we are all Israelites, living out the wilderness between the slavery of sin and the promise of Heaven. It’s inconvenient and uncomfortable, but it’s a necessary journey. These desert steps cultivate the character we require to live in the Promised Land. And God has committed to accompany us all along the way.
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Sin glimmers like Egypt from the wilderness: the far-off promise of something easier, but when we get close enough to lay hold, it’s something altogether different than we expected and it’s too late to turn around. Sin is a trap and we are creature caught in it’s clutches. Egypt is not as it seemed.
We are still consumed with our transformation from slavery to sonship, sin was the contestant whip at our backs. God knows our pre-occupation with becoming His alone, applauds it and promises to clear out the enemy on our behalf. Like the Israelites, we don’t need some brilliant offensive strategy, we just need to stay close to God.
It’s good to live today with accounting day in mind; quite convinced that one day we’ll give an explanation for these twenty-four hours. It’s good to recall this as we consider others, as we interact with flesh and blood in a fallen world. Some day we’re all going to stand before God and sputter an answer for our actions.
What if we took this week and leveraged all it’s romantic solicitations for Kingdom’s sake?
Friends, we are just passing through. We don’t observe Sabbath and Jubilee years any longer, we’ve misplaced these incredible traditions of trust and grace. We must instead remind ourselves over and over again; this world is not our home. We are tenants and everything we have is only on loan for a little while. The sooner we learn this the less tightly we’ll hold to everything temporal: position, possessions, opinions and grudges.
“Sin is always looking for another participant. Our enemy endlessly seeks to incite us, to pull is in to the vortex of trespass swirling about us. It’s an ongoing challenge to hold our tongue in this season of pandemic, politics and rampant cancel culture. Sometimes the holist thing we can do is keep silent.”
Good is God-quality that has been eroded by the passage of time to the lowest grade of acceptability. We have watered it down, like lemonade powder on a church budget. We have taken one of God’s most potent, pure and powerful qualities and reduced it to something far less palpable, something less heady and wonderful.
Paul may have been referring to an ancient Roman form of capital punishment.