Trust the Lord with All Your Heart

 

When societal dilemmas rise,

yes, pray, but also actively seek

God's guidance through His word 

Blessed be the Lord who has not given us as prey to their teeth.

Psalm 124:6 

In many parts of Africa today, we see a subsistence existence that Christian brothers and sisters have rationalized as being God's will for everyone. The refugee crises that don't appear in the news anymore, continue to make for a very present way of life among millions who have fled civil wars, internment camps, and bloody terrorism.

Taking courage from Israel's difficult history, maybe knowing Israelites had been subject to attack by peoples who could be cannibalistic (leading Israel to desperate self-cannibalism at times), some Christians in Africa may see missionaries who partake of meats as suspect.

There may tend to be a lack of discernment between human sacrifice and the complete sustenance the love of Heaven has made possible. There also may be an outright disdain for anything that may seem like gluttony in comparison.

But thank God today, that many have known, with all our hearts in the U.S., a provider whose loving kindness has taught us how to recover when we're ailing, and whose Grace often has told us not to eat so much the bread of affliction (the Old Testament saga) but to eat of the bread of life: the bread that brought us through slavery and gave us eternal hope.

To more fully understand that meaning, think of Old Testament scriptures that were painstakingly written on scrolls made from animal skins. When a prophet physically ate a portion of a scroll and found it sweet to taste but bitter to digest, that was God's poetic way of saying we don't have to live bitterly.

God's word, the Bible, calls the old scroll the "bread of affliction." But thank God today that we shouldn't have to eat that old, unleavened "bread," and, more importantly, that we have the unleavened bread of Heaven, instead.

Instead of suffering and living on fragments of painful wisdom, we're supposed to have the free gift of a new testimony: a testimony that provides; a testimony that says, "Let your moderation be known."

While being gluttonous isn't the way of new life we have in Jesus, knowing He is provider and allows us more than enough, is.

***

Answers like in the above opinion don't happen overnight. Answers in Jesus often take years of trial, prayer, and seeking God through his word.

One thing I've learned for sure [Hackers, please don't

change another word], is that if we understand

what Heaven is telling us, that means our

understanding isn't puffed up in error. Instead of

being puffed up like leavened bread, our

understanding needs to hold together like the skins

of an Old Testament scroll and the crisp, bound

pages of the New Testament books

(not like puffed up bread).

Understand, yes, God is artistic, and, yes, God is

poetic. Hasn't He made us in His likeness? And

wasn't He aware that bread was being leavened and

shaped in vulgar and even murderous error? And

isn't that part of why He has said to eat of the

unleavened, skin-saving truth of His word, instead?

(That is to say, drawings and pictures like the above

are not what God means by the bread of ljfe!)

When we're patient enough in affliction and in good, we ask God our questions and one day see answers in His word, clear and day (answers He often already has given us in heart).

By the way, probably the best way to study the Bible is never a Bible-in-a-year study plan. It's probably always best to hear Sunday school lessons, which usually are topical; to be in a Bible-study group, if possible, wherein the Holy Spirit may have answers a lot of seeking people need; to sit at a pastor's feet for mid-week studies, which can often bring us sharper theological and historical understanding of scriptures; and to seek answers to prayers during your own quiet times.

A photo of an old animal-skin scroll

(the "bread of affliction" for some faithful),

published in the New York Times

As to getting through passages that are that difficult bread of affliction, it's my personal testimony that God makes a way. I was in a Bible-study group in a shelter when the topic was Nehemiah's rebuilding of the Jerusalem wall. That one chapter-by-chapter study in Nehemiah, with commentary, made it so much easier to put much of the Israelite journey in right context.

Other topical help I've found, through independent study years ago, included following the books of Kings in order to understand imperfection becoming perfection through Jesus.

It's all about what the believer needs and wants to know by faith (Knock, and let truth be opened), not about how many times anyone has read how much of the Bible.

In my own heart, I'm led to believe it's not God's will for me to know every passage of the Bible intimately. I've accepted that there is at least one Bible book I may never read.

How Jesus Ends Our Suffering

 

In Bible terms, serpents are only

problems, but problems that

can be handled in Christ

As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up.

John 3:14 

Two folk expressions are appropriate right now:

One is, "Give it to God." Another is the old Jewish expression, "You're dead to me."

To say or even think, "You're dead to me" is a terrible way to feel. That's a feeling that doesn't have Jesus. But it's appropriate for this lesson, because it helps bring together some very strange puzzles that Jesus gave us.

"As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up," Jesus told a man named Nicodemus one night.

If you're a Christian and are the kind of person who has reached out in prayer about every strong question you have had about the Bible, you may have wondered, or may be wondering right now, Why has Jesus compared himself to a serpent?

It's a mystery, the most odd puzzle I think the Holy Spirit has ever given.

But it helps to know that, in God's terms, serpents represent problems.

Sin is a problem for God. And a tradition of sin ("iniquity") that goes from generation to generation more and more as time goes on, becomes so much a problem that hearts grow cold, the love of Jesus has warned.

Yet so many people think sin is a remedy. And maybe a few, in strange theological circles, have made it up in their hearts that the serpent himself that Moses lifted up was a remedy - as in a reflection of Jesus on the cross. ... But how wrong is all of that!

In Moses' time, the Israelites were familiar with prophets, but they didn't have the Messiah, the Savior from God, firm in heart. So God spoke to the people in some very rudimentary ways.

There came a time when the people were getting bites from snakes that felt like fire, and those people were dying, possibly at an alarming rate (which begs the question of why the people didn't quickly walk away from the snake-bitten place where they were traveling or where they may have been living).

Moses, like a shrewd father, went and most likely killed a large snake that was the color of bronze. He posted a pole up high somewhere and put the dead snake on the pole.

The sight of that dead thing on a pole had to have drawn crowds away from sulking over repeated snake bites. It put eyes on a solution. ... Just trust God, move away from the problems for at least a few minutes, look here, look up, remember what God did in Egypt, pray and slay whatever problems are in the way, and stop being bitten.

That was a solution that didn't quite include Jesus.

That was a the-problem-is-dead solution. That was a "The problem is already dead to me" response. Instead of reflecting or foreshadowing the coming Savior, Moses raised up a solution by taking things into his own God-given hands.

The trouble with that solution is that, oftentimes, our problems, although snakelike, are very much about differences or fighting among very human people. So, we need Jesus.

Jesus isn't the problem. He is the solution who is the remedy. He is the one from Heaven whose self sacrifice says, "Go on now, to a new freedom. Sin no more."

Instead of reflecting what Moses did, Jesus was lifted up to do the opposite, to draw people not to ending problems with their hands, but to accepting Him as the only Heaven-sent sacrifice for this world's problems.

The only similarity between Jesus and the serpent was that both were lifted up in order to draw people away from perishing.

But in Him, there is a whole lot of waiting problems out ("longsuffering"). In Him, there is a lot of trial or testing. In Him, there is slowness to anger and care in judgment. In Him, each one is held to an account. In Him, there is deliverance, even if we're unable to move and are just being still. In Him, there is wisdom and there are hands to help heal. In Him, solutions, real remedies, take time, despite how we expect Him to, in the end, come swiftly.

Amen.

Endurance Helps Save

Living through turmoil and

confusion in these "last days"

is just as Jesus said,

but He also says to endure

In the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.

2 Peter 3:3 

I don't want to give voice any of the naysaying I find online and in everyday living. Instead, I'll say I'm faithful.

We need faith to be Jesus' body in these eschatological end times. To keep being His hands and feet, helping make a difference, let's stop in-fighting in the church.

If we're fighting in unrighteousness, there's no victory in Him.

Jesus: The Savior who didn't have a place to call home at night, because his mother apparently doubted Him at one point; the Savior who depended on whoever was willing and listening, who depended on others in flesh but who said, "I'll give you rest"; the Savior whose prescription was to labor less like Mah-ta (the English say Martha), and to rest more like the sister who stopped her hurrying in order to listen.

Being pressed and stressed today, one of the best things there is is being still, getting organized and collected, working in peace. From early childhood to elder years, that's a blessed prescription.

And if you wouldn't want anyone to disrupt your peace in Jesus, don't make it your everyday mission to be disruptive to anyone else's day to day.

We're living at a time when some organizations have written "to disrupt" as part of their mission or goals. But I'm here to tell you, devil, you have another thing coming.

As the apostle Paul said, "I bear the marks of Christ," so don't bother me, anymore.

Let's keep quiet sometimes, study, and rightly discern not only biblical history but, more importantly, God's words of Bible truth. Let's keep our bearings and always know victory is in Jesus.

While much of the world is allied in war, confusion, and lawlessness now; and while there are those Europe- and Russia-oriented elite who have become headstrong not in faith but in standing on war power and on prideful thoughts of ancestors who migrated back to the land of Israel after the second most recorded world war; while there is racial and gay pride gone to godless extremes in thinking no one can go to the hell that men like Herod the Great went to, not if the offences are only using the tongue for evil compared to Herod murdering a wife, two of his sons, and Hebrew children (something the Jewish historian Josephus was probably too entangled with Rome to ever write about); while there is so much against many of us each and every day, we cannot forget that we are Heaven's shepherds, lions, and lambs, and that we are supposed to be witnessing our faith convictions no matter our circumstances.

God help us never to fall from grace.

Lord, help us remember how you said he who endures to the end will be saved. (Matthew 24:13)

***

When I logged in early morning weeks after I made this post, I happened to see someone had messed up this post. ... So I'm asking the Lord for the hacking to just end. ... I have held out too much faith for too long -- and have poured my whole heart into leaning on how I learned to write, edit, and keep faith that the love of God is always right there helping us speak our heart. ... The struggle God has given us is for His good, and there has been sacrifice enough without ministry being ruined.