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Sunday, 19 December 2010 07:56

December 19, 2010

“ACTION READY MINDS”

1 Peter 1:10-13

by Pastor Ole Lillestolen

What if there was no God? What if the late astronomer Carl Sagan was right to say that, “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”

That would mean that we have a huge scientific problem to solve, namely: “How can we explain existence in the face of so many scientific impossibilities?”. For example, it is impossible to have an eternal cosmos and yet have energy today. The laws of science tell us that if the cosmos is eternal it should also be ‘energy dead’!

Scientists know this and came up with the idea of a ‘big bang’ as an end run around this problem. But, making our universe part of a bigger ‘cosmos’ doesn’t change anything with respect to energy, and a ‘big bang’ only adds another impossibility to the long list because what “banged” supposedly banged out of nothing! Furthermore, things don’t become organized and complex by chance.

Yet, if there is no God, there is no reason to live for anything or according to any set of ethical standards. The only standard is self preservation, if that matters to you. If you can get away even with murder, why not murder? Where did our country’s laws come from? Not from textbooks on evolution! They came from the Bible! The mode we are in today in our country is not one of creating higher ethical standards. It is a deconstructive mode which moves slowly and steadily in the direction of “anything goes”.

Still, most people have always known that there has to be more to this universe than just cosmos and randomness. The universe screams of a creator! So people have always sought to penetrate the veil covering the realm of God, trying to understand who He is, what He is doing, and what He has planned for us for both time and eternity.

The trouble is, not every attempt to penetrate this veil has been truly honest. We humans are good at playing games in our quest for the blessing of God. We tend to look for and create gods after our own desires, which have often been very perverted.

Jesus, however, gives us the key to truly penetrating the veil before God. In John 7:17 He told skeptical Jewish leaders who were doubting His credentials as the only begotten Son of God: “If any man is willing to do His will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it is of God, or whether I speak from Myself.” In other words, any search for God and His leading that is governed by a proviso like: “I could never believe in the kind of God who . . .”, or “I can’t believe God would . . .” is doomed to failure from the start. If we are not willing to accept God as He is, then we will be looking for God in all the wrong places!

People have followed all kinds of ‘insights’ and ‘unusual experiences’, which seemed to be windows into heaven in creating various religions. Yet God was not silent while people searched for Him in all the wrong places! He revealed Himself to people in ancient times in ways that left them convinced that God had truly spoken to them.

Moses saw a bush burning without being consumed. How would you like to have a chunk of that wood to put in your wood stove? But, when Moses took a closer look at the burning bush, a voice told him to return to Egypt and lead the Israelites out of their slavery and into the promised land.

Countless people have experienced visions and other physical things which led them to believe that God was talking to them, but when Moses obeyed the voice from the burning bush it became clear he had been hearing God. His stick became a snake and then became a stick again. He called down awesome plagues upon Egypt! He stretched out his arms to command and the Red Sea to part and it did. And on it went, miracles confirming God’s many revelations to him. And the story is the same with each prophet in the Bible, revelations with experiences to confirm the revelation as God’s revelation.

One day, however, God spoke to Moses to tell him about His long range plans. In Deuteronomy 18:18 God said, “I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.” Nobody knew very much about God’s long range plans. God told Abraham, when He called Him (Genesis 12:3), “I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” But, what did that mean? God’s revelation to Moses only added to the mystery!

As the generations rolled on, God revealed more and more of His salvation plan. God told King David in 2 Samuel 7:16: “Your house and your kingdom shall endure before Me forever; your throne shall be established forever.”

God told Jeremiah (Jeremiah 23:5,6): “Behold, the days are coming," declares the LORD, "When I shall raise up for David a righteous Branch; and He will reign as king and act wisely and do justice and righteousness in the land. In His days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely; and this is His name by which He will be called, 'The LORD our righteousness.’”

But it was Isaiah who really got a lot of fantastic information about the coming of the Messiah. In Isaiah 9:6,7 God told Him to write: “A child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; and the government will rest on His shoulders; and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from then on and forevermore.”

Yet imagine how God’s revelation of Isaiah 53 must have looked like a real curve ball as it described a suffering Messiah who “was despised and rejected by men,” and upon whom was laid the “chastisement of our peace” as He would be “led like a sheep the slaughter.” How can you have a glorious king rescue forever the nation of Israel and yet have Him be killed when He shows up? I can see Isaiah and others spending hours pouring over these prophecies trying to understand what God was planning!

We don’t understand everything either, even though we have the benefit of being able to look back on Jesus’ coming to this earth the first time. A lot of what was mystery for the prophets themselves is cleared up for us. Yet, we wonder about things like the rapture which the Apostle Paul talks about. When will it take place? Will it take place before the Great Tribulation which the Bible describes? There are many things we still wonder about, so we can easily imagine how the prophets struggled to understand God’s plan of salvation!

And Peter writes in our text, “As to this salvation, the prophets who prophesied of the grace that would come to you made careful search and inquiry, seeking to know what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating as He predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow.” They had to content themselves with simply being messengers to us. Peter tells us that, “It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves, but you, in these things which now have been announced to you through those who preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven-- things into which angels long to look.” Not even the angels in heaven understand the mind of our infinite God!

Yet, here we have from God this body of revelations and many of their fulfillments! Many of those which remain to be fulfilled look like they could be fulfilled very soon! Our world very strongly resembles the world which the Bible describes for the end times, especially the place of Israel in that world.

This is all so fascinating and amazing as to be mind boggling. The question is: “How should we be responding to all of this?” Peter tells us in verse thirteen: “Therefore, gird your minds for action, keep sober in spirit, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

I don’t think I have to explain very much what this means. It is pretty clear that Peter is telling us that we need to fill our minds and build our lives around Jesus. He wants to redeem us from the power of sin in our lives today and He promises to return to ultimately redeem us from this world of sin! What I do need to remind you of is the urgency of this, especially since this was Peter’s teaching to people who were living two thousand years ago! Wasn’t Peter going overboard to being something of an alarmist?

The answer is a resounding, “No!” It doesn’t matter whether or not Christ is actually coming during our lifetimes; Peter’s concern is that we always need to be ready for whatever comes down the pike. Jesus will ultimately return, maybe in our lifetimes; but even if He should wait another thousand years, we are choosing today what His eventual coming will mean for us! Countless people already dead will miss the blessing of His return because they were so distracted by Satan’s empty promises that they didn’t realize how they were pushing Christ away!

And look at the way Satan even used religion to distract the most religious people of Jesus’ day! The scribes and pharisees literally hated Jesus! So the mind action Peter is talking about involves having the curiosity of the prophets who continually explored what God told them to try to honestly understand what He was telling them.

One of the saddest lessons of life is that it only takes one mistake to mess up a life forever! Where Satan loves to try to distract us into devastating mistakes is in those areas of God’s revelation we haven’t bothered to explore or have not been honest even with ourselves in our listening to them. Ignorance or misunderstanding is no excuse in the courts of our land and it doesn’t change things here either. Sin is sin whether we know about it or believe it or not, and Peter knows that Satan is ruthless in his efforts to deceive us into sin and its wages. So he urges us to, “gird our minds for action!”

There is a God. He has a wonderful plan to rescue us from this realm of sin! He has both told us about His plan for a savior, Jesus Christ, and He has told us what it means to experience His redemption. We want to make it into a timeless ticket to heaven, but it is so much more! What is your commitment to wrap your mind around what God has spoken to you?