“Sing, O daughter of Zion,
shout aloud, O Israel!
Be glad and rejoice with all your heart,
O daughter of Jerusalem!
The Lord has taken away your punishment,
He has turned back the enemy,
The Lord, King of Israel,
is with you;
never again will you fear any harm.”-Zephaniah 3:14-15
Now there is a mind-blowing set of statement; “The Lord has taken away your punishment,” and “The Lord is with you, never again will you fear any harm.” Note the present tense of both those verses. The Lord has taken our punishment away and is with us.
So much of Christianity is locked on the distant future – the someday where we will finally be in God’s will and really be free. But who are we to dare say that what God has said now is hasn’t really happenned yet? If God says that He is with us now, shouldn’t we be living like it? And yet, for some reason, that is a massively difficult thing to do. Perhaps it’s because we don’t really believe that that is true, or perhaps it’s just part of our natural sinful bent combined with Satan’s force in this world. Probably a bit of both. But either way, there is time after time in our lives that we fail to live as if God’s word were really true now.
Henry Blackaby, in his book Experiencing the Cross, charges Christians to stop judging scriptures promises by their own experience and to rather raise our experience to the level of scripture’s promises. By no means an easy thing to do, but how wildly different would our lives be if we even began to try! Chris Vallotton made a wise observation when he said, “I can’t afford to think differently of myself than God does.” Yet, day in and day out, we do exactly that.
Paul says it this way in Romans, “We died to sin! How then can we live in it any longer?” (Romans 6:2) He goes on to say, in verse fourteen, that, “sin shall not be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.” How often must we run out from grace and return to the law, if we judge by our lives? May God trap us and surround us in that grace so we cannot escape. May we dive so deep into Him that there is no possible way for us to turn around and swim back to the surface where this world’s air is.
Are we trapped, are we lost in the fights and struggles of this world? Sin is a strong force, yes, but what is it compared to our God? Take heart, for,
The Lord God is with you,
He is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
He will quiet you with His love,
and rejoice over you with singing.”
-Zephaniah 3:17
So, do not be afraid, my friends. Do not falter of fail, for our Lord is a Lord who is mighty to save and rejoices to fufill his promises. It is in this we rejoice.
1 Comment
So many Christian writers that I have been fed from (many of whom are Puritans or strongly influenced by Puritans) refer to this whole idea as our faith being simultaneously about “the already” and the “not yet.” We live in the tension between those two – struggling to experience the joys of what we ‘already’ have been blessed with in Christ (Ephesians 1:3 says that we have beeen blessed with “every spritual blessing”) and yearning for the fulfillment and completion of our salvation when Christ returns (the “not yet”). I sure feel the tension of being pulled in both of these directions.