Spiritual Ponderings

Once the truth about what God is really like opens the heart and enlightens the mind, suddenly Scripture comes alive like it could never be seen before. Once the darkness of misapprehensions about God's character begin to dissipate, light from knowledge of His true glory illuminates passages that previously were puzzling or even frightening. At the same time the darkness of false assumptions about God becomes revolting and disgusting and reprehensible. A text keeps coming into my mind that I decided to investigate under the light of this emerging glory. I sense that the closer we come to perceiving God through the lens of Jesus as the early believers did, the more clearly we can understand the things they did and said when the true gospel spread contagiously. Who has said, by the Holy Spirit, through the mouth of our father David your servant, Why are the nations so violently moved, and why are the thoughts of the people so foolish? The kings of the earth were lifted u...

The system of reward and punishment that pervades all of the world's societies and legal systems is based on the concept of debt and payments of debt. This is easy enough to see on the negative side of the scale but is not so readily perceived on the positive side. We can easily feel that a debt is created and needs to be addressed when something is taken from us or an offense is committed against us. But what about on the other side of the scales? How can the idea of debt and repayment explain the positive side where rewards are given out for doing good? If we insist that punishments must be dealt out for the debts of offenses, the same principle must apply to how we perceive good deeds must be dealt with as well. And herein lies one of the greatest dangers that blinds us as to how skewed our ideas about God have become. Because we believe that every debt must be satisfied, then every good deed must have its reward according to our concept of what we think is an immutable ...

Recently in church I was conversing with a friend who expressed the belief that he would likely be among the lost on judgment day. I did not want to dispute his feelings at the time, but took note to look into this more intently. I realize how many of us struggle with the issue of confidence when it comes to our relationship with God and our salvation. We know that one is not 'saved' permanently simply by repeating some religious phrases or making claims of accepting Jesus as their Savior no matter how sincere we may be. But too often we have gone to the other extreme and supposed that it is wrong to have confidence that we have eternal life right now and do not have to live in fear of being lost. I know this all too well for I spent a good share of my life living in constant trepidation that God was ever looking for excuses to keep me out of heaven. For years I had something of a competitive thing going on with God where I was trying to eliminate everything from my lif...