GOD IS GREAT

GOD IS GREAT

                Our theme this week is based upon Psalm 145. In this Psalm David speaks of the greatness of God and he reviews many of the things about God that make Him worthy of our worship.

1.       The Lord is gracious and full of compassion; slow to anger and of great mercy

2.       The Lord is good to all; and His tender mercies are over all his works

3.       All of creation will praise Him and his saints will bless him

4.       Our God is a God of power and majesty

5.       His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom

6.       The Lord upholds all those who fall and He raises all those who are bowed down

7.       As we wait upon Him, He gives us our meat in due season

8.       He opens His hand and satisfies the desire of every living thing

9.       The Lord is righteous in all His ways and holy in all His works

10.   He will fulfil the desire of them that fear Him; he also will hear their cry and will save them

11.   The Lord preserves all them that love Him; but the wicked he will destroy.

                I had a wonderful father growing up. He loved God with all of his heart and I admired him, but mostly from a distance. As a minister of the Gospel he was constantly on the go… out there ministering to others… burning the candle at both ends.

                During my troubled teenage years, I wrote a song, as I was often want to do and it reflected some of what I felt at that time. It went like this:

Where were you when I needed you? Where were you when I wanted you?

I needed someone to guide me through the difficult times of my life

Far away in some other place you guide the ships to shore

But Dad, I am a wandering ship that needs you even more.

                On the other hand it was my Dad that planted in me the seeds of understanding and an eternal desire to see the big picture. He passed those things on to me as a legacy that I still live by today. But one of my struggles in trying to build a friendship and a relationship with God has been a constant feeling that God is preoccupied, busy saving others while having little time for me. Do you feel like that at times?

                In a greater degree than we realize our parents form and shape our picture of God and we can see Him as either being close and personal, or distant and preoccupied, kind and forgiving, or cruel and unforgiving. And so I thank God for godly parents that planted the seeds of understanding and salvation in my heart, but it was my Mom who helped me with the practical side of faith.

                We all struggle to a certain extent to know and to understand the great God of heaven. In fact, David even admits in this chapter that God’s greatness is unsearchable. He goes beyond all that we can comprehend and even God Himself tells us that His ways are not our ways and we at times are forced to admit that He does things the way He does them because He has an eternal perspective in mind.

                We often want God to answer our prayers the way we see it from our limited perspective, but God may see, that what we are asking for will do us more harm than good in the long run. This is where praying in the Spirit comes in, for indeed we need to trust God to answer our prayers according to His perspective and not ours. So we ask the Holy Spirit to pray for us according to God’s will and not our own.

                Out in Washington and Oregon our climate was conducive to a proliferation of slugs and slugs can eat your garden away overnight. As I grew gardens out there to feed three families, I would have to go out especially on rainy mornings and pull 20, to 50 to even 100 slugs off of my garden vegetables. It was a nasty job and I put out lots of slug bait, but they liked my vegetables even better.

                Given the damage that slugs do, I usually dispatched them to the world beyond, either squashing them, or salting them or feeding them to our ducks that loved them for a slimy snack.

                One day I saw a slug and I was about to squash him when I saw him with his little eyes, positioned as they are on the end of his antennae and he was looking up at me as if trying to fathom this creature that towered thousands of feet above him. I thought to myself: I am as God to this little guy. How unsearchable are my ways to him. Will I show mercy or will I squash him without giving it another thought?

                I looked down at his probing little eyes and seeing parallels between his life and mine; I sidestepped the little slug and let him live, even though he may be eating my garden tomorrow.

                There are many things about God that we can’t comprehend and especially so in light of the fact that our world is plunging into the darkness of earth’s final conflagration. We are watching the separation of the wheat and the tares. We are seeing the great rebellion taking shape… the great falling away as many abandon God to serve the adversary. Even God’s chosen people have largely become either Atheistic or have covertly begun to worship and to serve Lucifer.

                This is true of both Israel and the church, for indeed those who serve the living and true God are but a Remnant.                The world at large is turning against those who worship the true God and live by His Word. Amazingly, it is those who pretend to represent God that are presently building a global kingdom against Him… and they are instead preparing to put Lucifer on the throne of this world in the form of the antichrist.

                Millions of God’s people, both Christians and Jews are falling away from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits and doctrines of demons and it is only a matter of time before they will be persecuting those who remain true to God and His Word. Their hatred of God is focused upon one Person… Jesus Christ the divine Son of God who came here to pay the ransom for our sins and to deliver us from Satan’s kingdom. God Himself came here, born of a virgin, living in human flesh, to show us His ways and then to die at our hands… to pay the ransom for our sins and then to rise again and to return to heaven as our High Priest, sending down His Holy Spirit to take up residence in any of us who will receive Him as Savior and Lord.

                We should not be surprised at these events since God has warned us in His Word of this specific time in which we now live. It is all spelled out for us in Bible prophecy for those who are willing to listen. And Paul warned Timothy saying: “But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons.” 1Tim. 4:1

                Paul also gave warning to the Thessalonians to which we need to pay close attention. He said:

                “Now we request you brethren with regard to the command of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering together to Him that you not be quickly shaken from your composure or be disturbed either by a spirit or a message or a letter as if from us to the effect that the day of the Lord has come.” 2 Thess. 2:1, 2

                In other words, someone had come among the early Christians telling them that they rapture had already taken place and that they were now living in the Day of the Lord (The Tribulation) And given the persecution they were enduring, it certainly  looked like this might be the case. But Paul refuted that false teaching by telling the Thessalonians that two things would have to happen before the rapture (Our gathering to Him) would take place.

1.       There would be a great falling away or apostasy. This was a very specific apostasy involving God’s chosen people the Jews and His chosen people the church and I’m sure that there have been many fallings away and many apostasies, but there is one coming on a global scale that will bring life on this planet to an end and will result in the return of the Lord to rescue His people and to put an end to Satan’s dreadful kingdom. 2 Thess. 2:3

2.       There must also be the revealing of the man of lawlessness, the son of destruction who opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship. So that he takes his seat in the temple of God displaying himself as being God. 2 Thess. 2:4, 5

                We recognize this global figure today as the coming antichrist and we can match this prediction by Paul here with the same prediction by Jesus Chris tin Matthew 24: 15:

                “Therefore when you see the ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION which is spoken of through Daniel the prophet standing in the holy place (Let the reader understand) then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.”

                This, of course was first fulfilled in A.D. 70 at the destruction of Jerusalem, but it serve as a pattern of last day events as well because Jesus was here describing the events leading up to His return just as was Paul. And we are seeing plans for the very temple in which the antichrist will stand as Israel gears up for earth’s final events. Unfortunately most of them will worship the antichrist for he is their god Lucifer. But there is a remnant in Israel just as there is a Remnant in Christianity that will remain faithful to the true God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and to Jesus Christ and as Zechariah 12 and Romans 11 tell us, the faithful among the Jews will be reconciled to Jesus Christ in the end as well.

                I am one who likes to place everything within a framework of God’s big salvation picture. To me, we cannot celebrate the goodness of God without acknowledging that His plans call for the end of sin and suffering. He is returning as Judge and King of kings to destroy the vile kingdoms of this world and to fill the earth with His own kingdom. We will be restored to God’s original purpose for mankind in creation and sin and suffering will be a thing of the past.

                We need this perspective of the goodness of God as we plunge deeper and deeper into the events of the last days. God is not distant as many of us have felt at times. We are temples of His Holy Spirit and our goal in this life is to learn to live by that which He has placed within us, rather than by the flesh that belongs to Satan’s kingdom. Our salvation is involved in learning how to live by the Spirit, for as it says in Romans 8:14 “For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God.”

                And so in Psalms 147:19 David says to us all: “He will fulfill the desire of them that fear Him; He also will hear their cry and will save them.”

                “We have this hope as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and one which enters within the veil where Jesus has entered as a forerunner for us, having become a High Priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.” Heb. 6:19, 20

                “I will extol thee my God, O king; and I will bless Thy name forever and ever.” Ps. 145:1