Proper Places

His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and goodness.--1Peter 1:2

I want to live the life You have planned for me. I want to be godly before You. How can I access divine power to do this?

For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness, and to goodness, knowledge, and to knowledge, self-control, and to self-control, perseverance, and to perseverance, godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness, love.--1Peter 1:5-7

Oh, sure. I can't do this. No way. I can do some of these some of the time, but not all of them all of the time. Never.

If anyone does not have them, he is nearsighted and blind, and has forgotten he has been cleansed from his past sins.--1Peter 1:9

Just a minute. So having the character You desire, a character that progresses from faith to goodness to knowledge to self-control to perseverance to godliness to brotherly kindness to love starts with remembering my own sin. Accessing diving power depends on knowing first that I can't do it. These characteristics do not come from my own depths, but from Yours.

Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.--1Peter 1:20-21

In fact, You gave us Your Word, and through the Holy Spirit continue to give us Your Word, but that Word is never our word. Even during the wonderful times you transfer holy understanding to me (like now), I remain my ego-driven, sinful self. You may speak, and even use my own mouth to speak out loud, but I can never forget that the same mouth that You enable to speak Your truth is still connected to my sinful body. In fact, anyone who forgets this, You tell me is blind.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight.--Proverbs 3:5-6

You, not me. Knowing who You are and who I am keeps us both in the places You prescribed and all is as right as this world allows.

Proximity

It seems to me that my understanding of people and times and places when they stand alone differs substantially from when they stand next to someone or sometime or someplace else. For instance, reading or watching television or even praying takes me more deeply inside, whereas talking or playing or working with other people brings motion and accomplishment not otherwise possible. Another example occurs as I work to develop character. I cannot summon up humility either alone, or even in community. Humility can only come from standing close to God and seeing the vast difference between us. Proximity does this.

Close association also gives depth of understanding. "I love you" from a distance means something very different from "I love you" whispered in my ear. Proximity in the written word enhances it, too. Today, my reading began with this familiar verse:

"My thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts."--Isaiah 55: 8

In this verse, God apparently declares that we do not think alike, that He will forever remain, at least to some degree, incomprehensible to me. But those words are followed immediately by these, also familiar:

"As the rain and snow come down from heaven and do not return without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so the word that goes out of my mouth will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it."--Isaiah 55:9-10

These last verses tell me that God gives me His word and His word has purpose, a purpose that God enacts perfectly. Taken together, though, these verses bring new hope and understanding.

You made me different from you, God. So different that I can never understand you. But, in doing that, you also opened a line of communication between us, one that leads inevitably back to You. Because my ways are different from your ways, you gave me your Word, and You do it to fulfill Your purpose, the one that is so different from mine. Your word does not return empty because it returns always to You.

Your word leads me to your thoughts, which lead me down your ways, the only path leading back to You.

What Didn't Change

During the earliest years of his reign, King Solomon built a temple to the Lord. It was a big place of stone and wood and gold, artistically decorated by the best craftsmen with the most precious of materials. It spoke everywhere, by its shape and size and construction, of God's glory, but it did not just look beautiful. It also served as a place where man transacted business with the Almighty, very practical, down-to-earth business.

It spoke everywhere of God's desire for man to approach Him, from the presence of the altar upon which sacrifices burned, to the incense of prayer, from the enourmous basins in which men cleaned both themselves and their animals to make themselves presentable, to the light and bread that they always kept trimmed and fresh so as to make themselves constantly aware of their need for readiness. That approach, however, had a price.

The outer temple was a bloody place. Constant slaughter, burning, then purifying brought everyone before the Lord aware of the gap separating them from God. The inner parts , accessible only to the High Priest, threatened potential death. No one approached without the pause that comes from expending sweat and blood. One could not help but be aware that a terrible God beckoned there. Our modern worship has preserved little of this practical awe.

We no longer need animal sacrifice, of course. Jesus, the last and only perfect sacrifice, changed that. The very nature of God and the very nature of man did not change, however. God is still perfectly holy and we are still despicably sinful, something too easily forgotten amid our distant, sanitized, easy worship. No one notices the irony of what we have made of Christ's sacrifice. He tore down the veil separating God and man for all eternity, and we do not approach God's astounding reality. We have made Him comfortably human rather than what He remains: at once loving and fearsome.

Singing songs, praying in comfortable seats, dropping an offering envelope, and listening to a minister teach or admonish are all good things, but God, God, where is Your power, where are your thundering choruses, where are Your many rushing waters? Jesus sweat and bled as He transacted His eternal business. I do not believe that, when He said "Follow Me," He would have excluded this.

Therefore, since we receive a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful and so worship God acceptably, with reverence and awe.--Hebrews 12:28

We Shall be Changed

Have you ever noticed that, in the Bible, when God shows up, He never comes during benevolent sunshine or sweet gentle rain? He appears to Moses as a burning bush, He precedes the Israelites as towers of smoke and flame, and He promises to return as storm and thunder. God, in His natural state, if He can be said to have such a thing, booms and rattles this world with terrible power.

I have become accustomed, as have many, to thinking about God as a loving gentle Jesus, a forgiving shepherd, a humble servant. And He was all of these, of course. But I need to remember that, when His work here was complete, He returned home and resumed His godhead, where He picked up again His power. He promises to return in His full splendor as triumphant warrior, commander in heaven and on earth, no longer meek and mild.

God became man once, but only for a short while. He remained God both before, during, and after that experience. He remains God today and forever: terrible God, marvelous God, earthshaking God. He created men originally destined to share His glory, then redeemed them to assure it. He became like us for a little while so that we could know His real self forever.

We know no reference point for this in our experience. That's why we sometimes get stuck on Jesus' sweetness and go no further. We can understand that part of Him, but that part does not characterize God alone. He says that He is coming back to the sounds of celestial trumpets and thunderous earthquakes in rising blazes and that, in that instant we will be changed. He will not change, we will. He will remain mighty, and we will join Him in His might.

The day that Jesus returns, if my imagination can do any of this justice, will resemble more than anything else a fairy tale or a disaster movie: big and marvelous and terrible. But the end comes out much more than happy. I will not only be saved; I will be changed to glory, a glory I will share with God.

We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will all be changed. 1Corinthians 15:51-52

The Cheese should not Stand Alone

Most people know a little about King Solomon. They probably know that he solved a dispute between two quarreling women by offering to divide a baby between them. They may know that he was King David's son and successor and that he built the first temple in Jerusalem. Some may remember that he married hundreds of women, most of whom did not follow his God, and that his good-intentioned love for them eventually corrupted his life and reign. Solomon, the man who reigned over a magnificent kingdom and possessed more wisdom than any other living human, ended his life having fallen into despair and cynicism. And all because he took his eye off the ball.

Solomon made a marriage alliance with Pharaoh, king of Egypt; he took Pharaoh's daughter in marriage and brought her to the city of David until he finished building his house and the House of God and the wall of Jerusalem all around. However, the people brought offerings upon high places, for a house for the Name of God had not yet been built in those days.--1Kings 3:1-2

Pharaoh's daughter was the first pagan Solomon brought home, but far from the last. Throughout his life, they came in a steady, unending stream. When he'd accumulated a few hundred, he must have been rather distracted. By the time they'd reached 700, he would have needed all his wisdom just to get out of bed in the morning. But sheer numbers did not defeat him. His defeat lay in that he had no place to bring them, no place for them to come unerringly to pray, no place that stood as a physical connection the God that governed his life and to whom they, as his wives were responsible. Lacking a mortar and stone temple, they worshiped at the only places they knew, the high places where they had once worshiped pagan gods of wood and stone. Their intentions were probably good, but they lacked firm guidance.

Solomon's wives are worth considering as we structure our own lives of worship. Whatever a personal prayer place looks like--chair, or corner or window by the sun, we have a need to be grounded in a larger place, too, a place where God visits congregations. I learned a long time ago that God shows me different things alone than He does in company with others, and I need both.

Also important, though, is for that group to be similarly grounded in a larger context. It does us no good to affiliate with a group of believers that shares no sense of responsibility to other groups, other churches. Only God stands alone. He made us to stand side-by-side in His sight, and provides the structures within which we can do it. Like the children's rhyme, Farmer in the Dell, that ends in disarray when the cheese stands alone, we need to hold each others' hands.

Two Faced

The bonds we have to God were forged before creation. Everything we know about Him or experience of Him stems from the ties He forged with us before time began. He even specifies the nature of that relationship; it is exclusive, subservient, and reverent. No one is exempt, even pagans.

Oh, Belshazzar, you have not humbled yourself, though you know all this. Instead, you have set yourself up against the Lord of heaven. You had the goblets from His temple brought to you and you and your nobles, your wives, and your concubines drank wine from them. You praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which cannot see or hear, or understand. But you did not honor the God who holds in His hand your life and all your ways.--Daniel 5:22-23

So one of our faces must be turned to God at all times, and that face must worship, recognize our lowliness before Him, and rejoice in it. But, like Janus, we have a second face, one with which we look at one another. That relationship differs substantially from the first. With that face, we love and empathize. We recognize our common human lot, our frailty, and our equality before God. We are as like one another as we are different from God. He knows this, of course, and explained it in simple terms.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.--Matthew 22:37-38

Jesus explains these as two commands because they are. The first command governs our first face, the one turned toward God. The second tells us to love each other through our frailties, remembering that we all the same before Him. God instituted this double standard from the beginning. Love and worship God because He is not like us. Love and forgive men because we are all alike.

So Big

No one is like You, Oh Lord, and Your name is mighty in power. Who should not revere You, Oh King of nations? This is your due.--Jeremiah 10:6

The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His being, sustaining all things by His powerful Word. After He provided purification from sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.--Hebrews 1:3

Power, glory, majesty, authority. These are your due and my purpose to acknowledge. Worship is what happens daily in the heavenlies and what is supposed to happen daily here on earth. Our purpose, more than anything else, is to know, and to say, and to sing your praises. Instead, I hardly see them. You put me in this world to see You and I see the world. You gave me life to see You and I see life.

When my children were small, I would take their hands and raise their arms high above their heads, exclaiming, "So big!" You do that, but I am the child and You hold my arms up, hoping I will eventually get it. You, God, are so big.

So how do I acknowledge that You are big today? I have to concentrate not on living, but on You. When I clean or cook or write, it is by Your grace and permission. I have no power You did not give me. Your power. Your honor. Your strength. Your wisdom. You are big, Oh God. So Big.

I am the Lord, the God of all Mankind. Is anything too hard for me?--Jeremiah 32:27.