Face value

It is not face value.

It never was and never will be.

God is a very meticulous ,He does things through his creation and although they are subtle they can be very significant in it’s meaning. God is just that way. He doesn’t use a hammer to get his point across.

It is also the way He tells his story in his people. It is here where I think that maybe we have become lost in the story when we continue to look at things at face value at when, why, who, where things are accomplished at God’s work.

The man called Jacob, is just the thing to explain this misconception that goes on. It actually starts even at the very beginning of the story too.
But we will use Jacob  for this example because it is very crucial to the rest of the scriptures.

We have all heard the saying in the police shows “we have changed the names of the people involved to protect the innocent”. God in this case has done just the opposite, “He has pronounced the guilty of their real names to put them in HIS story!”

Let me explain, haven’t you noticed in the scriptures of old that to distinguish people or men that He has changed their names. Think on it, it will take your breath away when you realized that all through  the old testament that He was changing or elevating ‘characters’ in his story  to be used by him.

Abram to Abraham, Sarai to Sarah, Simon to Peter, Jacob to Israel, Saul to Paul and there are others. This is important to remember throughout the story of God.

God’s desire to have his characters stand out from the crowd are important to see in telling the story, It was to  be God’s way of getting his story told thru them.  It was like producing a list of God’s people that were going to be in the play.

Now it is with Jacob that it takes a turn. Before in God’s use of changing a person’s name, He changed it still in a ‘singular’ way. But when He changed  Jacob’s name it became ‘plural’, Israel. It became a ‘people’.

This is actually apart of the bigger picture of the story, but for now we will concentrate on this emphasis. God’s changing of the name of Jacob to Israel was  a big clue in the direction that God was telling his story. It was actually a reference to Adam (who was to be the beginning of his people), the new name was to be the new character in God’s story.

It  is with this new name change that signals a new direction for God, He now will be using his people (Israel) as the new lead character in the story. They will be used as the example of  what God wants in this story.

The actual way that Jacob receives his honor of him being  the  ‘one’, is in itself a whole other change in transition for God. But a good one!

The significance of this transition of God’s story is key to telling the rest of the story in the new testament, which we have failed to use in our ‘seeing’ the storyline.

This is important part of the story to ‘see’ under the whole story that God is telling us and we must remember it through out the story.

 

 

 

 

Taking matters into our own hands

We are only human! This is a Homer moment! “Duh”

We have this instinct built into us it seems that we have to act to in our every day lives that just makes us act on our behalf to do it ourselves. ” If I want it done right I have to do it myself” is usually the exclamation that it is heard around the work place or at home trying to accomplish something. What does this say about us as people and our society, to say that we are in charge of our destiny and our lives?

Where is God in all of this?

I have a bookmark for books that reminds us that ” if we would let go, and let God”. This is revealing truth of us, humans and christians.

Let us go back to one of the first examples of this “I can do it, get out of the way God mentality” It goes back to Abraham in Genesis 16:2-3.To preface this story, God has talked to Abraham before and promised Abraham that He would have a heritage that would outnumber the stars in the heavens. Let us remember at this point that Abraham is the promisee, God is the promiser! Now, Abraham and Sarah both knowing the circumstances that surrounded them, knew that it wasn’t possible in a normal way to fulfill this promise had to act on it to make it come to fruition.

Why as a promosee do you try to fulfill what a promiser has said he is going to fulfill a request do you try to fill it yourself? I never thought about it in this light but it is a good insight into the story.

Abraham and Sarah  were in a pickle, God promised them something and they seen it as a hopeless situation as to it coming true. So as to script, We have to act. Or should I say Sarah acted(this is an important symbolic moment in the story but also in the big picture of God’s story) I will blog on this next.

Sarah suggest to Abraham that he should take sarah maidservant as a wife to have a heritage with. This would be the only way it would happen according to “their ways”. I believe this is where someone should of told abraham and sarah  the ole cliche of “God’s ways are not our ways!”.  But yet we and abraham and sarah still act on situations of God and thru our own ways and our own abilities.

To make matters worse and to show us that by our involvement in a situation,God shows us what He thinks of our involvement in his story is that when He condemns it. Wow. God tells abraham and sarah that because of their involvement in the promise, that ishmael would not be apart of the covenant that God had promised him. This covenant would only go thru isaac.

This should be a clue for us in everything that we understand in the bible and of God’s ways. But to understand this principle we also have to understand when and where we acquired this idea that we had to be involved in the good things of life.

The beginning, that’s where it always starts. Eve chose to go out on her own, and be her own person,her own boss(with adam). Why? because we would have the knowledge of good and evil! We would know it all! or so we thought.

God is the author,designer,builder of this Kingdom. He is all in all.God is involved, God has authorship of everything, God’s desire is God to be built into us. From there His work is complete, He will have rest, He will sit and have his feet on the footstool of the rest of world.

This is God taking His Kingdom as His.