RAISING YOUR EBENEZER

Yea and verily (and various other archaisms most people don't understand!), Rudi and I have been busy refining our The Unfaithful Bride & The Faithful Groom book (See Amazon). Here's a wee quote (followed by a link to a great hymn brilliantly done): 

Israel, and so the bride of Christ of all time, needs to be reminded of two aspects of God’s relationship with them. Firstly, God is awesome, majestic, powerful, gracious, faithful and great like no other God. He elected His people to be His own. Secondly, they are sinful and inclined to walk in sin. Put these things together and we sing the hymn,

                                                    O to grace how great a debtor
                                                   Daily I’m constrained to be!
                                                    Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,

Bind my wandering heart to Thee.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

Psalms, Hymns and spiritual songs can be powerful. Little wonder then that Paul writes, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord” (Col. 3:16)…

The Bride of Christ is so much the poorer for neglecting to sing the Psalms which remind us of the covenant faithfulness of God who tramples His enemy underfoot. They remind us of our unfaithfulness so that we are bound to constantly confess our sins before Him. We are called to rely on His mercies to fulfil our responsibility to bring honour to His Name till the end of this age. We need to sing, “A mighty fortress is our God”. To this we can add “Stand up! Stand up for Jesus!”, “Who is on the Lord’s side?”…

If we may be permitted to, as it were, “kill two birds with the one stone” (no pun intended), in the hymn quoted above, Robert Robinson goes on to sing, “Here I raise my Ebenezer, Hither by Thy help I’ve come”. Raising an Ebenezer (as mentioned elsewhere in this book), is in reference to the Israelite practice of placing stones of help, stones of remembrance, stones of testimony, witnesses to great events in history, i.e., God’s mighty works, such as Israel’s crossing the River Jordan to enter the Promised Land (Josh. 4:1-7; 19-24). Spiritual songs, like these stones, are reminders, historical landmarks, to us of His mighty works. Yes, setting stones and singing songs has long been the practice of God’s Church. For, even in the beginning the angels sang when God laid the earth’s corner stone (Job 38:6-7).

Of Jesus at His Triumphal Entry, we are told that “the whole multitude of the disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works they had seen, saying: ‘Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the LORD! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!’ And some of the Pharisees called to Him from the crowd, ‘Teacher, rebuke Your disciples.’ But He answered and said to them, ‘I tell you that if these should keep silent, the stones would immediately cry out’” (Luke 19:37-40). Whether stones of help or hymns of praise, we must not remove reminders of the mighty works of God done in the Church’s past. Therefore, psalms and old hymns need to be included as part of the contemporary bride of Christ’s repertoire, lest we forget by Whose help we have come hither. In the ancient, the old, and the new, we must continue to raise our Ebenezer.

Link to Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing brilliantly done by Celtic Worship:

Come Thou Fount (Official Music Video) | Celtic Worship - YouTube

PERFECTION SPOILT

                                                                Perfection Spoilt

Image from Net

What is perfection? Is it, like beauty, something in the eye of the beholder? Some may view a Rolex, the Mona Lisa, a magnificent sunset as perfection. Yet time can spoil these works of art. The word ‘entropy’ is shorthand for the second law of thermodynamics, where order becomes disorder, integration becomes disintegration, and perfection becomes spoilt. Have we just seen a form of entropy at work in the previous sentence? Have I already spoilt what might have been a perfect article by my use of spoilt instead of spoiled here? Again, perfection is in the eye of the beholder.

‘And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day’ (Gen. 1:31). God spent six days making the heavens and the earth and all therein, (a magnificent work of art if there ever was one!), beheld His creation, and declared it ‘very good’. Where did entropy come from? How did God’s perfection become spoilt? ‘But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked’ (Gen. 3:4-6).

Before they ate the fruit of good and evil, Adam and Eve could only see good wherever they looked in God’s ‘very good’ creation. However, after perfection had been spoilt, they beheld entropy, like a hammer beating on a Rolex, acid on the Mona Lisa, they saw disorder, disintegration. So, what is God going to do now that His ‘very good’ creation has been spoilt? He gave His Prophet Jeremiah an illustration, ‘So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do. Then the word of the Lord came to me: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the Lord. Behold, like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel”’ (Jer. 18:3-6). 

Yes, God can build or destroy whole nations and kingdoms. He spared Nineveh, and reworked it, when it repented of its evil! (Jonah 3:10). The news gets even better: ‘Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show His wrath and to make known His power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of His glory for vessels of mercy, which He has prepared beforehand for glory—even us whom He has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles [i.e., the nations]?’ (Rom. 9:21-24), and even better still, ‘For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God’ (Rom. 8:20-22).

Image from Net

Individuals, nations, and the whole creation can be reworked by God, the disordered reordered, the disintegrated reintegrated, and the spoilt remade to perfection! You personally can escape the entropy of God’s judgment, ‘For God so loved the world that he gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3:16).

To learn more about entropy, see video link: https://fb.watch/lD089Cnpq5/