It is written, "Bless the LORD, O my
soul: and all that is within me, bless
his holy name. Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits: Who
forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; Who redeemeth thy
life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender
mercies". (Psalm 103) This is my praise and prayer today.
I was in Binghamton at Lourdes
Hospital yesterday for one of my treatments. Alice and I met with the
doctor, who was pleased with my blood tests. He commented on how
wonderfully I was responding to the treatments. I replied that the Lord
Jesus is blessing me and performing his miracles of grace and mercy. My
doctors in Boston are also very pleased. One of the doctors shared with
me during a recent visit that I have already "beaten all the odds".
I reported that I have been covered and engulfed with so much prayer and
intercessions with so many around the corner and around the globe. The
Lord Jesus, the winsome physician and mighty healer, is at work. I praise
the Lord for each one every one who have been praying for me faithfully,
fervently, and believing for me all these years. I am ever so grateful
and eternally indebted to you all. I have been battling this
health issue for over 10 years. The Lord has sustained and renewed time
after time. During these special years and days, through testing and trials at
times, He has given me His favor and has rejuvenated to continue in
serving Him. He paved the way for travel overseas, including Australia,
preaching and teaching. I am praying to travel to India Spring of 2018
with a very special short term mission. Please continue to pray for me
that the Lord whom nothing is impossible, grant me the desire of my
heart.
Alice and I along with my visiting
brothers from India have been enjoying visiting family and friends. One
again, praise the Lord for the beauty and splendor of this magnificent
season. The hills are laughing and the mountains are dancing. Once
again, in the words of Albert Camus, "Every Autumn is a second spring when
every leaf becomes a flower". Praise the Lord for the abundance of
this season.
One of the neighbors who raises honey
bees as a hobby brought us Five gallons of honey - raw, wild, and natural
unadulterated. We have been giving it away to family friends. One
of my young friends, who is a youth pastor and an avid hunter, texted me
yesterday and shared that he is busy with bow hunting. He said he will
bring me big deer whole and intact. My hear did a happy dance.
My dad was a farmer and a very gifted and talented hunter. He loved the
wild and the wilderness. We were raised with wild meats. The
hills, mountains, and fields were our grocery stores.
Once again thank you all for praying,
believing, and trusting. I had a note from Neha, a young collage
student in India and daughter of my relative. She stated that she
is praying for me. I had a praying partner who entered church triumphant.
He used to pray for me praying, "May the Lord of all good and perfect
gifts grant you the faith of Abraham, Love of King of David , the strength
of Samson, the tenacity and determination apostle Paul.".
Elie Wiesel, the great Jewish writer
known best for his writing about the Holocaust, wrote many other things as
well, including Messengers
of God about Bible characters and stories. In
his chapter "The Sacrifice of Isaac: A Survivor's Story," he says:
As a child, I read and read this tale, my heart beating wildly; I
felt dark apprehension come over me and carry me far away. There was no
understanding the three characters. Why would God, the merciful Father, demand
that Abraham become inhuman, and why would Abraham accept? And Isaac, why did
he submit so meekly? Not having received a direct order to let himself be
sacrificed, why did he consent? I could not understand.
There is no other story like this in the
Old Testament. There is but one other in all of human history. It
is the great finale to Abraham's life although he lived on many more years, had
other children, buried his wife, Sarah, and finally died at age 175. His
faith story started in Genesis
12:1-3 In
Genesis 22, the words follow the same pattern: "Take your son, your only
son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as
a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you".
Years before, God had asked Abram to
"burn his bridges behind him",but in Genesis 22 "he asks him to
burn the only bridge ahead of him," in the words of Sidney
Greidanus. We cannot help but ponder the impenetrable emotions of this
story, but our text does not help us. One cannot help but wonder
what this felt
like. The three characters here—God, Abraham, and Isaac— invite our
focus. Each gives us something significant to consider. If we focus
on God, then we must weigh his goodness, his mysterious ways, and his
promises. If we focus on Abraham (as Hebrews
11 does), then we are called to meditate on
faith in God. If we focus on Isaac, we get a glimpse of God's redemption up
close and personal.
I choose to focus more on the test of
Abraham, which begins, "Some time later God tested Abraham. He said
to him, 'Abraham!' 'Here I am,' he replied" (Gen. 22:1). In testing
Abraham, God wasn't checking to find out whether or not Abraham's faith was
genuine enough. God himself had given and shaped Abraham's faith by
promises, struggles, forgiveness, and wonders over many years. In Genesis 15, God showed
Abraham the stars and told him his descendants would be that innumerable.
The Bible says there, "Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him
as righteousness" (v. 6). Abraham had seen that promise come to pass when
Isaac, the promised son, was born miraculously to a 90-year-old mother and
100-year-old dad—the great nativity story of the Old Testament.
The text emphasizes the love of a father for his son, which makes the
enormity of this command obvious, "Take your son, your only son, whom you
love—Isaac—and go …" (Gen. 22:2). God's tests of faith often take us
out beyond the place of clarity into frayed emotions and broken hearts to
wonder, What if I have this wrong? What if God is not like the Bible
says?
Sometimes we look into the suffering of
other believers and say, "I don't know how she does it. I don't
think I could bear up under that." God allows us to
be given burdens and trials more than we can bear
sometimes, and in those times we may lose touch with God. We may not
know what to believe. We may not even be able to pray. We may cry
out with Psalm 88: "Darkness is my closest friend" (v.
18). In writing to suffering Christians, Peter said in 1 Peter 1:6-7,
"Now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of
trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of
greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result
in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed." God's
tests of faith are not just trials by ordeal but in reality they are the
refining of gold.
When our faith is under fire, sometimes it
seems that God is silent in our suffering, so we consider more seriously the
things God has taught us. Those three days journeying to Mount
Moriah may have been like that for Abraham. I think he reasoned
and prayed out implications of his faith he hadn't grasped before. We
also may face life journeys fraught with some times of lonely turmoil
which take us through the far borders of our faith. There we have no
choice but to pray through the promises of God, to think through what we
have in Christ, to decide to tighten our grip on God. We feel
ill-prepared for these times of trial, but God uses them as times of refining
our faith, our lives, and our witness.
The son of Abraham was as good
as dead. God would have seen nothing more if Isaac died. Isaac was
consecrated to God as surely as if his body had been consumed by fire. That he
still lived was a kind of resurrection story just the way his birth was the Old
Testament's great nativity story. The Jews read this story In one
very important sense, Abraham was willing to offer his son as a
sacrifice. It was a momentous time in the lives of Abraham and Isaac,
taking place in a remote and isolated place. Abraham and Isaac prefigure
God the father and God the Son. The sacrifice God demanded of Abraham to
give his son prefigured the death of Jesus Christ on the Cross.
In Christ,
Brown
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