THE GOD OF LOVE - LOVE LIFT YOU UP WHERE YOU BELONG
WEEK EIGHT - DON'T SPARE THE ROD AND DON’T SPARE THE STUDY
Though He brings grief, He also shows compassion because of the greatness of His unfailing love. For He does not enjoy hurting people or causing them sorrow. (Lamentations 3:32-33)
When the things you are suffering through is the consequence of your sinful choices, the thing to do is to confess it and acknowledge your choices before God AND THEN GET BACK INTO HIS WORD. God isn’t trying to eternally punish, or to bring defeating afflictions upon the people of the earth. God restores people so that they may experience his unfailing love, but he does also bring about short-term grief to get your attention. His love is a restoring justice. God’s love is restoring liberty and individual rights. His love liberates the captives and frees the mind. And that restoration comes following his correction. God is a creator. He has created in us free will. And the consequence of that creation is we will likely find ways to pervert it and sin. And so, God corrects our perversion with calamities that he uses to draw us to himself. Our free will must become his perfect will, but it’s free for us to choose the way we will go, towards God or away from him. Are we going to seek him or seek to disobey him? Whatever our choice we have no excuse, we’ve been given plenty of opportunities to find out God’s way (will).
DID YOU KNOW? - You cannot know God’s love, and his ultimate will for you, without knowing his Word (The Bible). And there’s not an obstacle humans can invent that will prevent you from knowing that word. Did you know that in-spite of thousands of years of persecution the best-selling book of all time is the Christian Bible. Best estimates are that probably something like 5 to 7 billion copies have been printed. Every year the Christian Bible is number one. Even in this dark age of the rise of post-modern antichrist movements infecting all aspects of the world’s cultures, the Christian Bible remains the most popular in book sales. Even during the former ages when much of the world was violently persecuted by pagan enemies, and resources were not like the advantages we have today, even then the Bible was helping to restore people into God’s graces.
Since its creation the world has been trying to drag down the Bible and if possible, eliminate it altogether. French philosopher Voltaire in his many writings against Christianity and the Bible, predicted in 1776, “One hundred years from my day, there will not be a Bible on earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity-seeker.” Only fifty-eight years after his death the former home of Voltaire in Geneva, Switzerland, was serving as a storehouse for Bibles and Gospel tracts. God’s power is greater than the will of the philosophers. In 303 AD, the Roman Emperor Diocletian ordered that the Christian Scriptures be confiscated and burned. So elated was he at his persecution achievements, he ordered a medal to be struck inscribed with the words, "The Christian religion is destroyed, and the worship of the gods restored." He proclaimed that the Bible was now extinct. Ultimately God’s will answered that boastful claim by transforming the Roman Empire into the main driving force for expanding the Biblical reach throughout the known world. In this way Jesus’ prophecy (Matthew 24:35 “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words shall not pass away.”) has been fulfilled.
Many skeptics throughout the ages have challenged the Scriptures, and it’s time tested proven divine power to inspire people, by merely providing modern cynical readers with myths and literary fictions ironically originating from the spiritualism of the ancient pagan world. If they can’t kill enough Christians or burn enough Bibles, they’ll dig pits (traps) of disillusionment, and dig up scholarly fabrications (snares) trying to reinvent what the scriptures say about who Jesus is. They’ll even push in these teachings into the halls, classrooms, and pulpits of the Christian seminaries. Just look around in our modern age at all the false teachings, heresies, and protestations against Christ’s divinity coming from within the church institutions if you can’t believe the devil is truly and literally in the details. For this reason, the Christian individual MUST remain alert to these traps and snares, and continue in daily study of the Scriptures, making prayer and growth through Biblical study a lifestyle choice if they hope to know God’s will and perfect love. If you’re going to survive the struggle and come away stronger in faith and closer to God, if you’re purpose is to love God, then you must love his Bible enough to give it the time it has earned. Elsewise the world will worm its way into your mind with distractions and disillusionment, and the cost will be the loss of YOUR faith and your soul.
God loves you; he Will correct you, sometimes he’ll bring you through something hard, but you must go through it, repent and look up his perfect will right away and he’ll be sure you discover his love along the way.
Caution - Do not cherry pick the bible verses
There’s a story about a man who had determined he wanted to completely trust God and his bible to guide all his choices. In fact, he wanted to trust God’s will to even guide his Bible study choices. So, he laid his bible in his lap, flipped it open randomly and determined that wherever he dropped his finger in the pages it would be God’s will for his life. His first verse was Matthew 27:5 “…Then he (Judas) went out from there and hanged himself.” Of course, this troubled him, so he decided to try again. His next attempt landed him on Luke 10:37 Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.” Now the man was very disturbed and decided this couldn’t possibly be what it seemed to be saying, so he tried one more time. He flipped the pages and jammed his finger on John 13:27 Jesus said to him, “What you are going to do, do quickly.
Friends, it’s okay to randomly skim the verses of the bible and try to discover how God wants you to grow from those words. But you must dig deep if you’re going to discover anything meaningful. You’ll need context. You’ll need understanding about the authors, the region, the audience, and a myriad of many other factors, but mostly you’ll need to pray throughout the whole process. And DON’T rush it. Give the word the time it deserves. Meditate on it. Talk with others about it. Most importantly LISTEN. If you ever hope to hear God’s will for you, you MUST listen.
Why does it have to be so hard? Why all the pain, suffering, struggles and battles? Simple answer: Because the world of evil is trying to destroy you and your soul because it hates you. And God is trying to save you because he loves you. It’s that simple.
Why does the world hate the Bible?
Perhaps the exclusive claims of Jesus (“No one comes to the Father except through Me”—John 14:6) are no longer welcome in this culturally and religiously agnostic public arena of postmodernism. These attacks are not aimed at a better you, a more historically accurate you, and helping you in your understanding of the Bible, but aimed at dismantling the Bible’s worldview. In another word, they are again trying to destroy the Bible and its divine reach, if not physically than by dragging it through their muddy waters of disillusionment in you the reader. Be skeptical when the world is convinced, they have superior scholarly understanding and especially when they have a consensus. They don’t have your best interests in mind.
QUESTIONS TO DISCUSS:
What is at the heart of all these attacks upon God’s word?
Why are critics constantly trying to historically remix Jesus as opposed to the Jesus of the Bible?
Is it simply an honest scholarly inquiry attempting to discover the true historical facts about Jesus and His teachings? Is something more sinister at work?
Could it be that the Bible’s message of an all-powerful God who sits in judgment upon the affairs of men—and to whom all will one day give an account—is simply no longer acceptable to our modern understanding?