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Provoked to Jealousy
A false gospel has permeated the American culture. It is the false gospel of prosperity, the health, wealth, and prosperity gospel, as some call it. I call it a false gospel because those who preach it do not preach the entire counsel of God—only the appealing part. They teach how God longs to bless His people. They teach how God desires to give them the Kingdom. They teach how God’s people are to be the head and not the tail, lenders and not borrowers. But they neglect the part that comes before—in order to be blessed by God, one must be obedient to God.
God does desire to bless His people. Inherent in that statement is the fact that one must first be His people. What does this mean? It means one must be adopted into His family by the blood of His Son, Jesus Christ. It means one must acknowledge his or her sinfulness, repent of that sinful life, and submit to Jesus’ Lordship. In order to be blessed, one must be His child, His obedient child.
God told the Israelites, who were His people, that they were to follow His commandment and to keep His statutes. If they did this, He would bless them exceedingly. “…He [would] bless [their] bread and [their] water; and [He would] remove sickness from [their] midst. 26 There shall be no one miscarrying or barren in [their] land; [He would] fulfill the number of [their] days. 27 [He would] send [His] terror ahead of [them], and throw into confusion all the people among whom [they came], and [He would] make all [their] enemies turn their backs to [them] (Exodus 23:25b-27). Why would He do all this? It was to win the world back to Himself by provoking them to jealousy. When the foreign people see the blessings of the Israelites they would ask, “Why are you so blessed?” They would point to God as the Source of their blessings. When their gods were unable to bless them like the Hebrew God, they would come back and say, “tell us about your God.”
A similar scene happened in the Book of 1 Kings. Solomon’s fame had gone out around the world. The Queen of Sheba came to see the man about whom the whole world was talking. The problem was that by then Solomon was not still close to God so when the Queen came, Solomon did not influence her towards God; rather she influenced him away from God.
In the New Testament, Paul tells us that God’s plan hasn’t changed. He still wants to use His people to provoke those outside to jealousy. Paul tells us in Romans 11:11 that God has taken the Kingdom to the Gentiles as to provoke the Jews to jealousy. When they were to see the blessings of God upon the Gentiles, it was meant to cause them to turn from their ways, recognize Jesus as the Messiah, repent, and turn back to God. This part of God’s plan is still in effect.
As believers we are to be walking billboards of the blessings and the glory of God. We are to both display God’s physical blessings and His spiritual ones. He does want to bless His people. I am convinced that God searches the earth looking for people He can bless. But He only blesses the obedient (Exodus 23) and the faithful (Matthew 25:14-30). His blessings are not just for us but as a testimony of His goodness and a witness to His faithfulness. They are to lead people to seek not just His hand but His face.
Do you want to receive the blessings of God? Be a blessing to others. Share what you do have-time, talent, and treasure. Let your joy be evident to all. Put your faith and your praise on display. Let your life be a witness for God’s honor and not dishonor. Provoke those who have no peace and joy to jealousy so they will ask you, “What’s up?” When you become a willing channel for God’s glory, and not your own, it will be your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.
Is There Unfairness in God?
I was listening to a radio broadcast some time ago and I heard a person ask the host a question: Is God unfair in making people spend an eternity paying for sins committed in a finite existence? As I thought about this, I thought about the folly of the question (not the questioner). [He was actually asking a question that was posed to him.] My answer to that question would be this:
First, let’s set aside the fact that eternity has no timetable or measurement as we know it. Suppose you live 100 years and you sinned all of those 100 years then you die? Should you just spend 100 in torment? 200 years? 100 years for each sin? Then when you were released, where would you go? Since outside of Hell (or the Lake of Fire) is the Kingdom of God, that sinful person would then be released into a real hell. He or she would be forced to live an existence they resisted their whole life: living in an eternal worship service!
Secondly, the person who was released from torment would be released with the same spiritual deadness and rebellious nature that they entered Hell with. So when they come out, they would not be more God-honoring but likely more God-hating because of the eons of torment they had to endure. Setting aside the fact that God cannot be in the presence of sin, and that a sinful person cannot abide in His presence, would they then have a desire to worship God? They would more likely decide to go hang by the Crystal Sea than to abide in the presence of God.
Third, the original questioners premise was wrong. Hell was not created for man. Hell was created for the devil and his angels who rebelled against God. When we joined in their rebellion, we earned the right to join in their punishment. Since both angels and people are eternal in nature, the rebellious ones will spend eternity apart from the God who loved and created them.
Romans 9 asks the question, “Is their unrighteousness with God?” Paul answers, “Certainly not!” God will have mercy on whom He will have mercy and compassion on whom He will have compassion. What that says to us is that God is not unfair in causing us to pay eternally for sins committed in this life but that God is gracious in giving us any way out of the punishment for the sins we have committed in this life. Instead of trying to find injustice in God toward us, we should be thankful to the justice He meted out to His Son on our behalf so that we would not have to spend an eternity separated from Him, which is the real torment.
God Bless America?
Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, The people whom He has chosen for His own inheritance.-Psalm 33:12
We all want God to bless America. This is the land that we love and we want to see it prosper. But I fear her days of prosperity are behind her. As we draw near these last days, I am reminded that people have mentioned that America does not appear to have a significant role. When I first heard this twenty years ago, I thought maybe they were misinterpreting something. Now as I look at the moral and fiscal decline of our nation I can understand why we will have no significant role in the world’s future evolution.
A few days ago a friend of mine remarked about how the fiscal decline of our nation is paralleling its moral and spiritual decline. How true it is. There are many places in the Bible where God states that obedience brings blessings and disobedience brings a curse. In fact, one of my favorite passages in the Bible is Exodus 32 where God promises to bless Israel so that all the nations of the world would be provoked to jealousy. Through this, He would win the nations back to Himself. However, because Israel refused to comply, God also told them in the Book of Deuteronomy of the calamities that would come upon them. Deuteronomy 28:15-69, in part reads:
“But it shall come about, if you do not [o]obey the Lord your God, to observe to do all His commandments and His statutes with which I charge you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you:
16 “Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the [p]country.
17 “Cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.
18 “Cursed shall be the [q]offspring of your [r]body and the [s]produce of your ground, the increase of your herd and the young of your flock.
19 “Cursed shall you be when you come in, and cursed shall you be when you go out.
20 “The Lord will send upon you curses, confusion, and rebuke, in all [t]you undertake to do, until you are destroyed and until you perish quickly, on account of the evil of your deeds, because you have forsaken Me.
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43The alien who is among you shall rise above you higher and higher, but you will go down lower and lower. 44 He shall lend to you, but you will not lend to him; he shall be the head, and you will be the tail.
I believe there are a couple of reasons why this happens. First, because we remove God from our society, we also remove godly principles that make for a productive, operating nation. When we lose sight of God, we lose sight of fiscal responsibility and personal accountability. We are borrowing millions of dollars a day to keep our nation operational and sending millions of dollars in relief to other nations, yet our schools are in shambles, our roadway infrastructure is in need of an overhaul, our military is nearly depleted, and we have millions living at or below the poverty line. Our prisons are overcrowded. We are spending millions in earmarked projects studying things that have no value, essentially building thousands of bridges to nowhere. Why? We are doing this for the second reason: because we have, in effect, evicted God from this nation, He has evicted reasoned thinking from this nation.
Wisdom is gone. As Romans 1 tells us that because we ‘refused to honor God or be thankful to Him, He has allowed our thinking to become empty and our hearts became darkened (). We profess to have wisdom but in reality it is foolishness.’ If we look at our society we have put many Band-Aids on serious wounds thinking we are solving the problem. Like Israel and King Saul, we have elected officials based on their outward appearance but not on their character. We gave people fishes instead of teaching them to fish (entitlement programs). We pay our teachers little and tie their hands on discipline and wonder why our education system is lacking. We treat the people whom we call upon to serve and protect our nation worse than we treat convicted felons. Through entertainment media, we indoctrinate people against sin with videos of violence and programs of promiscuity and vulgarity. We curtail parents’ ability to discipline and teachers’ ability to discipline and wonder why they fight the police. And the list goes on.
Though Psalm 33:12 was original written to the Jews, it is applicable to us. If a nation honors the Lord and keeps His commands, it will be blessed. Our own history has shown that to be true. But once God came under attack with Engel v Vitale (which ended prayer in school), Abington School District v Schlemp and Murray v Curlett (which ended mandatory Bible reading), and later misinterpretations of “separation of church and state” policy, this nation has begun to go downhill fiscally and morally with the Vietnam War; entitlement programs; the free love movement; strike down of DOMA and the rise and “protection” of the sexual issues like homosexuality, pansexuality, and transgender identification; Obamacare; and the like.
God bless America? How about America bless God?
Cyber-Discipleship 