Unfulfilled Expectations

Unfulfilled Expectations

Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations; Deuteronomy 7:9 (KJV)

The little boy woke up early on Saturday. He wasn’t exited about watching cartoons or playing video games today, no, he was going fishing with his Dad. He had waited for this day for two weeks. He remembered the night when they were eating dinner and Dad had promised him that they would go fishing and today was the day. He got himself up, did his chores and even had his tackle box and pole ready to go. This was going to be the best day ever! Time passed and he didn’t hear any noise from his Dad’s bedroom. They usually got an early start maybe Dad was sleeping in. He sat on the porch dreaming of the fish they were going to catch and the great time he would have talking to his Dad and comparing their trophies. The morning was slipping away when Mom came out the front door. He jumped up ready to go when the words fell on him like a rock slide crushing his spirit. Dad had to go into work this morning and left before he had gotten up. There would be no fishing, no talking, no special moments spent together.

We have all experienced the sadness of unfulfilled expectations. Those moments when we were let down by someone that we thought we could trust. It might have been a parent, an employer, a co-worker, or friend but no matter who it was, the moment is easy to recall; it was if our boat was capsized on the sea of life. Sometimes those disappointments could have been avoided, sometimes the person could have chosen us over someone or something else but they didn’t and it hurt. Sadly, in some lives there is a litany of unfulfilled expectations that scar the fabric of our souls and leave us insecure and unwilling to trust anyone.

These unfulfilled expectations can leave us angry and that anger can lead to bitterness. Our view of the world becomes jaded and we find it hard to put our hope, our dreams, and our heart in the hands of others. People can’t be trusted so we turn inward to ourselves and believe that we are responsible for our own happiness. This manifests itself in many ways but the driving force behind all of the behaviors is that we feel insecure and compensate by placing our trust in money or possessions, perhaps we throw caution to the wind and “live for the moment” never finding any hope for tomorrow. But in all of this the most tragic part is that the enemy subtly steals our faith. We cannot put our trust in a God that allows us to suffer.

The essence of “el hanne eman”, The Faithful God is faith! We can trust Him. Satan loves to play the shell game with us. Moving the shells around on the table, diverting our eyes, and deceiving us into believing that God is playing tricks on us and He doesn’t have our best in mind. Isn’t that what Lucifer did in the Garden of Eden? He convinced Adam and Eve that God wasn’t faithful, you just can’t trust Him. He is hiding something from you. He knows that if you eat of that fruit you will be like Him! So don’t listen to God! Go ahead and eat. Attacking God’s faithfulness to us is the most effective way of destroying our relationship with Him.

We walk by faith and not by sight! If we can’t trust God with our lives then we won’t give our lives to Him. Knowing that God is working, even now, to bring about His will requires us to trust Him when we cannot see where life is taking us. We must understand that His love for us will never fail. Our God is holy, righteous, and in Him there is no shadow of turning. We have a firm foundation on which to stand and are built on nothing less than His Truth. Like the little boy who didn’t understand why his Dad had to go to work we often miss the bigger picture that God is working on because we are self-absorbed and see only our needs, our desires, and our passions. Believing that God is for us when things don’t work out the way we had planned allows us to take another step in our journey of faith.

A Firm Foundation

Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations; Deuteronomy 7:9 (KJV)

Words mean something.  What we read and write are not just random marks on a page but those markings carry the intent of the heart.  In reading and studying the Word of God I use many different versions of the Bible.  No Jesus didn’t read the King James Version and Paul didn’t write in the King’s English.  Translating the ancient manuscripts from Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic is an arduous task undertaken by men and women of much greater understanding than me.  Needless to say people spend their entire life studying these ancient languages and attempting to give us the best translation and understanding of what the authors were trying to say.  With that in mind I would like to examine the same verse today in two different translations of the Bible. 

The passage I would like to examine is found in Proverbs 16:6.  Originally written in Hebrew, translated to Latin then to English we find what appears to be two very different verses in the King James and  New International Version.
By mercy and truth iniquity is purged: and by the fear of the LORD men depart from evil.  Proverbs 16:6 (KJV)

Through love and faithfulness sin is atoned for; through the fear of the LORD a man avoids evil.  Proverbs 16:6 (NIV)

Mercy becomes love and truth becomes faithfulness!  How did that happen?  Let’s leave the scholars to their linguistic arguments and just contemplate these words in our hearts.
I have heard mercy defined as unmerited favor, grace that isn’t deserved.  Your Strong’s concordance tells you that the Hebrew word was “hesed” and the top three translations of the word are mercy, kindness, and loving kindness.  It is God’s great love that moves Him to have mercy upon us.  It was God’s love that led Jesus to the cross where mercy was poured out upon the lost.  Mercy and love both speak of the same attribute of God’s heart. One is the root and the other the fruit.
That one was easy.  Now let’s look at faithfulness and truth. The Hebrew word used here is “emet” and turning to our Strongs for help we find something that can only be described as amazing.  This word is derived from one that means stable or stability.  In one place it is used to denote a wall which firmly holds a nail in place and another to describe a house with a firm foundation.  Treasure hunting can be tedious and requires sifting through lots of extraneous material to find the pearl of great price.  Here we have found a great treasure. 
Truth and faithfulness are the foundation of our salvation.  We are held in the hands of a loving God that has shown great mercy, underserved favor to each of us.  He will never leave us and we have no fear of being forsaken.  His faithfulness is grounded in His Truth.  In this world of relativism where absolute truth is ridiculed it is hard to grasp the concept of undeniable, unchangeable Truth.  But there are absolutes.  White is still white not eggshell or any other blend.  Pure is still pure, holy still holy and God is still God.  He never changes.  His love is established in Truth.  This is the essence of His faithfulness. 
Oh what joy to know that our sins have been washed away!  Not because of something that has a short life span but because of God’s great, unchanging love.  Our iniquity has been purged; our sin atoned for by the blood of the Lamb.  We have a sure and a firm foundation that cannot be shaken and we cry out, “O Lord, Great is thy faithfulness!”  He is truly “el hanne eman” The Faithful God.

Faithful God

Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations;  Deuteronomy 7:9 (KJV)

This week we are exploring the depths of  "el hanne eman" - The Faithful God

     The human body is perhaps the greatest feat of engineering in the universe.  From the unsearchable mysteries of the human brain to the complex working of the foot the body inspires wonder.  We take the parts and pieces of our body for granted.  I am sitting here on the couch with a broken calcaneus bone. I have walked on that bone for fifty six years and never knew the name, never understood how it worked, and really never gave it any thought, until it shattered.  One twelve foot drop off a ladder and everything changed.  The intricate balance of our bones, nerves, muscles, blood, and tissue work day in and day out keeping us mobile and functioning in this world, yet we give them very little thought.  Oh, we wash the body but mostly so that we can be comfortable and not offend others.  We groom the hair and clip the nails, clean the ears, and eat, but how much thought do we give to the body when we do these things.  Really we treat it with little thought about how wonderful and amazingly faithful it is.  We just use it.

     We often treat God much the same way taking for granted the blessings and presence of His hand in our lives.  We remember the “big” moments!  The times that God reached into our lives and rescued us but those dramatic events are not what really define the relationship we have with our Heavenly Father.  He never leaves us.  When we are alone and things are quiet, He is there.  When we are playing, He is there.  When we are holding our children and grandchildren in our arms, He is there.  In the quiet meadow or the rocky mountain top God has always been there. 
We love to talk about how God was in the lion’s den with Daniel keeping him through the night but we forget that God was there when Daniel was taken captive; He was there when Daniel was chosen to serve in the King’s Court, and He was there at the window three times a day.  The faithfulness of God is not found in the great rescue but in the mundane repetitions of the everyday lives of His people. 

     This is what truly amazes me about God.  Every morning when I open my eyes He is there.  For most people that moment doesn’t bring about a dynamic religious experience.  They don’t even acknowledge Him.  Not even a good morning.  But He has been there every day for the last fifty six years of my life.  When I was a slave to my sinful nature and didn’t give Him a thought, He was there. When I ignored His warnings and lived my life in defiance to His holiness, He was there.  When life did not seem worth living, He was there.  When I called out through the pain of my own existence, He was there.  His love has never failed, never abandoned me, and never let me go.  Like the Father of the Prodigal Son, He stood on the porch and looked down the road waiting for me to come home.  He was there!

     When we relegate God’s faithfulness to the miraculous events in our lives we fail to truly understand His love for us.  Ask any woman who feels deeply loved and she will tell you it’s not the big dates, but the assurance of her loves faithfulness is in the little things, the everyday things.  Yes, God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son and that love has been faithfully demonstrated to us every day of our lives.

New Beginnings

And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful. Revelation 21:5-6 (KJV)

“In the beginning God created…”  Most of us learned the story of creation as children and as we matured we moved on to other lessons but today as we close out the year 2013 and begin a New Year I would like to take you back to the beginning.  That day when God’s Spirit moved upon the face of the deep and created the world as we now know it.  Debate has raged about “the gap” between Genesis 1 verses 1 and 2.  But whether you believe that everything was created only 6000 years ago or you believe that an unspecified period of time lay between those two verses the fact remains that God moved upon the chaos of this world and spoke those powerful words “Let there be”.
Genesis 1:2 records, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” 

Personally I believe that God delights in creating beauty and when He creates he takes that which is without form and desolate and speaks life into the darkness.  God doesn’t create voids He fills them.  For some reason the beauty of His creation was marred and in His time God moved upon the face of the water to bring about a new beginning.  There is another place where the phrase “without form and void” is found.  

Jeremiah 4:23-27 (KJV)  “I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form, and void; and the heavens, and they had no light. 24  I beheld the mountains, and, lo, they trembled, and all the hills moved lightly. 25  I beheld, and, lo, there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled. 26  I beheld, and, lo, the fruitful place was a wilderness, and all the cities thereof were broken down at the presence of the LORD, and by his fierce anger. 27  For thus hath the LORD said, The whole land shall be desolate; yet will I not make a full end”.

This passage sounds eerily like Genesis 1:2.  There was no light, the earth was a quagmire, no people, no birds or animals, and all the cities were broken down.  Why?  Because of the fierce anger of God which brings judgment for sin and rebellion, but pay attention to those last eight words.  “Yet will I not make a full end.”  God doesn’t leave things broken!  He is The Creator. He makes all things new!
When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, God once again pronounced judgment but He did not abandon His creation.  There would be a Savior!  There would be a new beginning.  Throughout the history of this world the hands of God have been at work fixing the marred image of His creation.  The Creator’s wisdom is revealed like a thread that runs through the story of man.  From Adam through Noah and Abraham, Isaac, then Jacob on to Moses and Joshua, King David and the royal bloodline all the way to Jesus.  God did not abandon the work.  He did not “make a full end”. 
For nearly 2000 years that thread has worked its way through the Church touching the lives of the lost and fallen.  Restoring broken lives and trading beauty for ashes, the Spirit of God stills moves upon the waters.  No matter how desolate the circumstances of our lives, God has not abandoned us.  We are His creation fashioned in His image and purposed for greatness. 

In the cool of the day God would visit the garden of His creation and walk with Adam.  We were not created as an exhibit to be displayed but as friends to enjoy the fellowship of God.  Though sin has marred the beauty of our union God has not given up.  He desires our fellowship and will not walk away.  He is still reaching out, still longing, still working to restore us to Him.  No matter the cost, no matter how long it takes, His hand is reaching out to us.  There is healing in Christ for all those that will trust in Him.  After all, He is the God of New Beginnings.