Streams in the Desert - God Knows

Your heavenly Father knows (Matthew 6:32).

A visitor at a school for the deaf and dumb was writing questions on the blackboard for the children. By and by he wrote this sentence: "Why has God made me to hear and speak, and made you deaf and dumb?"

The awful sentence fell upon the little ones like a fierce blow in the face. They sat palsied before that dreadful "Why?" And then a little girl arose.

Her lip was trembling. Her eyes were swimming with tears. Straight to the board she walked, and, picking up the crayon, wrote with firm hand these precious words: "Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight!" (Matthew 11:26)

What a reply! It reaches up and lays hold of an eternal truth upon which the maturest believer as well as the youngest child of God may alike securely rest -- the truth that God is your Father.

Do you mean that? Do you really and fully believe that? When you do, then your dove of faith will no longer wander in weary unrest, but will settle down forever in its eternal resting place of peace. "Your Father!"

I can still believe that a day comes for all of us, however far off it may be, when we shall understand; when these tragedies, that now blacken and darken the very air of heaven for us, will sink into their places in a scheme so august, so magnificent, so joyful, that we shall laugh for wonder and delight.

--Arthur Christopher Bacon

No chance hath brought this ill to me;

'Tis God's own hand, so let it be,

He seeth what I cannot see.

There is a need-be for each pain,

And He one day will make it plain

That earthly loss is heavenly gain.

Like as a piece of tapestry

Viewed from the back appears to be

Naught but threads tangled hopelessly;

But in the front a picture fair

Rewards the worker for his care,

Proving his skill and patience rare.

Thou art the Workman, I the frame.

Lord, for the glory of Thy Name,

Perfect Thine image on the same.

--Selected

Taken from Streams in the Desert devotional 

God's Wrath

God’s wrath is His righteous response to the wickedness of sin and all who defy Him. His wrath is not an emotional response like human anger. God does not seek “payback” or “to get even.” Instead, God’s wrath is His settled, holy and measured reaction to the evil that destroys the beauty and wholeness He created. Because God is holy, He cannot compromise with sin and look the other way. God’s overwhelming passion for purity and all that is just and good moves Him to action. God exercises His

wrath as a judicial act against rebellion and those who sin against Him (Exodus 15:7; Luke 21:22-24; Romans 1:18-20; 2:5-6; Revelation 6:16).

All people are born with a sin nature, and God’s wrath “rests” on every person from birth. Because of our sin nature, God’s wrath is the biggest problem people face, though most do not realize this. Only those who believe in Jesus Christ escape God’s wrath (John 3:36; Romans 5:9; 8:1; Ephesians 2:3-5). Believers deserve God’s wrath just like unbelievers but are rescued from wrath only because Jesus took the wrath that believers deserve.

Some dismiss God’s wrath as a “hellfire and brimstone” message intended to scare people into loving God. Most people reject or ignore the reality of God’s wrath and judgment. The thought that

God would stand against people He created offends many. When Abraham heard of the grievous evil in Sodom, he struggled with God’s plan to destroy the city. When we fail to believe in God’s wrath, this wrong thinking leads to a casual approach to God and sin.

In our culture today, many people will not call anything wrong, much less sinful. Public opinion scoffs at the idea that God even cares about what people do. People reject the gospel because they fail to believe that personal sinfulness deserves God’s

holy judgment. This is a serious, fatal and eternal error.

The reality of God’s wrath may not be pleasant, but awakens us to the seriousness of rejecting God’s offer of grace and rescue through Jesus Christ. Discomfort with this truth does not make it less true. Does the reality of God’s wrath motivate you to pray for unbelievers and to share the gospel?

Understanding God’s wrath helps you recognize the seriousness of sin and its offense to Holy God. Believing we deserve God’s wrath elevates the wonder of salvation in Christ. The depth of this truth should be intensely personal. How incredible that God would love, seek and save ME, a rebel!

Habakkuk prayed, “Lord, I have heard of your fame; I stand in awe of your deeds, Lord. Repeat them in our day, in our time make them known; in wrath, remember mercy” (Habakkuk 3:1-2). If I am in Christ, though I deserve wrath, I receive mercy. What a wonderful, merciful Savior! (BSF International)

Look to Me and Be Saved

"Look to Me and be saved,
all the ends of the earth; 
for I am God, and there is no other."
Isaiah 45:22

Look to Me, and be saved, all you ends of the earth: This simple but powerful statement shows the plan of salvation.

1) It shows the simplicity of salvation: all we must do is look. “One can read may books on theology which expound all kinds of things in an attempt to show how man can reach God, but these theories are far from the truth. The Holy Spirit needs exactly four letters, two of them the same, to tell us what to do: l-o-o-k. That is all. It is the simplest, basic thing any person can do, yet the most difficult to do in daily living.” (Redpath)

2) It shows the focus of salvation: we must look to God, and never to ourselves or to anything else of man. “Look unto ME, is His Word, which means looking away from the church because that will save nobody; away from the preacher because he can disappoint and disillusion you; away from all outward form and ceremony. You must look off from all this to the throne and there, in your heart, see the risen, reigning Lord Jesus Christ.” (Redpath)

3) It shows the love behind salvation: God pleads with man, “Look to Me.”

4) It shows the assurance of salvation: and be saved.

5) It shows the extent of God’s saving love: all you ends of the earth!

Look to Me: In Numbers 21, the people of Israel were stricken by deadly snake bites, and Moses lifted up the image of a bronze serpent, raised on a pole, and the people who looked to it lived. The people were saved not by doing anything, but by simply looking to the bronze serpent. They had to trust that something as seemingly foolish as looking at such a thing would be sufficient to save them, and surely, some perished because they thought it too foolish to do such a thing!

So it says here in Isaiah: Look to Me, and be saved, all you ends of the earth! We might be willing to do a hundred things to earn our salvation, but God commands us to only trust in Him – to look to Him!

On Sunday, January 6, 1850, a young man not quite sixteen years of age was walked through a village street in a little town some fifty miles from London, England. On the bitterly cold day the snow fell heavily; but he was more concerned to find a church, because he was deeply conscious of his need of God, and of the breakdown, sin, and failure of his life even at that young age. As he made his way through the street with the snow falling, he felt it was too far to go to the church which he had intended to visit, so he walked down a back lane and entered a little Methodist chapel. He sat down on a seat near the back, and it was as cold inside as it was out! There were only about thirteen people there.

Five minutes after the service was due to begin at eleven o’clock, the regular preacher for the morning hadn’t come. He had been delayed by the weather. So one of the deacons came to the rescue and began conducting the service, and after a little while announced his text: ‘Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else.’ The deacon didn’t know much, so he only spoke for about ten minutes.

Charles Spurgeon himself tells what happened: “I had been wandering about, seeking rest, and finding none, till a plain, unlettered, lay preacher among the Primitive Methodists stood up in the pulpit, and gave out this passage as his text: ‘Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.’ He had not much to say, thank God, for that compelled him to keep on repeating his text, and there was nothing needed – by me, at any rate, – except his text. I remember how he said, ‘It is Christ that speaks. “I am in the garden in an agony, pouring out my soul unto death; I am on the tree, dying for sinners; look unto me! Look unto me!” That is all you have to do. A child can look. One who is almost an idiot can look. However weak, or however poor, a man may be, he can look; and if he looks, the promise is that he shall live.’ Then, stopping, he pointed to where I was sitting under the gallery, and he said, ‘That young man there looks very miserable.’ I expect I did, for that is how I felt. Then he said, ‘There is no hope for you, young man, or any chance of getting rid of your sin, but by looking to Jesus;’ and he shouted, as I think only a Primitive Methodist can, ‘Look! Look, young man! Look now!’ And I did look; and when they sang a hallelujah before they went home, in their own earnest way, I am sure I joined in it. It happened to be a day when the snow was lying deep and more was falling; so, as I went home, those words of David kept ringing through my heart, ‘Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow;’ and it seemed as if all nature was in accord with that blessed deliverance from sin which I had found in a single moment by looking to Jesus Christ.”

Somehow in a very strange and amazing way that young man looked from the depths of his soul into the very heart of God. He went out from the church, and he tells that as he walked through the streets, his burden had been lifted, never to return again. He walked with a new spring in his step, a new joy in his face, a new sense of peace in his heart. He had looked and lived.

Taken from the online Bible commentary of David Guzik at Enduring Word

Psalm 8 - Man and God

LORD, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth! 

You have set Your glory in the heavens. 

Through the praise of children and infants 

You have established a stronghold against your enemies, 

to silence the foe and the avenger. 

When I consider Your heavens, the work of your fingers, 

the moon and the stars, which You have set in place, 

what is mankind that you are mindful of them, 

human beings that you care for them? 

You have made them a little lower than the angels

and crowned them with glory and honor. 

You made them rulers over the works of Your hands; 

You put everything under their feet: 

all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild, 

the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, 

all that swim the paths of the seas. 

LORD, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth!

Psalm 8 

Imagine the scene. Here is young David out under the stars at night watching his sheep. The air at that time and place was not darkened with smog or polluted with the irritants that fill the atmosphere today. The stars were brilliant, and the moon, in its full phase, was crossing the heavens. He felt, as we have all felt as we have stood under the stars at night, something of mingled mystery and awe as he looked up into the star-spangled heavens. He considered the beauty of nature and its silent witness to the wisdom of God. All the breath-taking beauty of this scene broke upon his eyes as the sun set. He was astonished at the greatness of a God who could create such things.

Thirty centuries after David wrote these words, we feel the same awe when we consider the starry heavens. Astronauts have been physically able to walk on the same moon that David could observe only from a distance, yet all the knowledge that has been gained about the universe in which we live only serves to deepen our impression of the tremendous wisdom and power of God. How vast is the universe in which we live! These billions of galaxies whirl in their silent courses through the deepness of space. How tremendous is the power that sustains it all and keeps it operating as one harmonious unit! That is what impressed this psalmist.

Then he faces the inevitable question that comes to those who contemplate God's greatness. "'What is man," he asks, "in the sight of a God who could make a universe like this?" You will recognize that this is the question that cries for an answer in our day. What are humans? Where did they come from? What is their purpose here? Why do they exist on this small planet in this vast universe? These are the questions that are being asked more and more.

The psalmist goes on to answer his own question: "You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor" (Psalm 8:5). Man has a unique relationship to God. He was made to be a little less than God. What is included in that remarkable expression is the revelation of God's purpose for man. According to the Bible, God made man to be the expression of God's life, the human vehicle of the divine life, the means by which the invisible God would be made visible to His creatures. Man was to be the instrument by which God would do His work in the world and the expression of the character and being of God. He is the creature nearest to God. There is none other nearer, for God Himself was to live in man. That is the revelation of the Bible. Man is such a unique being, such a remarkable being, that God Himself intends to live in Him to be the glory of man's life.

Prayer: We thank You, Father, that in You we find our true worth and identity. Thank You that You live in us through Your Holy Spirit. Thank You that Jesus took on the very nature of man so that He could identify with us and take our punishment for our sins and give us His salvation. In His name we pray, Amen.

Life Application: God created human beings to be fully alive in union with Him. Are we allowing God to restore that union with the risen Christ to be fully alive in and through us?

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Psalm 139 - God's Amazing Design

Design And Determinism — Psalm 139:1-18

Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
Psalm 139:16

The phrase "unformed body" literally in Hebrew is "my rolled-up substance." It paints a picture of the embryo, all rolled up. People are asking questions today about when life begins. When does an embryo become a human being? The answer of the psalmist is, "Thy eyes beheld me--not an impersonal collection of cells that wasn't me yet--in my rolled-up embryonic state." The marvel of the human body, even at that stage of growth, has convinced him that God is with him and knows him immediately.

Some will remember the Alger Hiss case quite a number of years ago. Alger Hiss was accused of communist conspiracy while he was a functionary of the government. A primary participant in that case was a man named Whittaker Chambers, also a member of the Communist Party and a contact of Alger Hiss. Whittaker Chambers later wrote a book in which he told how he became a Christian. One day when he was sitting with his little two-year-old daughter on his lap, his eye fell on her ear, and it caught his attention. He was struck by the design of that ear. How beautiful, how shell-like it was, and how perfectly designed to catch every sound wave in the air to be translated into sound by the brain. Knowing something of the mechanics of the ear, he began to think about it. He was struck by how impossible it is that anything so intricate, so complex, so beautifully designed could ever occur by chance. That led him to other lines of thought, and eventually he investigated the Christian position and became a Christian. The argument from design is a great argument, and it is what the psalmist uses here.

He is not only impressed by the argument from design but by the evidence of determinism. Evidently he had an experience similar to many of us--there came certain days in his life during which so many unrelated factors suddenly fell together to produce a circumstance or an experience that he could not help but be aware that something was causing it to happen, that it was all being brought about by a mind greater than his own.

We have all had something happen suddenly, something that we did not plan or expect. It was made up of so many varied factors that all of a sudden fit together, dovetailing beautifully, that we became aware that Someone else was planning our days and yet allowing us free will in the experience of them. That was what struck this psalmist. It was the fact that, even before these days occurred, they were written in the book of God--they were planned for him.

Prayer: Lord, no one knows me like You. You knew me before I was born, and You knew what each day of my life would hold. I praise You and thank You for Your intimate knowledge of me.

Life Application: Have we deeply contemplated the organized design we see in creation? What about the pieces of our lives that seem to assemble as though in a master plan?

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