Category: Greatness Of God

God Shows Up - (Part 1 of Meeting God - A Series of Articles on Job 38-42)

5/1/2019

“Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind and said, 2 "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” Job 38:1-2 (NASB)

These are probably not the words any of us really would want to hear, let alone the situation in which we’d want to hear them. Yet God posed them to Job – and recorded it so that we could “get in on the fun!” I am hoping that by describing to you the way that God chose to reveal Himself and the words He spoke will get your attention – as they have truly gotten mine.

Here we see God speak out of the whirlwind to Job. God and the whirlwind are often revealed together. This particular passage in Job 38 was preceded by Elihu’s description of God drawing near in chapter 37. It is a disconcerting chapter to read. God was approaching in a massive storm that made Elihu tremble. He describes a storm that includes lightning, thunder in amounts that should get our attention. He speaks of clouds with ice (hail maybe?) as well as clouds loaded with moisture. These clouds are described as thick and seem to be described as swirling or at least changing direction all over as they approach.

The word “whirlwind” means a windstorm – and can be tied to several kinds of storms in that region. There are the massive wind storms (shaboob storms) that can sweep up massive amounts of water and form a waterspout over the sea – and dust storms that take your breath away as you see them darkening everything on the horizon as they reach heights of 6000 feet or more. The main aspect of them, of course, is the wind involved. There was also another storm, the one that terrified the disciples when they were in the boat with Jesus in the gospels. The description of such storms that came off of the mountains to the north and hit the Sea of Galilee relate them as if a giant hand had come from heaven and hit the surface of the sea so that it seemed instantly consumed by hurricane force winds and a turbulence that shakes everything around it.

This is what was approaching Job in chapter 37 – and has arrived in chapter 38. If such a storm itself was not disconcerting enough, the sound of the voice of God coming from the midst of it had to be utterly terrifying. But then again God and the whirlwind were often seen together in Scripture.

In Ezekiel 1:4 God came in the whirlwind as He approached the prophet Ezekiel to speak.
In 2 Kings God took Elijah to heaven by a flaming chariot in a powerful whirlwind.
In Zechariah 9:14 God is seen marching in the whirlwinds of the south.

Whatever this is – it is awesome and fear inspiring as we read of it. Job must have been terrified as this storm approached – and petrified as it slowed and God’s voice came from the midst of it.

Forgive me – but as someone who grew up in “tornado alley,” I’ve seen the arrival and effect of such storms. My house was destroyed by one when I was 4 years old and we huddled in our basement hoping we would survive it. I remember my father describing it to me. The storm itself was unbelievably powerful with winds whipping every way – and the sound of sheets of rain pelting the windows. Then he said it suddenly became quiet – and he ran with my two brothers in hand for the basement. He said behind him it sounded like a dozen freight trains all descending on the spot where we were.

In the movie “Twister” the final scene focused on a force 5 tornado that was being tracked. When they moved toward it – they were shocked at a tornado that was over a mile in width as it destroyed everything in its path. Now imagine such a thing coming toward you no matter which way you turned. As you were ready for your life to be crushed by its power – it slows as it reaches you. Then if that were not enough to scare you to death – you hear the mighty voice of God speaking to you from the midst of it. That is a pretty astounding situation – and the level of fear Job must have felt could not be measured.

Even more terrifying is what God has to say to you. The words had to thunder to be heard over the raging of the storm. “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” Suddenly Job knew this was about him and the words that he had spoken without a full understanding of Who God is. You see we have a tendency to speak such words when we feel that we could do a better job of managing our own providence – that the sovereignty over our days would be in better hands if it were placed into ours. We might even complain of the things we experience in life – and gripe and moan a little at circumstances that are – how do I say it – difficult.

Honestly – our circumstances cannot come within miles of those that Job experienced. His is an epic story of suffering and hardship as God was working out His perfect will – and Job’s absolute best. Yet, when things get very difficult – we can be very difficult people to deal with as we speak with and of God. So it is with a less than thrilled acknowledgement that we see ourselves in the same light, albeit far, far less severe than that of Job.

Here He comes. God is showing up at the perfect time to do and say what only he can say and do. His timing is perfect and His ways are perfect. We may not want to hear that at the start of things – but by the end of it we will have no more critical comments about Him. He will reveal Himself – amazingly in questions we cannot fathom answering – and – it will be over. We will repent (if we are wise) and He will be praised.

Maybe you, like me, need such a meeting. Maybe you are not all that sold on your current providential situation in the hands of a loving, all-wise God. Maybe we need the Lord to approach us in a way that will leave us speechless and motionless in fear and trembling. Maybe in such a setting we will once again realize how infinitely small we are in this world – and how unbelievably lacking in wisdom and perspective we can be. Maybe – just maybe – we need to field all of God’s questions here – so that we grasp how very little we know. Maybe – just maybe we need to come away humbled, repentant, and focused on knowing Him, walking with Him, and yes – even loving Him as we are reminded why we need to trust Him with absolute trust as He works out and in our lives during the short time of our stay on this earth.

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Joy in Weakness, part 3 - To Whom are you Measuring Yourself?

8/18/2015

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Weakness is not something most people want in their lives. But that is because they think themselves strong - or at least want to think that way. Our problem with understanding the blessing of embracing weakness has to do with perspective. God's Word tells us that when we examine ourselves amongst ourselves and measure ourselves against one another, we deceive ourselves as to the truth about ourselves. In that context and with that perspective weakness is relative to who you are versus whoever it is to whom you compare yourself. Men and women have all kinds of contests by which they measure their own comparative weakness against each other to ascertain who is the strongest. But in the end - it is only comparing weakness against weakness. We may walk away with a victory - even a trophy or medal - but it only tells us that we are stronger than another human being.

Man has fancied himself strong for centuries. Early on man thought earth to be the center of all things - only to learn as man caught up to the knowledge of God - that we are only a tiny little insignificant ball of dirt on the outskirts of our own galaxy. When compared with other stars in our galaxy, we come to learn that even our mighty sun is pretty much a fairly small star that pales into insignificance compared to others around us. If one started from the center of the universe doing a random search for earth - it would take millions of centuries to randomly come to our tiny blue orb on the outer edges of the Milky Way.

Job understood true strength - as he moved from a position of having everything to one of losing everything. He lived in moments of plenty - of great health - and of a life of relative ease and comfort prior to one of the most breathtaking devastations in all of Scripture. He grasped, as few others ever have, just how precarious our supposed strength is. It was in such a moment that he turned to God and grasped "real strength." Read his own words as he contemplated standing before God and being right with Him.

" . . . how can a man be in the right before God? If one wished to dispute with Him, He could not answer Him once in a thousand times. Wise in heart and mighty in strength, Who has defied Him without harm? It is God who removes the mountains, they know not how, When He overturns them in His anger; Who shakes the earth out of its place, and its pillars tremble; Who commands the sun not to shine, and sets a seal upon the stars; Who alone stretches out the heavens and tramples down the waves of the sea; Who makes the Bear, Orion and the Pleiades, and the chambers of the south; Who does great things, unfathomable, and wondrous works without number. Were He to pass by me, I would not see Him; Were He to move past me, I would not perceive Him. Were He to snatch away, who could restrain Him? Who could say to Him, ‘What are You doing?' God will not turn back His anger; Beneath Him crouch the helpers of Rahab. How then can I answer Him and choose my words before Him? For though I were right, I could not answer; I would have to implore the mercy of my Judge." Job 9:2-15

According to what Job had learned there are some things that tell us of God's absolute power and strength. These things also helped Job to grasp just how weak he truly was - and how He needed to cry out for God's mercy for true strength to be given to him.

First - no man can dispute with God and prove Him wrong. If we tried, we would be unable to answer God even 1 in a 1000 times. God is the wise one - God is the mighty one - and for us to defy Him and debate with Him is only to harm ourselves. We do not have any wisdom that we can claim on our own. If we have any wisdom - it is because we have learned it from God by His mercy.

Second, no one can "impress" God with what they can do. All we have to do is look at Job's description of God's resume and we are rendered speechless. He removes mountains and shakes the earth so that the very pillars of the earth tremble. He can command our sun not to shine. He is the One who stretches out the heavens - so that our expanding universe seems to grow ever larger in terms that dwarf our understanding. In the end Job puts it like this, "Who does great things, unfathomable, and wondrous works without number." For us to boast of our meager achievements (even if they dwarf those of the rest of humanity) is laughable in the sight of the strength and power and wisdom of Almighty God.

Third, we cannot even perceive God unless He graciously allows it by revealing Himself to us. God is Spirit and is beyond us and our understanding. We would not even have a clue as to His existence or presence except that He chooses to manifest Himself in ways that our little pea-sized brains can understand. Our own strength and ability fall infinitely short of "getting" God.

Fourth, we can do nothing to deliver ourselves from His hand or ultimate purposes. Listen to these terrifying words Job says about God's power over us, "Were He to snatch away, who could restrain Him? Who could say to Him, ‘What are You doing?" God's power is absolute. If God so chooses to snatch us away we can do nothing to stop it. Even a protest on our part would mean nothing. Though men question His works and purposes - there really is no one who can call God to account to where God has to given some sort of answer. Within this statement is the doctrine of God's ultimate goodness and perfection. He cannot do wrong - and whatever it is that He wills - it is always what is right. Thus in the moment we decide to question Him and call Him to account - we are already wrong.

Finally, we can do nothing to alter God's righteous judgment. Here is a terrifying reality. God will judge and destroy the wicked. There is absolutely nothing they can do to render God's judgment null and void. I see fools wearing shirts and making statements that, "Only God can judge me." This is not meant to be a statement honoring God - for those who parade such things do so while living lifestyles that mock His Word and the righteousness He reveals in it. But what they do not know is that God has already judged sin. Thanks be to His graciousness that ultimately He has done this at the cross - and granted forgiveness to those who respond to the gospel with repentance and faith. In the end Job says that his only play - is to implore the mercy of his Judge.

So - how strong are we feeling now? How apt are we to tout our own abilities in light of God's revelation of Himself to Job - who went from everything to nothing within moments? The truth is we ARE weak - maybe not in comparison with others around us - but when we stand in the light of God's revelation of Who He is. Wisdom, dearest saints of God, is turning to God regularly for mercy. Wisdom, precious ones, is to regularly remember and embrace humility in His glorious, infinite presence. Wisdom is to bow before Him - lay ourselves at His feet - and rejoice in His most amazing condescension to us in the gospel of Jesus Christ. For it is only in such moments that we truly "get it" and are granted grace to move from weakness to strength by His mercies alone.

Be strong in Him and in the power of His Spirit!

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Have You Responded in Awe and Wonder Lately?

7/31/2014

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Awe and wonder . . . two words that perfectly fit any view of God. But in a world that thinks too highly of itself, populated with fallen people who seriously think too highly of themselves, awe and wonder do not describe the average response to God, Who has revealed Himself to us in Scripture - and His creation. And if I were to be completely honest (which hurts as I admit to my own sin of pride and over-aggrandizement of myself personally - and humanity corporately) I do not respond to Him nearly enough with the kind of awe and wonder that He deserves. At times I sing songs about His greatness with little more than yawning excitement - and even more sinfully - with a sense of wanting to get on with it so I can move on to other things more exciting to me. In an age where we make much of man - and even more of ourselves - the whole concept of being lost in wonder and awe of God is dangerously waning. And please understand I speak not of the world at large - but of those of us in the church.

There are two words that should show up often in our vocabulary when seeking to give any kind of description of God. The first of these words is the word "awe." We speak of things that, when we see them or experience them leave us awe-struck. That means the shear magnitude and majsety of them render us speechless because we are not sure there are words adequate to describe what we are seeing or experiencing. God, being both infinite and eternal, should be One who leaves us utterly speechless because His majestry and limitless magnitude are beyond human words or concepts. That is where we reach back to get our second word, "wonder." When I looked up wonder at Dictionary.com, the following definition began to take shape in my mind. Wonder means to be filled with admiration, amazement, or awe. This sense of wonder often illicits surprise, astonishment, and in some cases worship or adoration of what has caused our wonder. The God Who has revealed Himself in the Old and New Testaments - and Who is also revealed in what He has created, is a God Who can fill our hearts and our minds with both awe and wonder.

There is no way to adequately define or describe Who God is. One way that we can touch the fringe of His boundless, infinite magnitude is by looking at nature - most specifically - the heavens. Since the discovery of the telescope, we've enjoyed a view of the heavens that expands as quickly as we can upgrade the ability of our telescopes to see further and further into space. The information below was originally printed in John MacArthur's commentary on the book of Matthew.

"The more man delves into the universe, the more amazing and awesome the wonder of creation becomes. Telescopes can take us some four billion light years—about twenty-five sextillion miles—into space, and yet we have not come near the edge of the universe. We have discovered certain gravitational principles that keep the stars and planets in their orbits, yet we are far from fully explaining those principles, much less duplicating them. The earth spins on its axis at a thousand miles an hour at the equator, travels in a five-hundred-eighty-million-mile orbit around the sun at about a thousand miles a minute, and, with the rest of its solar system, careens through space at an even faster speed in an orbit that would take billions of years to complete. The energy of the sun has been estimated to be equivalent to five-hundred-million-million-billion horsepower. There are at least one-hundred-thousand-million other suns in our galaxy, most of them larger than ours." (John MacArthur, Commentary on Mark)

What is even more amazing to me after reading that again, is that MacArthur's statement is just a small paragraph, because there is enough to know about our universe to fill an entire library of books. That is after we've spent 100's of years looking into space. The truth is our knowledge of the universe is ridiculously limited at the present time. If we had instruments and ships that could take us far out into the universe (even into our own galaxy to be honest) our knowledge would grow exponentially!

To give you a perspective on how much we should be in awe and wonder of the God who created our universe, allow me to focus on one star within it. Granted, at the moment (due to our lack of a telescope powerful enough to see it) it is the largest star we know. Nevertheless, let's talk about the star Sirius, or Canus Majoris. This largest of all stars known was most recently measured at around 1500 solar radii. If you were like me, you had no idea what a solar radii was. It is the measurement of how big our sun is. That measurement is approximately 432,450 miles (to go from the outer edge of the sun to its center). If you want to know how far it is around our sun - that would be approximately 2.72 million miles (quite a walk - and take sunblock over 50 because you might get a sunburn!) Just our sun is so huge that it blows the mind to comprehend its size. But we speak of Sirius (Canus Majoris) which is now approximately 1500 times the size of our sun. Now I know that you are tired from that recent walk around the sun (and a little burnt probably) but you need to suck it up - because now we're going to walk around Sirius - which would be 4.1 billion miles give or take a mile or two.

Forgive me for using this comparison - but it will give you a little better grasp of how large this star is. Imagine our earth is a basketball. Compared to our sun earth is a little smaller than a popcorn seed. In order to get something as large as Canis Major you would have to have a ball that is over half the size of the Empire State Building. Let me put that into perspective for you. That height is larger than the full height of the Superdome. So we are talking about a ball bigger than the Superdome itself (try jumping high enough to dumk that sucker into a basketball rim that can fit it!). Another way of describing the size of Sirius is that if we put it into our solar system (starting at the center of our sun) its outer edge would reach beyond the orbit of Saturn (although some think it extends beyond that to about the orbit of Jupiter). That is HUGE! But . . . this is only 1 star, albeit the largest one on record to date. There are trillions times trillions more stars in our universe - all of which have been placed in orbital movements that conicide with each other with greater precision than that of a well choreographed ballet. It truly is incredulous to an infinite degree how men can think this is all a random cosmic accident!

I've taken all this time - and verbiage - to hopefully get you to stand in awe and wonder of a single star - in a galaxy filled with billions and billions of starts - which is in the midst of millions of other galaxies - all moving in such synchronization that we set our clocks by its movement. God created all this by His infinite power and wisdom. He did it so that they would proclaim the glory of His great name! Thus this mere creation of the genius and limitless strength of our God is itself infinitely inferior to Him - the One who spoke it into existence. It required no over-exertion on His part and its creation was no drain on either His intelligence or His might. He is beyond its existence and could as easily consume it entirely with one additional word spoken to utter remove it to little more than an afterthought flying quickly through our minds. So please . . . the next time you consider the God of your salvation - the God of creation - the God of eternal, timeless existence and infinite, measureless magnitude . . . do so with awe and wonder . . . oh, and a little reverence might be in order too (just as an infinitely understated suggestion). And one other thing . . . this coming Sunday when you meet with the saints to sing of the God of your salvation - remember Sirius, Canus Majoris - or by its common name, "The Big Dog!" When you do - and you also meditate on the fact that God created this giant ex-nihilo (meaning out of nothing) as He spoke the world into existence (By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible. Hebrews 11:3, NASB), we will be moved by His Spirit and the truth to sing and worship Him with both awe and wonder! Or, in a euphamism more familiar to our current age, "Let the 'big dawg' speak, and when you feel him - get crunk as you worship God off the hinges." (Yes, I know that just exposed me as a really old white guy trying to look cool - sorry, couldn't help it with the star being named, "the big dog.")

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Articles

God Shows Up - (Part 1 of Meeting God - A Series of Articles on Job 38-42)

Joy in Weakness, part 3 - To Whom are you Measuring Yourself?

Have You Responded in Awe and Wonder Lately?

Biblical Articles

Categories

​Articles

God Shows Up - (Part 1 of Meeting God - A Series of Articles on Job 38-42)

Joy in Weakness, part 3 - To Whom are you Measuring Yourself?

Have You Responded in Awe and Wonder Lately?

Biblical Articles

Categories

Articles