DIVINE IRONY

It's funny the things I've never noticed about the Bible. Or sad really, I guess. I'm reading the NT this year, one chapter a day, Monday through Friday, and I am finding things IN THE GOSPELS I never noticed before IN MY LIFE. Yikes.

I like all those moments in Scripture, and they happen in life as well (life imitates art...err, truth), where God fulfills a prophecy or does something semingly ironic, right under the nose of unsuspecting people. In the crucifixion on Christ, in Chapter 15 of Mark, I guess I just never noticed all the underlying "God stuff" happening there, aside from the obvious. Jesus, as he is dying, cries out in a loud voice....pretty odd for a man dying from a form of execution that brings about gradual suffication. And oh, it takes like 3 hours, instead of days. It's so odd, that when Joseph of Arimathea asks for Jesus' body, Pilate acts surprised, basically saying "He can't be dead YET". Weird that the Son of God couldn't hang on for more than a few hours.....until you look at the big picture.

It was the day before the Sabbath, and they couldn't have someone on the cross over the Sabbath, so normally, soldiers would break the legs to speed up the process. BUT, prophecy said that no bones would be broken, so God somehow steps in at that moment and moves the process along, so that there can be no mistaking the fulfillment of prophecy. And when Jesus dies, the centurion standing there is so taken withthe way Jesus dies, he says "this guy had to be the real deal."

That's amazing to me, just the little details, the little things I've never noticed that take you deeper into an understanding of who God is, how He sees the world and His plan. Its hard to udnerstand it all, because our minds are stuck in the context of time and space, but God operates above all of that. The best (worst) analogy I could come up with to wrap my mind around that was when I was using my iMac to edit a DVD project for my wife. Now, WATCHING a movie, you don't know the end when you start, and you don't know for sure how you're going to get there. BUT, MAKING a movie, I've got all my clips dropped into iMovie, and I have a timeline. I can pull back and look at the whole thing, start to finish, and can move things around, put things together, and make the whole project make sense. I can see the end from the beginning, and can line things up in such a way that everything works together to create one story.

That's how God views the world, in my humble opinion. He sees the whole timeline of past, present, and future, and he makes it all tie together, moving people and working with their lives, the things they do, to put together the story of His creation. It's even harder because you have to factor in free will, so it's like editing a movie where the scenes constantly change. Wow. I'm tired now, that just weirds me out. Anyway, that's as deep as my puny intellect will go today!

FEAR

You can almost smell it, it's so thick around here. I was in a worship service this weekend at our church, and the pastor was talking about stewardship. He opened up talking about several economists view of our country's financial condition, and it was mostly gloom and doom. He did bring it back around to say thatr our hope is in Christ, but not before the collective sense of fear sucked the air out of the room. People are terrified, believer and non-believer alike.

I work with churches a lot, and the recurring theme I see is that while more and more are turning to the church and to Christ, giving is down. What's the problem? Unemployment? It's 7-8 %....which means EMPLOYMENT is at 92-93%. While the stock market is down, it seems people are still making money, but they're holding on to it. It seems to me that we've done a bad job as the Church combating fear with education- making people aware of the fear being spread, and offering them hope by following what God says about the money he gives us. Part of worshiping God is obeying His Word, and His Wordsays that we are to give back at least a tenth of what He gave to us through our work.....HE gav eit to us, so ultimately He should be the one to make the rules, right?

So anyway, I choose today not to be a slave to fear, but to trust and obey what God tells me to do with what He gave me to manage for Him. That's my two cents on that.