  At this rate we will have 385 this year.

The pain inflicted by this kind of madness chills me to the bone.  It also reminds us of the capability of the human heart to birth and nurture murderous intentions. 

We live in the days of Noah!

The Lord observed the extent of human wickedness on the earth, and he saw that everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil. ⁶ So the Lord was sorry he had ever made them and put them on the earth. It broke his heart.  Genesis 6:5-6^(NLT)

Notwithstanding man’s cruelty and depraved callousness concerning the value of human life, there is another thought that plays bigger in my mind these days; the cross of Jesus Christ has never been more winsome to my hurting heart!

John Stott wrote: 

I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the Cross.  In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?[3]

Speaking of the ministry of Jesus in not only forgiving our sins, but taking them upon himself, the writer of Hebrews put it this way:

This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for he faced all of the same testings we do, yet he did not sin.  

Hebrews 4:15^(NLT)

If you carry that thought to San Bernardino, and all the other atrocities of these days, Jesus didn’t just die for our sins; He took them from us and made them his.  He identified with my murderous nature; He took everything bad about Russell and carried it all to the cross.

People want to make sense of the horror of mass shooting events and other human depravity.  Well…none of it makes any sense, except in light of the cross, the Gospel’s Good News, that even though we are covered in sin and moving ourselves farther and farther away from God, Jesus was not willing to sit comfortably in heaven and not do something.

What He did was show up, and He understood us, and He willingly gave Himself for us; and He knows our pain and evil. 

But more than that – more than just knowing, feeling, wishing us help, Jesus did something about it!  And because of the cross the blessed Holy Spirit of God comes to us in our grief and despair…even as the shell casings continue to hit the ground.

There is, and will be, more pain…likely there will be increasing shootings, earthquakes, mass cruelty and more…and in all of it, the cross is our beacon of hope and comfort.

For You Today

When it “hurts so much” that you can’t imagine God is there, remember the cross; His pain is proof He cares.

Think about that out on the Rocky Road today…and have a great day!

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[1] Title image:  By Jolanta Dyr (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons

[2] As reported by http://www.shootingtracker.com/ a mass shooting is where four or more people are murdered in one event

[3] Quoted by Timothy Keller in The Reason for God, (N.Y., Riverhead Books, 2008), p.203