Thought for the day

Things are going great. Rebekah is doing great and gaining weight like she should. Our house sold over the weekend. Praise God. It seems that there may be a calm in the storm for now.

I've been reading through the Bible chronologically this year. I just started Numbers yesterday. I just wanted to share some thoughts from my reading so far.

One of the greatest things I've finally connceted is that God has always come to us within the confines of our culture. I know that we say God transcends culture and He does, but we don't. God has always revealed Himself within our view of things so that we might understand Him better. Example? The story of Abraham. Many events that occured between God and Abraham relate to the culture. The first is the covenant that God made with Abraham. As a seal of this covenant God came as a fire pot and passed through the halves of animals that Abram had prepared. This covenant is very much like the treaty's back then. Abraham would have been very familiar with that kind of covenant. A second example in Abraham's life was the sacrifice of Issac. In that culture, is was the custom of many pagan god worshippers to sacrifice their children to these pagan God's. God asks Abraham to sacrifice Issac. The difference is that God provided the sacrifice after Abraham showed his faithfulness. Why does God do things within the confines of the culture of Abraham? Because that is way that Abraham will be able to understand who God is. God has never changed in nature, but He has always met us within our culture.

The other thing is that God uses ordinary people to do His extraordinary things. Issac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Gideon, David, and countless others were ordinary people that God used. None of them were the firstborn children. In the Old Testament the firstborn child was special. God intentionally didn't use the firstborn children to carry out his plan. Why? When you use extraordinary poeople to do extraordinary things, the poeple get the credit. When you use ordinary broken people to do extraordinary things, the only explanation is God's power. If you look at all of these men I've mentioned, they were all faithful but extremely flawed. It didn't stop there though. God sent His son as an ordinary child. He used the most ordinary men to spread the gospel in Acts. And He continues to use ordinary poeple in ordinary churches to do extraordinary things. Isn't God great? What is He doing extraordinary in your life today?