God's grace is free - but will cost you your life!! There goes that lovely 5 letter word that is so easily bandied about by Christians without knowing or understanding what it is (a bit like the doctrine of the Holy Trinity!). For something so precious and at the heart of Christian beliefs it was great to hear Derek's heart wrenching expose on the matter. And what a blinding job he did - stitched up like a kipper only hours earlier when Dave called in sick - giving Derek the opportunity to rise to the occasion! I think he had less then 24 hours prep time but that was enough.
We have been doing a study on David in 2 Samuel and had seen him screw up his life culminating in the killing of "Uriah the Hittite" and the breaking of all the other commandments which I mentioned previously. He had truly buggered up his life - and then he repented - and then God blessed him. If Derek hadn't mentioned that he had flicked back a few pages you would think that 2 Samuel 7 is a progression from 2 Samuel 12.
2 Samuel 7 is about God's promise to David as given through "Nathan the prophet". And you would expect such a promise to be given to a person after they had an episode of sin/repentance BUT God being God - who knows what David will do in the future, just as he knows what we will do in the future, God gives David an amazing promise in 2 Samuel 7:5-16. God knew what David would be up to in a couple of chapters - breaking as many of the Ten Commandments as he could in a short period of time!
David's response was sincere at the time with a prayer. He appears to have his eyes and heart clearly set on the ways of God - determined to do what is right in the eyes of God. God had put upon David an amazing promise - even though He knew what David would get up to later on in life. If you were God and you could see into the future, would you have given David this great promise? This promise was given to David for free - and God gives a similar promise to us today. Romans 10:9 "If you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.". Knowing what "sins" we will commit between now and death, we will be saved. We don't deserve to be saved but we are - and its free!!
We don't need to screw things up as badly as David did, but its good to know that if we do screw up there is "grace" - and after we have said sorry, then there is forgiveness. This is brought home in Matthew 6:9-13 "the Lords Prayer" - not so much a prayer but a pattern for prayer - praise, adoration, supplication, requests for provision and finally the request for forgiveness. It is always tempting to get the order wrong - "lets ask for forgiveness first" - NO get the order right!! Grace allows you to bring praise and adoration first - sin has been dealt with - God knew what you were going to do before you did it, before you where born, before Adam-n-Eve!
I was drawn to the words of Davids prayer in 2 Samuel 7:18-29 - David repeated uses the words "Sovereign LORD". The word LORD is actually the divine name of God YHWH aka The Tetragrammaton. These Hebrew letters actually veer towards Yahwah or Jahweh or Jehovah. lost in translation!! So David's prayer was a personal prayer addressing God by His Name and not just a generic title like "LORD". And I think this aspect of "relationship" is lost in modern translations of the Bible. The generic titles like "Lord" or "God" depersonalises the relationships people actually had with God in the Old Testament. Worth pondering.
Well done Derek - lets have some more !!
No comments:
Post a Comment