reflections | the blog of Time to Revive
Tell me, who has the right to fight with God?
Anyone? Who is worthy to approach the Holy One for a confrontation?
Was Jacob? Whether you say yes or no, he did it. He fought – more accurately, he wrestled – with God for a blessing. He marched into the ring with the Creator, chin up and muscles flexed. Who would do such a thing? The natural answer is that only a flawless, holy man would. Either that, or a delusional one.
But Jacob was anything but flawless. He was named “heel-grabber” for a reason – feisty, sly, conniving. He was greedy for blessing and would do anything to obtain a prize. Nothing about this man qualified him for God’s rank, to fight Him, not even to approach Him.
And Jacob knew this. In Scripture, his wrestling match with God is preceded by a modest prayer: “O God …I am not worthy…” Sitting on the eve of a potentially devastating sibling reunion, he knew that his brother Esau could be hours away from unleashing twenty years of anger. Jacob had stolen Esau’s birthright and his blessing. In his fear Jacob prayed, and in his honesty he admitted to God, I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies and of all the truth which You have shown your servant.
Then, it says he wrestled the whole night with “a Man” whom he recognized to be God. Jacob struggled tenaciously with this Man, saying “I will not let you go until you bless me!” Unworthy as he knew he was, Jacob wrestled, struggled, fought. He fought to the point that the heavenly Man could not prevail. And God blessed Jacob and blessed his fight.
We tend to be less ruthless than Jacob. We’re too “humble” to ask for a blessing, a gift, a healing, an encounter with God. Our reason is that we know we’re unworthy to receive anything from God, and why should we “wrangle God into our will” anyway? Yes, Jacob was blessed for that kind of feistiness, but shouldn’t we leave that in the Old Testament?
What then do we make of Jesus’ words urging us to imitate the persistent widow? The widow took her case to a rigid, uncaring judge time after time after time. He finally gave her justice, not because he was good or she was worthy in his eyes, but because she persisted. She fought. Quite honestly, she became a nuisance. Jesus told us to go to God like her. There’s something about a fighter that God fancies, something about the passion of a struggle that God blesses.
Of course we’re not worthy to ask for gifts, let alone wrestle God for a blessing. But Jacob didn’t wrestle because he thought himself worthy. In his earlier prayer, he said he was not worthy even of the very least, and he also reminded God that He had promised to bless Jacob. God had the power to prosper, bless, and multiply – independent of Jacob’s worth. And based on the worth of God’s word and character, Jacob fought for what only comes from the LORD.
Jesus summons us, “Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find.” We need not fear that our asking, even our struggling with God, will lurch the universe into disorder, nor will it ever “force” God to bend to our wills. He can still freely say no, but as He stands beckoning us in the ring to struggle with Him, to ask, to seek, to knock, to persist until we receive from God, we might as well say, Why not?
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Isaac enters the world as a long-awaited gift. He brings his aging parents laughter along with the assurance that God will fulfill His promises. He’s heaven-sent, like it says in James: Every good and perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of Lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.
As a young man, however, Isaac almost leaves the world early as an unexpected sacrifice. After God miraculously gave Isaac to Abraham, He shows up demanding the gift back. He calls upon Abraham in the night, “Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac…Offer him as a burnt offering…”
It is a horrifying thing to ask. What kind of God asks a man to butcher his most beloved son, to give back the gift from heaven? This is the moment when any ordinary person would wonder if perhaps God is malicious. Perhaps there is a shadow of turning with God, and He gives only to steal back. But Abraham, a man of extraordinary faith, does not question God this way. He waits for the Lord to show Himself faithful, even until the final moment before the blades gores Isaac. And as the angel cries outstop, and Isaac is set free, God does displays His goodness and love. He wants Abraham to keep the gift of Isaac, the promised one.
But the story reveals that God still demands a sacrifice.A wild ram appears, tangled up in the bushes. Abraham slaughters the ram, not his son, and calls the place The LORD Will Provide. Isaac’s life now not only represents a heaven-sent gift for Abraham and Sarah, but also a reminder that God will provide a substitute sacrifice in our stead. This aspect of God as sacrifice-provider paints a picture of what God would do through Jesus. Jesus would be the His gift to the world – the ultimate Isaac, Son of promise, come down from heaven. But He would also be the ultimate sacrifice. In both ways, God provides by offering His own. He Himself is the gift and the sacrifice.Isaac’s story is now our reminder that nothing comes from us. Everything we desire and need, even the demands of God, are found in Christ. Have we strayed from looking to God’s provision?
Have we looked to the gifts in our hands or to our own hard work and sacrifices in order to fulfill our desires and needs? Let us set up our own memorial – The LORD Will Provide – and forever be fulfilled in Christ alone.
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The storyteller over many years has narrated the account of Abraham only a breath after articulating the woes of Babel. It’s no mistake that these two very different stories have always dwelt side by side. After recounting the futility of Babel’s builders (who tried to make a name for themselves), Abraham enters the plot, a nobody to whom God says I will make your name great.
In blatant contrast to Babel, Abraham receives God’s blessing based on one ‘great accomplishment’: he believes God.
In the story, God calls Abraham to leave his home, and promises him a nation, descendants, land, and blessing. The promise comes, however, without any kind of tangible evidence as a deposit. Looking at hard facts, Abraham is just one ordinary man with a wife whose womb is closed, a stranger moving to a strange land. No raw signs of future greatness. But, as we find in later Scripture, Abraham hopes against hope in the word from God. And that is enough for him to bank on. He goes on the journey.
Today a word or promise is worth little. We need evidence and perfect logic in order to believe anything we’re told. It’s how we protect ourselves from being wrong or let down. But as people called by God, we are in a position to believe words received from God, even when they lack pieces. Abraham never saw the promise of numerous descendants fulfilled; he just saw the stars in the night sky and believed what God told him (Genesis 15:5). Jesus makes it even clearer when He says that Abraham anticipated His coming and was glad (John 8:56). As the ultimate heir through which millions would join the family of Abraham, Jesus came a couple thousand years after Abraham lived and died. Abraham never met Him, never saw Him. Regardless, Abraham was content to rest in God’s words and to trust He would come.
We are called to exercise this kind of faith exactly when all of our evidence points compass south. When the fulfillment of God’s promise seems impossible – then we can hope against hope and live in the blessing of Abraham.
This is the challenge: believing the words God has given us, even to the point of withholding our judgment on the evidence at hand. Whether we must believe we are not condemned though we see our failure, or we must believe all things work out for our good though we lose and suffer – we have a choice. With a dozen ‘reasons’ to believe our own logic, feelings and perceptions, we have a choice to believe the Word of promise instead. As the storyteller of old would be quick to inform you – from Genesis to the end of the Book – Godnever breaks a promise. He is worth banking on.
What is God asking you to believe in spite of the current evidence today, and will you join the company of Abraham by making a move based on faith?
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The stain of human pride marks the story of Babel.
The people on earth (Noah’s great-grandchildren), unite under the direction of the mighty warrior Nimrod and cleverly devise a plan to build an empire with a tower touching heaven. The massive tower and the extravagant city promise power, protection, and fame, not to mention a sly method of avoiding God’s command to fill the earth. The blueprint couldn’t be more appealing for an empire of demigods who have no need for their grandfather’s old-fashioned religion. From the tower, they could rule the world.
Unfortunately, neither the builders nor the tower ever ascend to the greatness once imagined. While the story in Genesis does not reveal the fate of the skyscraping tower, whether it falls by God’s wrath or stands unfinished, we do find a swift and divine demolition. God pulls down the pride of the people’s hearts and topples their once ‘immortal’ empire.
Suddenly the people cannot communicate and they disperse into the nations of the world, leaving the once beloved tower in the shameful dust of Babel, confusion.
Nimrod never would have guessed that God’s method for man to reach the heights of heaven involved bowing low. In all logic, building a tall tower made more sense. But the inspired writers of Scripture move forth from that spot of shame in Genesis, repeating again and again: God raises up the low, but brings down the proud and lofty. The heights of His presence are reserved for the humble.
Humility is a revolutionary alternative to the Babel method. Bowing low, letting go of our clever strategies of self-sufficiency, and being okay with anonymity are all as foreign to us as to Noah’s rebellious descendants. We’re more like Nimrod than we’d like to admit, as we amplify all of our strengths and good qualities and climb up to the position of control. Though we are warned of the demolition, we’ll do it again and again. We’ll climb, we’ll compete with God for rulership of our little empires, and we will fall right back into confusion.
True honor awaits us in the towers’ shadows, in the dusty place of confession. There, in our weakness we admit we need God. We barely breathe the words, “God, I need You,” and we are lifted up to the heavens.
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The story of the Flood – or “Noah’s Ark” – has always been a “fun Bible story” for kids, one they see illustrated with lots of bright colors and happy animals in pairs.
But you have to stop and wonder at this. The Flood is the most dramatic account of mass death in history – the whole world (minus one lucky family) was wiped out. Where is the family fun in that?Once you graduate from Kiddy Church, you may find the story a terrible tragedy. It begins to look like the vengeance of a steaming angry God, one who couldn’t care less if the world washed away.
With this lingering distaste for the old “Noah’s Ark” story, I cautiously approached it again – only to find a new thread, a new angle I never saw before. Whereas plenty of cynics, and I, had dismissed this as one of those “Old Testament fire and brimstone” stories, I now wonder if it’s not a picture of dramatically loving God.See, when the Scripture says in Genesis 6 that all flesh had become “corrupt,” it uses a Hebrew root word which means “to ruin” or “to destroy.” In other words, the whole world was already bringing on its own mass death – they were so evil, so “full of violence,” that they were destroying themselves. Destruction was inevitable; it was coming on like nasty decay. The Flood only quickened the outcome in one, clean sweep.
And all the while, God in heaven was not smiling and enjoying it. The Bible actually says He was sad – He wasgrieved in His heart. The pain He felt matched the deepest human pain. He suffered with creation.So, I find in this unlikely children’s story and Old Testament judgment story a loving, grieving character: God. He’s not steaming and unfeeling.His grief, though, is not the tragic end to a failed romance between man and the Divine. Even in the midst of total corruption and a global flood, God had a plan, a storyline, that could not be wiped out.Because there was a man named Noah.God chose to save this one righteous man and his family. And in Noah’s gene pool was the seed of David and the lifeblood of the future Messiah – Jesus. In Noah was the promise, the hope of the world. God had a plan, not just for one lucky family, but for a multitude of people: everlasting life through Jesus. By saving Noah, God preserved Jesus and you and me.
The Flood was a dramatic season of death on the earth, but it was in order for a marvelous story of life to come forth. Noah’s descendant, Jesus, has come to save us from our corruption, our decay, our once inevitable death. We can now board the ark, if you will, and have life – because God loves us, and that was always the story.
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Satan’s message to the world slipped in at the early stages of history, as he whispered to Eve, “Fend for yourself!”
The woman previously lived in the bliss of trust. She trusted God to meet all of her needs, she trusted her husband to love her wholly. Never had the thought occurred to her that she needed to protect and defend herself.
She was both safe and happy. Just like a later Hebrew song of praise would state, “Happy are those who trust the Lord.”
But Satan, the ancient accuser, entered the form of a snake – the most subtle of all creatures. He approached Eve, smoothly. He spoke smoothly. She felt no threat.
With concise duplicity, the accuser turned Eve’s trust to self-consciousness. His message was, Someone is not taking care of you well enough. There’s more for you, and you’re missing out. God is not enough – do something for yourself! With that, he convinced her to eat of forbidden fruit, to take some “control” of her life. Adam entered the game without a question, and the two willfully exited the state of trust and entered the world of self.
I must feed myself, clothe myself, hide myself, protect myself. God is not my defender anymore!
The survival of the fittest competition began, and generations forth would believe the lie: we must fend for ourselves. Hence today, we worry, we overwork ourselves, we sell ourselves to receive bits of love. We fret about bills, we shake at obstacles, we regularly think the world will collapse on us. We work and work and struggle and struggle because we think it’s our duty secure our destinies and defend ourselves from everything and everyone.
But in reality, God is still our defender. He is still the one who clothes, who protects, who provides, who meets needs, who secures our destinies, who saves us from destruction. It’s always been just Him.
The accuser, meanwhile, keeps the lie circulating – humanity is locked into a war with Satan. Satan nourishes our worries, fears, compulsions, and doubts, convincing us that we must defend ourselves because no one else will.
But God had Jesus prepared before the Fall, before the Creation to teach us: we must be born again, as infants who do not question their caretaker. We can become like Adam and Eve before the Fall. Paradise was lost, but the ability to trust God – the ability to be happy in that state of trust – remains. We are given the option through Christ to look away from ourselves – to say I AM NOT GOD, and that God takes care of me. We are given the words to speak: “God, my strength, I am looking to you, because God is my defender” (Ps 59:9).
Self defense, survival of the fittest – game over. I am not my own defender.
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