The Lord blessed us with awesome an summer-like day yesterday. The Lord decorated the evening by displaying the majestic harvest moon. Alice and I walked under the brilliance and beauty of the Harvest moon. The hills were laughing and the trees were praising the Lord in silence. A friend posted the photographs of turkeys grazing with the chickens. The trees are about burst forth into brilliant colors. We all can say, "what a wonderful world" and we all can sing, "How great Thou art".
One of the my favorite Psalms, Psalm 139, portrays the Lord God who watches over us with much love and care. Our Lord God knows us better than we know ourselves. He is aware of every action and anticipates our innermost thoughts. Verse 1 begins: "O Lord, you have searched me and you know me." The knowledge God has of us is not only expansive, it is also deeply personal. David described God as seeing us from afar, but that doesn't mean that he thinks that God is far off. This God who knows us knows us from the inside. David used the language of "perception" and "discernment" to characterize God's knowledge of him. "You perceive my thoughts," he said. "You discern my going out and my my coming in, my rising up and my lying down. You are familiar with my ways." This thought moved David to praise in verses 17-18: "How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand. When I awake, I am still with you."
John Calvin began the "Institutes of the Christian Religion" with the assertion
that the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves are related. "Nearly
all the wisdom we possess," Calvin wrote, "that is to say, true and sound
wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves."
Calvin went on to say that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself
unless he has first looked upon God's face, and then descends from contemplating
God to scrutinize himself. But, Calvin pointed out, what we learn about
ourselves is not entirely comfortable because when we consider ourselves in the
light of God, we see both "what we were like when we were first created and what
our condition became after the fall of Adam."
King David, the writer of Psalm
139, paused and pondered the majesty of God. He pondered the vastness of God's
wisdom, power, and grace. King David aligned himself with God's purposes, and
he asked God to search him. He aligned himself with God's purposes by
differentiating himself from the wicked. Verse 19-22 read: "If only you would
slay the wicked, O God! Away from me, you bloodthirsty men! They speak of you
with evil intent; your adversaries misuse your name. Do I not hate those who
hate you, O Lord, and abhor those who rise up against you? I have nothing but
hatred for them; I count them my enemies." We are embarrassed by his
sentiment—David's words sound harsh to us—but that is only because we have lost
our moral compass.
The Psalmist's uncomfortable words
are a reminder that there really is such a thing as evil and that it is right to
denounce evil, but those who denounce evil in others must be prepared to
confront a more subtle enemy: they must be prepared to face the evil in
themselves. That's why the Psalmist concluded with a prayer for himself in
verses 23-24: "Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious
thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way
everlasting."
In a Christianity Today article entitled, "Looking for
Monsters," Kay Warren writes that the first time she visited Rwanda, she went
expecting it to be easy to spot the monsters who had perpetrated that country's
terrible genocide in 1994. "What I found left me puzzled, and ultimately
terrified," she writes."Instead of finding leering,
menacing creatures, I met men and women who looked and behaved a lot like me.
They took care of their families, went to work, chatted with their neighbors,
laughed, cried, prayed, and worshiped. Where were the monsters? Where were the
evildoers capable of heinous acts? Slowly, with a deepening sense of dread, I
realized the truth. There were no monsters in Rwanda, just people like you and
me."
The good news is that the God who
is your creator is also your redeemer. This God who knows you inside and out,
the God who sees you coming and going, the God who is the architect of your
soul, is also the architect of your salvation. He is the God who became flesh
and dwelt among us in the person of Jesus Christ. He is the one who shed his
blood. Your creator is also your redeemer—Jesus Christ: the only one who saves
us from our sin.
In Christ,
Brown
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