Wednesday 21 December

Ezra 6:1-7:10

Ezra discovered the hand of his God was upon him... and his whole world looked different.  Suddenly he knew he had sufficient wisdom for the day.  Suddenly he could take courage.  Suddenly he could gather leaders around him and press ahead with a bold, almost crazy plan.  It has taken me a long time to accept the fact that the hand of my God is upon me.  I’m not entirely sure why that is.  One thing that might have contributed to it is all the talk about the ‘dancing hand of God’.  What this can suggest is that God puts his hand on you for a fleeting, flukey moment when suddenly everything goes spanking brilliant.  But then, a second later the hand dances off again like a conga line that you just can’t find the end of.  It suggests that the hand of God doesn’t remain upon you.  It makes everything seem flighty.  But Ezra knew different.  And so did Jesus.  Jesus didn’t talk about the dancing hand of God resting on him.  Heck, Jesus didn’t even just talk about the hand of his God being upon him - he talked about the Father remaining in him.  He talked about the Spirit making his home in each and every follower of his and that the Spirit would permanently empower, would continually sanctify, would persistently lead into all truth.  When Ezra accepted that the hand of his God was upon him he saw the world as his oyster.  If we have God’s whole being within us then what does that make the world for us??  This is a call for us to find who we are in God.  This is a call to truly accept that God has disposed himself to us.  And that God wants to use us and He will use us for his glory and his honour and his kingdom to come.

Revelation 13:1b-18

When Bob Dylan (who I utterly love) sang about us needing to serve somebody - “it may be the devil or it may be the Lord..” - he was pretty much echoing Revelation 13 but with one little twist.  Revelation 13 doesn’t just talk about service; it talks about worship.  It unambiguously asserts that people will either worship Satan or Jesus.  Satan may be worshipped in the form of the beast or the dragon or the second beast but it makes no odds.  Jesus may be worship as the lamb or the lion or the figure of burnished bronze but it makes no odds.  There is only one choice; worship Satan or Jesus.  And so we find in Revelation 13 a binary choice that is so loathed by post-modernism.  There is black or white with no shade of gray.  There are no centered sets.  You have your name in the book of life or you don’t.  And this both raises the stakes of our faith and acts like a rocket pack towards patient endurance and godly wisdom.  If we know there is no gray then we become very wary of any indication of our surroundings darkening.  If a dabble with sin is actually an act of worship of Satan.. well it seems much harder to write off as harmless.  If letting other Christian’s have their own false beliefs is letting them slip towards destruction... then it no longer feels so gracious or kind (we are talking here about the major doctrines like the need to live for Jesus rather than peripheral ones like the importance of tongues or infant baptism).  And this indeed is what we saw in the communications of the early church.  They ranted about this stuff like it really mattered.  They preached with passion and loved others with huge commitment and fled from sin like it was the plague itself.  They didn’t want the tambourine man to play a song for them.  They didn’t think the answer was blowing in the wind - they already knew the tune they were living to.  They were pressing on to the higher calling of their Lord.

Psalm 145:13b-21

He is loving towards all he has made.  Even the conies.