Break Time--Heaven Is Not For Wimps!

A Meditation on Psalm 23 and Suffering

Most parents will do everything they can to shield their children from suffering. Nobody likes to see someone else suffer—especially children. We live in a culture where we are taught to avoid pain at all cost. But Christians should learn from a very young age to face pain and suffering head-on and not try to run from it. 

Some Christian parents make their kids memorize Psalm 23 and it is one of my favorite Psalms. How nice to lie in green pastures and rest beside still waters! To be restored and have a table of food set before us. Ah…it’s like a life of retirement, right? 

But after reading the first two verses, we tend to just skim over the middle two verses to get to the end where we are dwelling in the house of the Lord forever. But the middle two verses are all about the journey of our lives. The Shepherd leads his flock in paths of righteousness. That sounds good, right? But the path of righteousness leads right smack into the valley of the shadow of death. And that is where we live our whole lives—in the valley of the shadow of death. 

Let’s read the Psalm.

The Lord Is My Shepherd Psalm 23

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

    He makes me lie down in green pastures.

He leads me beside still waters.

    He restores my soul.

He leads me in paths of righteousness

    for his name's sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

    I will fear no evil,

for you are with me;

    your rod and your staff,

    they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me

    in the presence of my enemies;

you anoint my head with oil;

    my cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me

    all the days of my life,

and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord

    forever.

Did you notice that the “path of righteousness” passes through the “valley of the shadow of death”? In this life, we live in the shadowlands. 

What is the “shadow of death” anyway? We all know what death is. It is loss of life. The “shadow of death” covers all the different kinds of loss and suffering we experience in this life. Every time we lose something, we experience the “shadow of death.” 

It could be the loss of something we possess like a house or a car or a smart phone. 

It could be the loss of a pet. 

It could be loss of our health. 

It could be the loss of a best friend. 

It could be the loss of a marriage or family or the loss of a child. 

It could be the loss of a job. 

It could be the loss of fellowship and love—being excluded or hated or shunned by other people.

It could be the loss of all our hopes and dreams.

It could be the loss of anything we love or need. 

These are all like a death to us and we suffer greatly because of them.

Know this, children:

If you are going to follow the Good Shepherd of Psalm 23, he will lead you into suffering! 

Look at what Jesus says to his disciples in Matthew 16:24—“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” 

Whoa Nelly! The cross is a symbol of intense torture and death. We have to be willing to suffer the loss of life to follow Christ. It is a test of our faith and our faith must be tested to see if it is steadfast. Only those who remain steadfast, only those who endure to the end will be given the crown of eternal life. 

That is why suffering is grace! 

We should never be afraid to face pain and sorrow and suffering head-on. We know that through suffering, Christ is making us the kind of people who will be able to live in heaven. 

HEAVEN IS NOT FOR WIMPS! It requires a particular kind of person with a particular kind of soul. Heaven is for people who do the right thing even if they have to suffer for it! People who avoid doing the right thing because it makes them uncomfortable will never be fit for heaven. Jesus uses suffering to expand our souls, so that in heaven our souls are capable of carrying the weight of joy we will experience there. The more you suffer on earth, the greater your capacity for joy in heaven. You see? Suffering is grace. Outrageous, scandalous grace! 

“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds,  for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.  And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing…  Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him.” James 1:2-4, 12

A TASTE OF HEAVEN

Fifty Shades of Grace Chapter 11

Chapter 11—Bible Codes--The Keys to Unlocking Them.

Do you like to decipher codes? If you do, you will love the Bible. The Bible is full of very rich language that has layers and layers of meaning. For one thing, the Jews had a mathematical system called gematria where numbers had certain meanings. In addition, letters of the alphabet were assigned numbers, so that you could take the letters of a word and add up the numbers to get a number meaning for the word. How fun is that! Think of all the secret messages you could send if you knew gematria! 

Here are some examples of the meanings of numbers in the Bible:

One is associated with unity.

Three is associated with the trinity and ultimate perfection.

Four is associated with the four corners of the earth or four points of a compass.

Six is the number of man.

Seven means complete.

Ten is a perfect number.

Ten cubed or One Thousand is perfect perfect!

Twelve is associated with foundations.

In Revelation the number six hundred sixty six means powerful but corrupt and it is the number of a man. 

Seven is seen a lot in the Bible. There are 7 days of creation, 7 days in our week, 7 weeks of feasts, 7,000 of those who are faithful to God in Israel, and when you get to Revelation, there are so many sevens that you lose count of them! 

There are a lot of twelves too. Twelve sons of Jacob, twelve tribes, twelve apostles, twelve baskets of food left after Jesus fed a huge crowd. Here is a fun calculation: The twelve tribes of Israel times the twelve apostles times one thousand = 144,000. One hundred forty-four thousand symbolically represents the number of Jews who became the first Christians during the lives of the apostles. They came from twelve tribes, were taught by twelve apostles, and multiplied by the perfect number 1000; they are God’s elect—the first fruits of Christian believers. 

There is also a lot of what we call apocalyptic language in the Bible—mostly in the Old Testament prophets and in Revelation. The Greek word apocalypse means revelation. The Bible uses apocalyptic language in conjunction with God’s judgment on men and creation. When you read apocalyptic language it sounds really scary—like the whole cosmos is being shaken apart. Some phrases you might recognize are: the sun will turn black, the moon will turn to blood, the sky will be rolled back like a scroll, the stars will fall from the sky. You will find these phrases and a lot more in the Old Testament prophets. 

When you see these kinds of descriptions, they are not to be taken literally. The stars will not really fall from the sky and the moon will not really turn to blood. This is just a way that God uses to describe how he judges all the things that people worship instead of him. He is just letting them know that there is no God more powerful than He is. No sun god or star god is more powerful than our God. And God also uses natural disasters to judge human beings. He sends terrible storms with fire (lightning) and thunder and hail; he sends earthquakes and tsunamis; he sends diseases and horrible plagues. Everything that ever happens comes from God’s hands.

But those who believe in Jesus never have to worry about God’s judgment on them. In the Bible, God made a way for his people to escape before he rained down judgment on unbelievers. That doesn’t mean that bad things won’t happen to you, but it means that God will protect you in it just like when he walked in the fire with Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and when he shut the mouths of the lions when Daniel was in the lions’ den. Sometimes the bad things that happen to you will be very painful, but God will not let you be destroyed. 

Anyway, it is important that you know how to decipher these codes so that when you read the Bible, you don’t FREAK OUT and get so scared that you stop reading. Just remember that God is bigger than any bad thing that can happen. Reminds me of a song we used to sing:

God is bigger than the boogie man

He’s bigger than Godzilla and the monsters on TV

Yes, God is bigger than the boogie man

And He’s watching out for you and me. 

Fifty Shades of Grace Chapter 10

Chapter 10--Captivity

Why do we feel so disappointed every time a good king lets us down? We keep thinking to ourselves—maybe he will be the one who gets it all right and never sins. But then he does sin and we feel so bad for him. If you feel that way reading about the kings, it is because the Holy Spirit has put a longing in your heart for someone who will come along and get it all right. Someone who will be faithful to the end and who can be our real hero. God’s prophets, men like Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel and Daniel and many others told the people that this man would come and rule forever someday. 

Who is this man? Isaiah describes him as a suffering servant who will be crushed by God, who will then become a conquering king and redeemer. Jeremiah calls Him a righteous branch who will reign as king and deal wisely and execute justice and righteousness in the land. Ezekiel tells us this man will be God himself and he will be like a shepherd who will seek out his lost sheep. And Daniel has a vision where he sees this same man ascending in the clouds of heaven to take his seat on God’s throne. Even God’s prophets had only a glimpse of who this man would be and what he would be like. But they all knew one thing: this would be the king they were all waiting for ever since the Garden of Eden when God told Eve it would be one of her descendants. This last king would be THE ONE we have all been waiting for. He would be the one to restore Eden.

Everybody did an awful lot of waiting. And then some terrible things happened. Judah was taken captive by the Babylonians and Jerusalem was completely destroyed and the temple was burned to the ground. God’s dwelling place no longer existed. Do you think God will divorce Judah? They would have deserved it, but God had another plan. He would spare a small remnant so that he could keep his promise to David about giving him a son who would rule forever. God used the Babylonians to preserve the line of David by taking the royal family and all the princes to Babylon where they were treated very well. 

Daniel and his friends were some of the royal family taken to Babylon. While they were in Babylon, Daniel and his friends were placed in high positions of authority because they were very wise. Daniel could even interpret dreams! Does that remind you of anybody else? 

Daniel interprets dreams

Daniel’s friends, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were thrown into a fiery furnace because they refused to worship the golden image of Nebuchadnezzar. 

The fiery furnace

Daniel also continued to pray to God when laws were passed that prohibited praying to anybody but the King. Because of that, he was thrown into a den of lions.

The lions' den

Other people besides the royal family could choose to go to Babylon if they wanted, and Jeremiah the prophet told them to go. Some people did not believe Jeremiah because all the other prophets told them to stay in Jerusalem! They said that Jerusalem was God’s dwelling place and God would never want them to leave. 

Whom should they believe? How did they know whom to trust? Here is how they knew: A century and half earlier, the prophet Isaiah told the people that Babylon would conquer Judah and that God would spare His people by bringing them to Babylon. By this time, everybody knew that Isaiah was a true prophet because everything he predicted came true. So those people who were reading their Bibles could tell the difference between the true prophets and the false prophets. That is how they knew Jeremiah was telling the truth. The people who believed God went to Babylon while Jerusalem was destroyed. So God spared the believers. He called them his remnant.

After 70 years of captivity the people of God would be given a chance to go back to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple and the city. Most of the people did not want to go back by that time because they had been born in Babylon and it was their home. Plus they had families and little kids and they were wealthy and prosperous there. It probably looked a lot like America today. The last thing they wanted to do was go back to a deserted place that looked like a pile of rubble and travel through the desert with all their kids and animals. They liked Babylon just fine. But the people who read their Bibles knew that God was going to destroy Babylon because Isaiah told them that too.  In fact, Isaiah even told them the name of the king who would let them go back home! His name was Cyrus. The people who did not read their Bibles did not know the truth. They trusted in their wealth and prosperity. But God in his mercy gave them a couple more chances to return before he destroyed Babylon. 

So once again the remnant returned to Jerusalem and built the temple and the city. It was really hard work and they were persecuted by their enemies, but eventually the job got done. There were a few prophets like Haggai and Zechariah encouraging the people during this time and the people began once more to look for the promised King, the Son of David. You would think it should be about time now, wouldn’t you? After all this waiting and waiting? Instead, there were 400 years of silence. Four hundred years of no prophets and no word from God. 

Even this would turn out to be grace as God prepared the entire world for the spread of Christianity under a unified world government!


Evidence of God's Grace to Me:

 A baptism and a foot washing

Katy and Sadie watch Alice eat lemons:

Fifty Shades of Grace Chapter 9

Chapter Nine — Scandalous Grace…Again

How long is this going to go on? All these years and still no king who will do everything right and reign forever! Maybe it will be the next king Joash—he restored the temple and the offerings—but no. He became bad at the end. Then there was Amaziah and he was mostly good, but not the one. Uzziah came next and he was really good! Maybe he would be the one to get it all right. He sought God, and God helped him and he did all kinds of really good things and became very strong and famous all over the world. BUT when he was strong, he grew proud to his destruction. He tried to offer incense and only the priests could do that, so God gave him leprosy and he could never go in the house of God again. What a disappointment he turned out to be.

His son Jotham was good, but then his son Ahaz was more wicked than all the kings before him. He did not trust God and he worshipped idols and worst of all, he took his sons and had them burned in the fires of an idol named Molech. Molech was a giant idol situated in a valley. Molech’s head was like the head of giant bull and fires were raging around him and inside of him. He was made of bronze so that the fire made the metal extremely hot. When people placed their children on the hot metal with blazing fire, drummers would beat very loud drums to drown out the screams of the children so their parents wouldn’t have to hear them cry. 

The people thought if they sacrificed their children to the idols, then the idol-gods would help them win wars or give them more children. Demons were behind the worship of false gods and they always do just the opposite of the true God. They made people sacrifice their children to a false god,  but the true God sacrificed his own Son for us so we could live forever. 

The prophet Isaiah told the wicked King Ahaz to ask God for a sign about what God was going to do but Ahaz did not want to hear it. That didn’t stop Isaiah! He told him anyway. He said that a virgin would be with child—that would be the sign for the coming of “the one”. Now at last we have a clue what to look for. As soon as a virgin has a baby…wait a minute. That’s impossible…isn’t it?

Isaiah foretells the virgin birth

After Ahaz died, his son Hezekiah became King. King Hezekiah was a very good King because he trusted God with his whole heart and he listened to the prophet Isaiah. He restored the temple worship, and consecrated the priests and Levites and renewed the covenant between God and Judah. During his reign, the people began to celebrate the Passover again like never before. God protected Hezekiah and the people of Jerusalem. In fact one night, when their enemies the Assyrians had the city of Jerusalem surrounded, God’s angel went into the camp and killed 185,000 soldiers! So you can see how much God loved Hezekiah. 

One day, Hezekiah had some visitors from Babylon called envoys. While they were there visiting, Hezekiah boasted to them of all his glories and showed them everything in his royal treasuries and in the temple treasuries. If he were living today, he would have posted pictures of everything on Instagram! Do you think that was a smart thing to do? It was not! He was acting like he did all this himself instead of giving glory to God. He was a sinner like all the rest of the kings. But he trusted in God and that is what matters! He was a very good King because he trusted in God and listened to God’s prophet Isaiah. 

Manasseh was the next King of Judah and he was even more evil than his grandfather, King Ahaz! He built altars to many different idols and he also sacrificed his sons in the fires of Molech and made other people do the same. He killed the prophets of God and anybody who listened to the prophets. He even had the prophet Isaiah sawn in two. The Bible says he filled Jerusalem from one end to the other with innocent blood. He was so wicked that God let the wicked Babylonians take him captive. They put a great big hook (like a fish hook) in his nose and tied it to a rope and dragged him away to Babylon. Can you imagine how much that must have hurt? 

Manasseh was thrown into a dungeon in Babylon and was very miserable there. While he was there, he began to think about all the terrible things he had done and he cried out to God and repented of all that he had done. Do you think God should forgive a big sinner like Mannaseh? You might not think it would be right for God to forgive such an evil man. But God loves sinners! But God not only forgave Manasseh, he let him go back to Judah to be King again! 

IT’S OUTRAGEOUS! 

IT’S SCANDALOUS! …

IT’S GRACE.

Do you ever feel like the sins you do are so bad that God could never forgive you? Well here is the good news: God’s love and mercy are greater than any sin you could possibly do or even imagine! And if you ever forget that, just go back and read about King Manasseh! He worshipped idols, burned children in fires and slaughtered God’s prophets. But when he repented, God saved him. God will save you too if you repent.

When Manasseh came back to Judah to the King again, he got rid of the idols and made God’s law the law of the land. He offered sacrifices to the true God and commanded all his people to obey God. When he died, his son Amon became King and he was another evil King. But Amon’s son Josiah was a good king. 

Josiah was only 8 years old when he became the king. Even though his father was evil, this little boy began to seek God. When he was just a teenager, he began to get rid of all the idols in the kingdom. He went to every town himself to make sure every idol was smashed and burned. You can imagine what the people thought when King Josiah came to their towns. I bet they all came out to watch the big bonfires of burning idols! 

While Josiah was king, the book of the Law was found. That would have been like our Bible today and included all the things written by Moses and Joshua. Josiah read the book and made all the people obey the commands in it. They kept the Passover just like it used to be in the days of Samuel. Everything Josiah did was good. But one day he went out to fight against the king of Egypt. The King of Egypt told him not to fight because God did not want him to fight, but Josiah fought him anyway and he died in the battle. That was very sad, because Josiah was the last good king that Judah ever had. All the other kings after that were evil and did not trust God. 

Evidence of God's Grace to Me:

Fifty Shades of Grace Chapter 8

Chapter Eight—Adultery and Divorce

Did you ever read through the stories about the Old Testament Kings? First there was Saul who started out good but then became evil. Then David came along. He was a shepherd who took care of sheep, fighting off lions and tigers and bears…well maybe not tigers. But he was a courageous boy who fought off the giant Goliath with a little slingshot. He later became a courageous warrior and won victories over all of Israel’s enemies. David was a man after God’s own heart, and God loved David so much that he promised him that one of his sons would be a king who would do everything right and rule over his people forever and ever. Why couldn’t it be David? Well, even though David loved God with his whole heart, David wasn’t perfect. He committed several very bad sins like taking another man’s wife and then killing the man to cover up his sin. Just when we started to think David would be our hero, he had to go and blow it! 

David and Goliath

But then Solomon came along and he was the wisest man who ever lived. God especially loved Solomon and gave him all kinds of wisdom and made him rich and famous, too. Solomon was the one that God appointed to build the temple.

Solomon's Temple

All the kings of the earth came to bring him gifts and hear all his wisdom. Wow! We hope he will be the one who gets it all right, with all that wisdom and everything. But no. At the end of his life, he started to worship other gods. 

WHAT?!? 

HOW COULD HE DO THAT? 

Even the wisest man in the world has let us down. Why do we feel so disappointed? 

Rehoboam was the next king and he was only partly good but during his reign, God divided the kingdom into two nations: Israel and Judah. Jeroboam ruled over the ten tribes of Israel and he made golden calves for the people to worship and he told them a BIG FAT LIE! He said, “These are the gods who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” That is called rewriting history and rulers do it all the time to make their people follow them instead of God. Some of the people in Israel did not believe Jeroboam and they gave up all their property and possessions to go live in Judah so they could worship the true God. The nation of Israel never had good king again.

In 722 B.C. God finally divorced Israel! Remember how he made a marriage covenant with her in the wilderness? Remember what he told them about what would happen if they refused to obey? Well, Israel was never faithful to God again after Jeroboam. She committed spiritual adultery, worshipping other gods again and again, and God was patient for a very long time, but then he had to bring judgment on them. He issued a divorce decree and Israel was given over to the Assyrians. The Assyrians spread the Israelites out over the entire empire so that they lost their national identity and they never solidified to become a nation again. 

The nation of Judah was all that was left now and these people became known as Jews because that is much easier to say and spell than Judahites. The nation of Judah had some good kings and some bad kings. Abijah was the next king of Judah after Rehoboam and he was a bad king. His son Asa started out good, but then took a wrong turn and became bad. But Asa’s son Jehoshaphat was a very good king. King Jehoshaphat listened to the prophets of God and did what they told him to do. In most countries at that time, the king was the highest person in the land and he got to make all the rules. But in Judah, God was supposed to be the real king, and the prophets of God were his messengers to the kings, so the kings were supposed to listen to the prophets. 

Jehoshaphat was a good king who read the laws of God and  sent priests and Levites all throughout Judah to teach the people the laws of God. Then he even went out to all the cities himself to make sure they were getting it right! Do you think he might be the one who gets it all right and never does anything wrong? 

No. Jehoshaphat made some pretty bad choices. He made friends with the King of Israel who was one of the wickedest kings to ever live. His name was Ahab and he was married to someone even more wicked than he was. Her name was Jezebel and she worshipped lots of idols and killed the prophets of God. Ahab and Jezebel had a daughter named Athaliah and King Jehoshaphat made an agreement with Ahab that his son would marry Ahab’s daughter Athaliah. Boy, did that ever turn out to be a big mistake. 

Jehoshaphat also went to war as Ahab’s ally because he still believed the Israelites were God’s people. But they were not God’s people anymore and that was another big mistake. Jehoshaphat did continue to trust in God though and did very good things for the people, so even though he was a big sinner, he was a very good king because he trusted in God. 

Jehoshaphat’s son Jehoram was the next king and he was the one who married Athaliah. He was an evil king who did not trust God and he was so bad that God gave him a horrible disease and he died in a lot of pain but nobody cared. Then his son Ahaziah reigned for a few years but died very young so his mother, that wicked Athaliah took over the throne. She was even more wicked than her mother Jezebel. She tried to kill all of her grandchildren! How wicked is that?!? But one of them—a little one year old baby—was hidden and kept safe until he was old enough to be king. 

Evidence of God's Grace to Me: