Isaiah 36:1-37:38
It seems that the Lord can read the scrawlings of Assyrians. Hezekiah spread out before God the Assyrian King’s letter and it was as good as read by the Lord. I suspect that the Lord knew exactly what it said even before Sennacherib wrote it, let alone before Hezekiah spread it out, but the point is that he chose to act once Hezekiah took it to him in prayer. This is the towering mercy of our God. He made heaven and earth, he is the LORD Almighty - the omnipotent one who can do any thing, any time, to any one in any way that He wants. And he chose to act on behalf of Israel, to send the Assyrians packing and then to slaughter 185,000 of the ones who were supposedly going to attack and destroy his land. I think He did that just to prove His point. No matter how strong or determined the forces against us seem to be, they barely even begin to cause a hint of trouble to our God. A few scratches of a king’s quill upon a papyrus scroll may have us quivering in our boots but it hardly has the Lord flustered. Nothing can rival his power. Nothing can put his control in jeopardy. The most ferocious assault on us is, before God, just like a paper aeroplane thrown at the sun. He can burn it up without even thinking about it. He proved that at Calvary. He vanquished the final enemy of death. He bound Satan and he will throw him into the eternal fire. Our God is flipping awesome. We need to get him bigger in our eyes. We need to know that we can just lay our most troubling problems before him in prayer and he will act with ferocious power and mercy. God has the universe in his hands (and there is still space for 10,000 more universes alongside it). And God has got our backs.
Galatians 2:1-10
Paul seems to betray a lack of regard for the other apostles. He describes them as “those who seemed to be important” and “reputed pillars” and says they “added nothing to my message”. And, in truth, Paul did not have much respect for the other apostles, not compared to his respect for Jesus. That was his whole point. In this passage Paul is continuing the argument that he begun yesterday - that his gospel is not something to be messed with by people because it came from One God. Paul doesn’t care a fig whether people like or dislike what he says, whether they abuse him or love him for it - he is never going to change his message because it is a message he has been given by one far more lofty than he will ever be. Anyone who comes along and preaches a modified gospel or an ‘updated’ message must be false because they are denying the superiority of the One who gave the message. And so we come back to that theme which seems to be all over the place at the moment - that God is dreadfully massive. That God is several hundred leagues above even the most brilliant of people. All of us are just humble beggars before him with nothing of substance to offer except what he has given to us. And so we turn to poor - fellow beggars before the immense and matchless Prince of All Ages. We regard ourselves as superior or inferior to no other human but regard all humans as unspeakably inferior to Him. This is His story, we just tell it on His behalf.
Psalm 107:23-32
“they were at their wits’ end...” they're not the only ones...
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