Please take the time to read. Enjoy! The first three verses of Psalm 30 have a duality to them. On the one hand, they foreshadow Jesus: right before He died, he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” His enemies (from Satan to the establishment) rejoiced when He died. In resurrecting Jesus, God hushed the enemy, drew him up from the pit, restored him to life and healed his broken body. I also see our relationships with the Father here. When we are hurting and broken, bullied by enemies, God lifts us up, out of the mire, and restores us. If He does not fix our circumstances, He comforts us and guides us through them. The rest of the verses amplify these dual ideas and brings us into those dark nights of the soul, before the dawn, when all seems lost. The best thing we can do in those times is to talk to our Father. He hears us when nobody else cares. He helps us when nobody else knows how. His fellowship and power to change us is what turns night into morning and mourning into dancing. Jacob muscled his way into birthright and blessing in Genesis 27: had he waited for God, his brother wouldn’t have hated him, his father wouldn’t have spent the final days of his life fretting over family strife, his mother wouldn’t have been left to mourn with Esau’s loathesome wives (two Canaanites and one of Ishmael’s daughters) after Isaac died. Jacob clearly did not deserve God’s blessing, but God keeps His promises. He keeps them because He does what He says He is going to do. God is bigger than our worst mistakes. Unlike the tabernacle which was portable, the temple described in 2 Chronicles 4 had a cast metal sea that was thirty cubits in circumference, or about 45 feet around. That means the diameter was just over 14 feet long! The sea was 7 feet long. That was big enough to immerse a person. Not only that, the brim was the flower of a lily, imagery theat suggests the baptism of Christ to me. The priests were to wash in the sea, and I wonder if it was for the one day of atonement when one priest could meet God in the Holy of Holies. The sea is set upon 12 oxen, which symbolize the twelve tribes and foreshadow the twelve disciples. It had ten smaller basins for priests to wash up after making burnt offerings. After Jesus exposed the ignorance of the establishment in Luke 20, he warned the people explicitly. I suspect the people knew enough about their ineptitude in the presence of Christ that Jesus warned them explicitly. In Luke 21, He followed up with another parable on the nature of true giving. The world measures value by total amount, but Jesus measure value based on the relative level of sacrifice. He observed that, “She out of her poverty put in all she had to live on. Imagine that coming from someone who left heaven, the throne of God, the most incredible place. He humbled himself to lose His power. Clearly, Jesus understood poverty form a perspective that noone could ever imagine. He states that the widow gave everything she had, knowing that very soon He too would give everything He had.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 09:55:30 +0000