Tag: Salvation

Always the Plan

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This morning we kick off a brand-new teaching series with the Advent season fully in view. When we are celebrating Advent, we are celebrating the season of preparing for the arrival of Jesus. But understanding that just got me thinking: How did God Himself prepare for Jesus’ arrival and what exactly does it mean that He prepared for it? Starting this morning, in this series we’ll explore God’s plans and how they worked themselves out over the course of human history all with our salvation in mind. To get you thinking about complicated plans and to have a little fun together, check out this YouTube video and then read on.

Always the Plan

So, wasn’t that cool earlier? Can you imagine how much work went into just setting that up? I’ve got to admit: If I took the amount of time involved in setting up that contraption—I mean, it spanned something like four different rooms of that house and then went outside—I’d have a lot of trouble pulling the trigger to start it. It kind of makes you wonder just how many times he got it started and then had to start over because something didn’t quite work; or how many times everything worked except the final ball didn’t make it into the cup. Yikes! Talk about monumentally frustrating.

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Morning Musing: Malachi 4:1-2

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“‘For look, the day is coming, burning like a furnace, when all the arrogant and everyone who commits wickedness will become stubble. The coming day will consume them,’ says the Lord of Armies, ‘not leaving them root or branches. But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings, and you will go out and playfully jump like calves from the stall.’”‬ ‭(CSB‬‬ – Read the chapter)

For the last couple of days we have been talking about this tension around the worthwhileness of serving the Lord and striving to do life His way. Yet even as we have been trying to resolve tension, we have left some hanging there each day. With what we see here at the beginning of chapter 4, we are going to repeat this pattern yet one more time, but hopefully with more weight on the resolution than remaining tension. Let’s dig in.

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Digging in Deeper: Zechariah 10:11

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“The Lord will pass through the sea of distress and strike the waves of the sea; all the depths of the Nile will dry up. The pride of Assyria will be brought down, and the scepter of Egypt will come to an end.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

History is linear. It is unidirectional. It is going somewhere. We may not be able to see where from any single point along the way, but yesterday was not the day before and the day before that was different still. This wasn’t always thought to be the case. For a time it was fashionable science to hold that the universe was cyclical–it had been expanding and contracting in an endless cycle since eternity past and would continue like this on into eternity future. Then some smart folks looked a little harder and realized that the universe actually started at a single point and has been expanding ever since. Some religious worldviews today still believe that history is cyclical. But it’s not. History moves in one direction. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t repeat itself.

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Morning Musing: Zechariah 6:12

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“You are to tell him: This is what the Lord of Armies says: Here is a man whose name is Branch; he will branch out from his place and build the Lord’s temple.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Yesterday, one of my boys had to do a small project on idioms. He had to choose one, illustrate it, define it, and use it in a sentence. He chose the phrase “butterflies in my stomach,” and did a great job with it. An idiom, of course, is a word or phrase that literally means one thing, but is used figuratively to mean something else. The person who speaks of butterflies in his stomach hasn’t been eating caterpillars, he’s nervous. Small animals weren’t falling from the sky here yesterday afternoon, but it sure did rain awfully hard for a little while. Why talk about idioms this morning? Because sometimes Scripture uses what can seem like idioms and this morning offers us an example.

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Digging in Deeper: Luke 23:33

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“When they arrived at the place called The Skull, they crucified him there, along with the criminals, one on the right and one on the left.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

These are perhaps some of the most unlikely words ever written. God, the eternal creator of the universe, died. On a cross. That’s what it means when it says, “they crucified him.” All modern theories about His perhaps not really dying on the cross to explain away the resurrection aside, when someone was crucified, the end result was their death. Always. But why did it have to be a cross?

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