15 Minutes
God is in accordance with His love. There is nothing that we could ever say
to give expression to God’s ultimate highness and authority, it cannot be
even thought of by another or any other. If we could only experience God. If
our closeness with God was as internal silence. Just deep breathing. In...,
out...! In, out. Feel God in your heartbeat. Think how our wordlessness can
speak the awe of His glory as we wonder before God. God is so wonderful
in His judgment, in His redemption, in His revelation, in His promises, that as
we know Him, we are humbly struck silent.
God is not some distant Being whom we worship by description only.
Worshiping God illuminates our understanding. It models our faith reflectively
to explore the old and the new testaments to reason with the obsolete
phenomenon rather than the traditional theological explanation. In this, the
Holy Spirit discloses and makes known different functions and meanings in
diverse texts and contexts. Oh, if only we had the wisdom, the reasoning to
conceptually explain sensibly how God could be understood to be God. We
consider His relationship, His agency, His attributes. Our approach...to what
can God be likened? What similarities to another god can be attributed to
God? None, there can be no other god. And because our faith is shaped by
the Christ-event, we look to our investigation of Jesus as our central Word
for the uniqueness of proclaiming God as the ultimate reality of all things as
the one cannot be without the other. This reality is of such excellence that
God humiliates God self in Jesus unto death and predetermination. Nothing
that God does can be sub-summed to the compliment that God the Father
acknowledges His Son. God leads history to the purpose God has chosen.
And because He is God, He, the holy One and He, the only One. This is a
“vertical” relation. God is above anything else in authority and power. God is
free to decide and to act in order to achieve God’s purposes. But this relation
also has a “horizontal”, historical aspect. God leads God’s people as a
shepherd to their future of peace and justice. In this sense God is proceeding
to God’s kingdom. And God’s kingdom is a reality in this world and is being
realized. God’s true power is the power He has given us to make judgment
choices. That was part of the creation image and likeness. And to live that
image, that likeness is the exercising of our choice as it is determined by
God’s character, God’s will, God’s purposes, God’s mercy and
righteousness.
And with this awesome gift of free will, of choice, we are to
have wisdom as reasoned with God. That means with every choice we are
to realize the sure consequences. So, it is more than just the power of
choice...it is the power of the right choice as it reflects the mind of Christ.
And there’s an even deeper dimension...God’s purpose to reproduce
Himself. God is a Family. And He loves to have sons and daughters.
Otherwise, we would not have been created in His image (God’s character)
and in His likeness (God’s features). The marring brought that to an end. So,
now the power of God is working in accordance with the word of God in our
lives, we speak God's word. And we speak simply because we have found
our place in God, the life and the power of God is at work in us, and we gain
command over life issues and circumstances. We walk in God's way. We
have an understanding and knowledge of who God is as we bring His
express image to others. The power to suffer and to die for others is love;
the power to suffer and die for another is ultimate, divine, perfect love. God’s
determination in His people reaches this dimension. And this power of God
cannot have a more competent element, a more credible witness than the
love, the life of Jesus. This power is indeed often hidden in human life and
in the history of this world. But the crucified is risen and exalted. This means
that our understanding of God’s power must be in accordance with God’s
love. No means of manipulation, threat and coercion...choice alone. God’s
power cooperating with human power without diminishing it.
God is the unchangeable changer. He cannot gain or lose His attributes. But
He does grow in grace and mercy. And whatever the circumstances we find
ourselves in, the power of the Most High God is able to change the situations
for good as He determined in the counsel and it is by our prayers that He
accomplishes His will. When we reasonably investigate God’s specific
promise that He does not change, His promise is based upon His character
and His authority to uphold it. When God says He does not lie, it is because
God’s nature is truthful and He has the power to uphold that truth. When God
says He does not break His promises, it is because His nature and authority
does not permit it. God said He does not change, this promise is specifically
in reference to His covenantal promise to Israel that He would bless all
nations through them despite their disobedience. Yet God offered to move
that promise from Abraham to Moses. Was this design of intervention, of
changing the fate decisioned in the Determinate Counsel? Pray, study, and
reason with the 32nd chapter of Exodus. God has every right to judge us in
our sin but consider the situation and the appeal in that passage because He
promised to fulfill His covenant of redemption for mankind through Abraham.
This covenant promise of God was fulfilled by the arrival of God Jesus in the
flesh. When Jesus became flesh, God was changing. In fact, this is His
providential fulfilling of the promise He gave beginning in Genesis 3:15 and
12:1-3 just as He said He would. Did God become flesh in order to fulfill His
promise...it was determined ever before there was anything except the
Godhead in Determinate Counsel. To best reason with this, one must
understand the difference between nature and position. In order, for God to
be faithful and always fulfill His covenant promises, it must require that His
character, His nature never change. However, such promises do not
necessitate that His position cannot change. Pause. We’ll return to this
thought shortly. Remember the promise of Malachi is that God’s promise will
not change based upon His truthful nature. Oh, what ignorance we possess
when we fail to realize, to reason with the full influx of the truth as it is
presented by God Himself. God calls us foolish, having no understanding,
no knowledge. If we would but ask for wisdom, not thinking we know what
we do not. To what is our God referring when He instructs us that He changes
not. To what humbling state of hearing are we to ascend to gain the
insightfulness to reason with His purposes determined for our attaining?
Hear and consider, think and reflect...
Malachi 3:6
Let’s ratify this change not comment. Here we have God's immutability
asserted by Himself, and glorified in it. Is God a just revenger of those that
rebel against Him? Is He the bountiful rewarder of those that diligently seek
Him? In both these He is unchangeable. He is as much an enemy to sin as
ever He was, and impenitent sinners will find Him so. God’s judgment is
never antiquated, or out of date, but against those that go on still in their
trespasses the curse of His law still remains in full force, power, and virtue.
Israel had reason to say that He was an unchangeable God, for He had been
faithful to His covenant with them and their fathers; if He had not adhered to
that, they would have been consumed long ago and cut off from being a
people; they had been false and fickle in their conduct to Him, and He might
justly have abandoned them, and then they would soon have been
consumed and ruined; but because He remembered His covenant, and
would not violate that, nor alter the thing that had gone forth out of His lips,
they were preserved from ruin and recovered from the brink of it. It was
purely because He would be as good as His word. Now as God had kept
Israel from ruin, while the covenant of peculiarity remained in force, purely
because He would be faithful to that covenant, and would show that He is
not a man that He should lie, so, when that covenant should be superseded
and set aside by the new covenant, Jesus, and they, by rejecting the
blessings of it, lay themselves open to the curses, God will show that in the
determinations of His wrath, as well as in those of His mercy, neither is He a
man, that He should repent, but will then be as true to His threatenings as
previously He had been to His promises. If we are wise, or if we are becoming
wise, we may all apply this very sensibly to ourselves; because we have to
do with a God that changes not in His character.
However, God can in His nature lower Himself in position, to the point of a
servant in order to best fulfill His promises. He doesn’t have to change His
character to do this, rather He lowers Himself in His nature to do this. He
takes on a different position. In fact, we could take it one step further and
say, Jesus’s position lowers so that he can fulfill his promises in accordance
with his nature. This is our Sovereign God.
Philippians 2:5-8
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