Category Archives: The Good News of Jesus

Held by Faith

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When Jesus said to Peter,

“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.” (Luke 22:31-32)

He was warning Peter about the trial to come.  But more than that, He was encouraging him, informing Peter that He would keep him safe.   Jesus prayed that Peter’s faith would not fail!

So, here’s the question: When we suffer, when we are discouraged and confused, who is responsible for making sure our faith doesn’t fail?   After all, faith is our lifeline, our means of connecting to God.  Who protects it?  Whose job is it to keep our faith strong?  Our natural inclination is to believe that we must work harder to keep our faith strong.  We have to tell ourselves to believe.  But is that true?

In Peter’s situation, Jesus prayed that his faith would not fail.   Maybe you think that Peter was more important to Jesus than you are.  Is that true?  (Hint:  What did Jesus teach about “the least of these, my brothers”? – Matthew 25:40ff)  Do you think that Jesus, the One Who promised,

And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. 40 For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.” (John 6:39-40)

… would somehow fail to pray for your faith?

And how did you get your faith?  Did you work it up?  Did you “squinch” up your face and ball your fists and hold your breath?  Or was your faith given to you by God?

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9)

By the way, when God gives out gifts, batteries – rechargables – are included.

The toddler is going with his grandfather, down to the soda shop to get a cone of mint-chip.  As they get ready to cross Main, Grampa holds out his hand and says, “Hold onto my hand and don’t let go.”   Hand in hand, off they go, picking their way through a break in traffic.  Whose job is it to make sure the child is still holding on?

In my Father's Hand

Loud and Clear

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Maybe someday we will understand how God connects with salmon and butterflies.  From our perspective, His connection with them seems built-in, automatic.  But the connection between God and humans is conditional.  It depends upon our being in the right condition.  You’ve seen the thriller movie scenes in which the guy in the airport tower is frantically calling to the pilot of an airplane but can’t get through?  That’s a conditional communication; the airplane radio must be set on the right channel and be in good working order or the communication doesn’t get through.  

But what is the necessary condition for communication with God?  God has designed our interaction with Him to depend on faith.  Think of all the other conditions He could have chosen.  He could have given us radios that we needed to set on the right channel.  He could have required us to bring burnt offerings.  We could have been required to follow His tweets.  But God chose faith.  Interesting…  Why faith?   The answer begins by considering  what faith is.

The essence of faith is solid belief that exists in the absence of tangible proof.  The Bible says it like this:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. (Hebrews 11:1)

(By the way, the word “hope” in that sentence did not mean wishful thinking, it means a confident expectation.   It’s not like, “I hope it doesn’t rain on Thursday,” but like our “hope” that Summer will follow Spring.)

If you think about it, if what you believe is true, then faith frees you from the cumbersome process of seeking proof.  When you walk in the dark in an unfamiliar place, every step must be tentative until you know you have solid footing.  But when you walk in the dark in your home, walking by faith that your home is unchanged from when you turned out the lights, then your steps are freer and more fluid.  Scientific measurement methods, by contrast,  are necessarily tedious and plodding, designed to help us feel our way in the dark and they work well for that.  But they don’t work well for an activity that is done with spontaneity, like dancing.  Dancing is done by faith.  And so is talking with God.

God designed us to communicate with Him, not on the basis of touch or sight or measurement, but on the basis of faith.  The more I consider His design choice, the better it seems.  Can you imagine how suffocating it would be to a relationship if you had to stop and measure how much you loved each other several times a day?   Do you remember how cool it was when you didn’t need training wheels?  We are meant to swoop and glide when we communicate with God, not wobble along in tentative fear.  

Without faith, we are not in touch with God.  We are left to our own devices and guesses.  Adam and Eve discovered that in the Garden of Eden.  When they stopped trusting in God, they were left wandering in the dark.  When Jesus came, it was to restore our connection with God.

Then they asked him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?”  Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”  John 6:28-29

To believe in Jesus is also to believe God loves us.  Faith is sure of that.  To believe in Jesus is to believe God will forgive us our many sins, that Jesus willingly paid with His life to settle our accounts.  Faith nails that down.  More than that, faith opens up our communication and relationship with God.  Wow!

When I dish out caramel fudge ice cream, my scoop seeks out the mother-lode veins of gooey, rich, stuff that clusters in the middle.  When it comes to faith in the Bible, one of the gooey, rich, mother-lode veins is found in the 11th chapter of Hebrews.  You saw the first verse quoted above.  Most of the rest of that chapter is a Hall of Fame listing of great acts of faith.  But there is something else, too, something surprising and thought provoking.

Stay tuned…

One Plus Two Equals One

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… or at least that is what we’ve been told.  God is One and God is Three.  He exists in three Persons, the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  But explanations of how three can equal one usually fall short.  People resort to tortured analogies (“It’s like three sides of a triangle…”) that don’t really help.  It’s a lot like asking a software engineer to explain what he does for a living.  Beyond answering you with “techno-speak” (“I manage the cloud-based infrastructure of network algorithms…”) your engineer friend is hard pressed to help you really understand.

The Bible explains the mystery of three in one by focusing on Jesus’ part in it.  Like this:

The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being,  (Heb 1:3a)

No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only (i.e. Jesus), who is at the Father’s side, has made him known. (John 1:18 – with my added explanation)

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.   (Col 1:15)

God is invisible to our limited human senses.  Even if we could somehow see Him, we would not be able to understand what we were seeing.  But Jesus, these verses say, is an exact representation of Who and What God is, given to us in a form we can understand: human form.

My favorite (and somewhat tortured) analogy begins with a desktop computer.  If you look at your computer, what you see is really just its case, not the actual computer.  You open it up and look at the circuit cards inside and you still cannot see any computing going on; you don’t have any way of knowing what it is doing.  What “it is doing” happens at a microscopic level, the invisible flow of electrons and “holes” (whatever those are…), in complex patterns, and at the speed of light.  Even if you invented special goggles that enabled you to see that flow of energy, you still couldn’t make any sense of it.  Balancing your checkbook would look very much like a game of Angry Birds.  Nevertheless, this invisible computing process is being done for you!   But there is no way for you to take advantage of it unless the process is somehow translated into a form you can see and understand.

That is why your computer has a monitor.  When you turn on your monitor, voila!, it translates the invisible and inscrutable flow of energy in the desktop unit into words and pictures that you can understand.  Assuming your desktop unit is connected correctly to your monitor, the monitor is the “exact representation of” the computer’s “being.”  The monitor has “made the computer known.”   It is the “image of the invisible” computer.  That’s why, when you talk about your computer, you are referring to all three parts of it as one thing – the processor, the monitor and the connection between them.  Like God: The Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Who is the wireless connection between the Father and Son!).

If you follow all of that, perhaps it will give greater understanding to these words of Jesus:

Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?  Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. (John 14:9b-10)

Does that make it clearer?  Two plus One equals One.

Ancient Glimpses

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Long time no post…  We’ve been wandering for a month or so, from Colorado up over Lake Superior in Canada and back, by the little squiggly roads.  We’ve encountered beautiful sights and some really crappy WiFi.  Worth it though…

So then, back to the “Fresh Bread;” here’s a mind-bender for you…

Isaiah saw glimpses of Jesus, 700 years before His birth; we’ve mentioned that before (See “Ancient Sroll; Secrets Revealed”). Go back 300 years earlier, and King David saw glimpses of Jesus, too:

The Lord says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.”  Psalm 110:1

The puzzle in that first line of David’s psalm is that David says that God (“The Lord”) speaks to his God (“my Lord”).  Who does he say God is talking to?  Jewish theologians from antiquity agreed: David was referring to the Messiah.  But the Messiah was understood to be a king from among David’s descendants.  How could David call a descendant of his “my Lord?”   Jesus posed this question for the theologians of His day:

While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them, “What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?”

“The son of David,” they replied.

He said to them, “How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls him ‘Lord’? For he says,

“ ‘The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.” ’  Matthew 22:41-44

David had been given a glimpse of Jesus, 1000 years or so before His birth.  In that same psalm, David talks of Jesus’ powerful rule.  In poetic imagery, he alludes to Jesus’ eternal life, saying that each new day…

Arrayed in holy majesty,
from the womb of the dawn
you will receive the dew of your youth.  (Psalm 110:3b)

But then David calls back an event from the life of his ancestor, Abraham, that took place 700 years earlier, 1700 years before Jesus.  Abraham was returning from a battle he knew God had caused him to win, seeking a way to give thanks and honor to God, when a mysterious stranger showed up.  His name was Melchizedek, which means “King of Righteousness.”  He served Abraham as a priest, receiving an offering of thanks for God, serving as one through whom Abraham could connect to God.  He then vanishes from the pages of Scripture.  In addition to not having any record of his lineage, Melchizedek has no death recorded in Scripture.  But the really unique thing about him is that he served as both a king and a priest, something no other king or priest has ever done.

David, in his psalm, says that God says to the Messiah:

“You are a priest forever,
in the order of Melchizedek.”  (Psalm 110:4b)

This may sound confusing, but David was saying that one day, a descendant in his line would be a righteous, powerful, supreme leader, a man who would live eternally, and who would serve as both a king and a priest.  Jewish scholars and theologians who puzzled over that psalm generally agreed.  1700 years later, Jesus acknowledged that He was that Descendant, Righteous King and Perfect Priest.  He would serve to connect us to God in a perfect way.  The author of the Book of Hebrews later gave a rather detailed explanation about how all those pieces fit together (Read Hebrews 6:13 – 8:2).

When I consider how unlikely it is that such ancient glimpses of a Messiah would ever fit together, much less be realized in the Person of One Man, my head swims.  And all of  that just skims the surface…

Whap!!!

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Isaiah’s prophecy about Jesus’ perfect leadership (see “Will the Real Leader Please Stand Up?”) includes glimpses of the results and they read like fantasy: wolves lying down peacefully with sheep; children playing with poisonous snakes without any fear of being attacked. Whether or not those images will be fulfilled literally, the end results of perfect Leadership will seem too good to be true. Imagine a world with no need for warning labels, helmets or lawyers!

But in order to accomplish such thorough peacefulness, first, Isaiah said, Jesus would take out a mighty club and smash the wicked. Now, there is a scene rarely pictured in Sunday School books. (“You there! You’ve had your last warning! Whap! Crunch!…) Hard to imagine. Even harder when you understand that His club will be the words He speaks, His

    Truth

.

He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth;
with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.

In a world in which a top law enforcement official can give testimony that by his own admission is “the least untruthful,” the Word of Jesus will descend like a mighty club, putting an end to all the nonsense. And that is good news. Whap!!!

Psalm for Wandering

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When we are wandering (literally – that’s how we like to travel, with no advance plans, reservations or schedule…) I return frequently to the lines of a favorite psalm. We have an illusion of control when daily life is “same old, same old.” But out exploring, almost everything is unexpected. On the road, you are not in control and you know it. In that condition, these words are especially meaningful:

Lord, you have assigned me my portion and my cup
you have made my lot secure.
The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;

Will the Real Leader Please Stand Up?

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Do you despair when you hear all The bickering that goes on in Washington? How do you suppose the upheaval in Egypt will turn out? Do you think the new leader in Iran will be better than Ahmedinijab (How do you spell his name? My spell checker converted it into something about getting a job at Denny’s)? When you consider all the unrest in the world are you ready for a perfect leader? Here’s a prediction about just that from Isaiah 11. He is prophesying about Jesus. When you read how Jesus’ leadership will be characterized one day, it sounds pretty good…

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—
the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and of power,
the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord—
and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.
He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes,
or decide by what he hears with his ears;
but with righteousness he will judge the needy,
with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. . (Isaiah 11:1-4)

Question is, with a leader like that, would you follow Him, would you cooperate?

Check Engine

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Are you getting tired of all this talk about what makes God angry?   You might be thinking, “Alright already! I get it; let’s get on to something more pleasant!”   If that is how you feel, imagine how God feels!  Fact is, God wants us to get on with the good stuff.  That’s why He gave us the Bible!

When your check-engine light comes on,

Check Engine light on a 1996 Dodge Caravan.

Check Engine light on a 1996 Dodge Caravan. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

you can either get upset about it, or you can think, “Wow! My car just informed me of something I can do to get it running better.”   Sure you can  also be bummed out about the cretin who just serviced the thing and who probably left a wire unplugged…   But the point is, Isaiah 5 is a “Check Engine” light.  Ignore it to your own peril.  Here’s what lies ahead for those who do:

So man will be brought low and mankind humbled, the eyes of the arrogant humbled.  (Isaiah 5:15)

The problem, at its root, is arrogance, the attitude that presumes it knows better than God how to live in His garden.  The opposite attitude, humility, is held by those who really do know they need to pay attention to God, the Creator and Designer of all this and to submit to the ways He has said work best.  If you are only recently reading these posts, go back and read about the key verse in Isaiah, the one that reveals the message of the whole Bible.  The short version is this: God will dwell in the souls of the humble, will forgive them, restore them and bring them to full life (Isaiah 57:15-19).

Here is what lies ahead for the humble:

But the Lord Almighty will be exalted by his justice, and the holy God will show himself holy by his righteousness. Then sheep will graze as in their own pasture; lambs will feed among the ruins of the rich. (Isaiah 5:16-17)

The “sheep” in those verses are the humble who pay attention and submit to God.  And to His Son, Jesus.  Here’s what Jesus said lay in store for His “sheep”:

Therefore Jesus said again, “I tell you the truth, I am the gate for the sheep. All who ever came before me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture.
(John 10:7-9)

The Hidden Jesus

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Jesus has been hidden in plain sight, by those who distort His message and co-opt it for their own purposes. Christ has become obscured by Christianity. But that is the way it has always been for God’s Truth. That is why God told Isaiah he would be preaching to people who would:

“Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.” (Isaiah 6:9) His teachings, teachings coming directly from God, would “Make the heart of this people calloused; … their ears dull and close their eyes.” (Isaiah 6:10a – excerpts). People would hear what Isaiah said, but not understand it, see it but not perceive it, because they would have their minds made up! People want to make up their own ideas instead of submitting to God’s ways. People are much more comfortable with religion than they are with Truth. By “religion,” I mean a set of rules – do’s and don’ts – so they can measure how well they are doing as they try to measure up.

The ironic thing is this:

    God’s Truth sets us free, while religion ties us up with rules.
    Religion tells us to try harder; God tells us to find the place where we rest, in tune with His Truth.

Consider what Isaiah was told to convey to the priests of his time. The priests had distorted God’s truth, making it sound as though it was for little children:

“For it is: Do and do, do and do, rule on rule, rule on rule, a little here, a little there…” (Isaiah 28:10) But God had said, “This is the resting place, let the weary rest” and “This is the place of repose” – but they would not listen. (Isaiah 28:12b excerpts) “So then, the word of The Lord to them will become: Do and do, do and do, rule on rule, rule on rule: a little here, a little there – so they fall backward, be injured and snared and captured.” (Isaiah 28:13)

People would rather live by rules than by God’s Truth. Religions made up of rules give some people authority over others. People have made up religions based on Jesus, and have hidden Jesus behind them. Jesus came to earth with “grace and truth.” (John 1:14) If people had “eyes to see and ears to hear” Jesus told them, “If you hold to my teaching (literally: if you make your home in my understanding of reality, my ‘logos’) you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31)

Here’s the urgent deal: If all you know about Jesus has come to you from a religion, get to know Him from His Word! Seek to understand His “Logos,” His understanding of what is real and true. Pray to have eyes that see and ears that hear. A great place to start would be in the Gospel of John.

Now You See it; Now You Don’t

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My wife has a can of aerosol wonder spray that causes spots on the carpet to vanish.  No, I don’t know what it is – deliberately, so I don’t have to use it.  We each have our own gifts: my gift is putting the spots on the carpet…  Anyhow, it’s amazing stuff. You should get some.  Now you see it; now you don’t.  

In Isaiah, God said this:

“Come now, let us reason together,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall  be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” (Isaiah 1:18)

Most of us have sins we hope nobody ever finds out about, the ones that, whenever they come to mind, cause our toes  to curl up in our shoes.  We’d like to forget them but they won’t go away.  They are like bloodstains on the carpet.   But God says He will cause those to vanish.  Not just forgive them but take them away entirely.   Literally.  Isaiah knew this from first hand experience.  When he cowered before God and confessed that he, like everybody else, was a man of “unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5) God arranged a weird, supernatural ceremony of atonement to happen:

Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar.  With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.” (Isaiah 6:6-7)

I cannot explain all the bizarre details described there.  But God (literally His angelic beings) did something to cause Isaiah’s sin to disappear.  The Hebrew word behind the phrase “taken away” means to drag off, or cause something to vanish.  Now you see it; now you don’t.   The reason that is possible is explained in the Hebrew word behind the phrase “atoned for.”  If you wanted to purchase freedom for a slave, you would pay the going rate to his master, making atonement for him.   Jesus made that kind of payment to free us from our guilt.   If you are willing, God removes it.

In the verse we began with above, God says, in effect, “Be reasonable and I will cause your sin to disappear – not just the common ones, but the whoppers, too – the ones that seem like bloodstains on your memory.”   What does He mean by “Let us reason together?”  We see it in the next two verses:

If you are willing and obedient, you will eat the best from the land; but if you resist and rebel, you will be devoured by the sword.” For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.  (Isaiah 1:19-20)