Table of Contents

Introduction

The Trees

Abraham

Jacob

Joseph

Balaam

Saul

David

Esther

Job

Habakkuk

Jonah

Daniel

Nebuchadnezzar

Me

Romans One

God is Good

Sovereignty Shared

Pictures of Jesus

Statement of Faith

The author’s statement of faith:

Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God,

came in the flesh, shed His Holy Blood

on the Cross at Calvary for the sins of the world.

He is Lord of the universe, King of Kings…

and I am His Shulamite.

Copyright

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the Holy Bible, New American Standard Version. Copyright © 1997 by the Lockman Foundation.

Scriptures marked Amplified are taken from the Holy Bible, Amplified Version. Copyright © 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987 by the Lockman Foundation.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the Holy Bible, King James Version. Copyright © 2011 by Barbour Books.

ISBN 978-1-936057-30-6 All and Only Copyright © 1998, 2012. Martha Kilpatrick.

All rights reserved. This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. This book may not be copied or reprinted for commercial gain or profit, or reproduced in any form by any means. Requests for permission to quote this book should be made in writing to:

Shulamite Ministries

P.O. Box 10

Suches, GA 30572

888-355-5373

http://shulamite.com

Note: This ebook has been reformatted from the original print version to accommodate electronic devices.

Introduction

The enigma of suffering...

The perpetual question is a challenge not only to the power of God but to His very nature: How can a good God allow suffering?

One who has the power to do anything at anytime… that One is sovereign. Even if He doesn’t use that power. To withhold power is still to possess it.

There is an explanation

and it lies with a

benevolent Creator

as His sensible secret…

That is enough.

The lusting mind gropes for explanation… “I will trust if I can only understand.”

By asking the question we are demanding that God win, not only our approval, but our consent.

We must authorize

His actions.

If I were God, I’d make it all so clear, explain myself so I’d be loved… But God is not a God who stoops to get permission for His actions.

When the terrible-what-happens occurs, our hold on His absolute dominion is attacked, and our hope is enfeebled that He is good, greatly good.

And what we really believe

comes snarling out.

I asked a missionary candidate, “Does your school teach that God is sovereign?”

“Oh, yes, God is all-powerful.”

Powerful we all agree. But sovereign?

Sovereign is not the

same as powerful.

Powerful could…

if it would.

Sovereign IS.

Isn’t it true that if He is so much as one event less than sovereign, He is then NOT sovereign? We would have to use another word.

By the dictionary, sovereign means: paramount, supreme sovereign, complete independence and self-government. Sovereign is a word of absolutes.

Though full explanation is beyond the comprehension of finite human minds, there is an answer.

Explanation means

I unveil my reasons.

Answer means only

that I have a reason.

The answer is given… not thought through, not figured out, not deduced by the minds of men. The answer is simply given in His Word:

I AM.

God identified Himself to Moses as… I AM. What a strange way to say it. Nothing unsaid… in the most amazing self-disclosure God had said it all.

I AM

All

All there is

All you need

Anything, everything

Only

The Trees

The Tree of Knowledge was

the Tree of Ignorance.

There is Only One

who knows.

Scripture is clear. From beginning to end. God is. And He is God. There is no other.

It is we who put events into categories with labels. Thus we live by the Tree of Death: man’s pompous belief that he can tell the difference between good and evil…

Sometimes the kiss of

a friend is betrayal,

an untimely death

is on time,

a gentle sheep hides

a vicious fang.

When will we see how small is our seeing? And trust…

Looking out into the world (my little one and that vast one) I see immense forces at work… powers in combat. Men kill men. Nations now can kill ALL men… Despots imprison and dominate.

Satan is there. His powers swirling… seeming to win. Then there’s me. I can destroy. I can hurt.

Finally, God. Is there any power left to His disposal?

Yes, there are vying powers. Huge and fearsome powers. Bigger than me, bigger than the earth! And as I look at what can be seen… I see them.

But when I look long into God’s Word, there is nothing more plain, nothing more repetitive than this:

God is in final charge

of all things.

He has the Last Word and the one who has the Last Word has all the power.

Abraham

God will

Sovereignly Accomplish

what He asks of you.

All by Himself.

A man must be called. He doesn’t choose his place in God’s chronicles nor the timing of it.

The pathways of his story also are mapped out… by God, not himself.

Abraham, singled out by God, chosen among heathen idolaters to know and follow I AM. To know by following…

He was elected

to a place, a time

and a particular

demonstration of God.

And so are you.

He was selected to father nations but God made sure that it was humanly impossible, divinely improbable.

Long before God performed this, He spoke it.

He is God over All,

Only Ruler and Controller.

When He speaks

the very universe

heaves to accomplish it.

Natural laws collapse before the sound of His Transcendent Voice. Human wills spend their fight, then bow.

His resounding Word breaks and creates, makes and separates. And nothing holds it back, not even humanity’s bungling stupidity.

By the bitter education

of error, Abraham learned

that when God spoke,

it was sovereignly

accomplished.

How could Sovereignty speak and it NOT come to pass?

But it takes a while to see… God as God. To discover that what He promises only He can deliver.

God never asked

for Abraham’s help,

only his surrender…

But because he thought God needed assistance, Abraham had long years to eat the acrid fruit of forcing God’s promise into existence before it was ripe.

His putrid creation of God’s Idea sapped him to the last ounce of hope. Drained his marriage, too.

Abraham eventually learned to pray instead of perform. To wait rather than run, see God and not himself.

And most of all, he

discovered how to receive:

To receive the all-encompassing

blessing of God… without

deserving it.

To relinquish what

he loved most, to receive

it back alive from

divinely-ordered death.

To accept without protest

his frightening inadequacy,

either to effect God’s will

or even to keep from

trying to do so!

Isaac was conceived when the man was destitute of trying to support God’s plan, by the collapse of his own prowess, and was left with nothing but… stark faith in the Only One Who has power.

When a man is reduced to the embarrassing level of simple receiving, then God’s promise has no obstacle of fulfillment… no strutting man to take credit for what God did all by Himself.

But no one will ever

volunteer to live by

the dire vulnerability

of receiving.

It’s too, too naked.

He must be shamed into it by the hopelessness of every other possibility. He must be disabled out of his determination to fulfill a vision he did not originate.

Weakness is

man’s final invitation

for which God

unendingly waits.

Jacob

If a man embraces

Sovereignty, it will mean

that someone other than

he is God.

Jacob, man of action. He would wrest his destiny out on his own, thank you. He needed no help from God to effect God’s plan.

Human dynamo,

making it happen.

Any means justified the end and he used any means to gain the blessing promised to him in the womb. God had promised it so stealing it was not immoral.

The human sliding scale

of integrity.

But Jacob was sovereignly chosen so no matter what wreck he made, God fixed it. No matter where he ran, God ran with him.

However low he sank, God went there also.

Whatever problem he had

was the affair of God.

There was no Divine Rebuke and no rejection. Oh yes, there was chastening. There were consequences.

But present more were Absolute Commitment and Unequivocal Presence… to the consummate end.

Sovereignty

is a true friend.

Jacob was finally tired of his pitiful management and ready to face the brother he cheated.

He was a man broken on the beam of his own striving, but in such desperation, such frantic need of God, that his grip was iron and his final strength no longer human achievement of Divine Ends.

He had only the power

of critical necessity:

an urgent hold on God

that would not

let Him go…

All other powers were gone: scheming, working, conquering. These powers had wearied him and ultimately failed to bring him to the destiny for which he had sold his soul’s honor.

But by that final power of brutal desperation, at last he touched the only human strength that moves God to take over… raw need.

God had been with him watching, waiting through every shortcut, committed to the man even in his rank independence, but now Jacob vacated the Chair and let God have His Rightful Throne.

So Jacob,

by unending crisis,

was transformed

into Israel.

The man of God became

the man IN God.

And that is two entirely different men.

The very core essence of the man had been transformed by the final comprehension of… his dismal failure at being God.

I Am.

Joseph

There aren’t many Josephs.

We would rather pet

our bitterness than

wear a crown.

And that is precisely

our choice…

It’s funny: the one who seeks no “whys” knows… eventually, the answer to the questions he needed not to ask.

And only that kind of person ever finds out.

Joseph, that magnificent hero, became such because he pushed past the obsession with “why” and dealt instead with “how.”

How can I please God?

How can I serve God?

If ever a man had the hostile right to ask “why,” wouldn’t it have been Joseph?

A favored son.

A faithful son.

Clean… malleable yet strong enough to report the wrongs of his brothers… when asked to.

Cruelly rejected for his God-originated dream and for his sterling character. We hear no railing screech of “Why, God!” A simple setting to the task at hand.

The question of Joseph:

“What is Your will here?”

The human question is “why?” “Give me all Your reasons and then, maybe then I will follow You.”

The legitimate question, the one that can be known is “what?”

God’s “what” is “Do the task at hand. Live the life you find.”

And Joseph did it… only to suffer again, not from sin but because he wouldn’t sin!

We would have screeched,

“What good is it?

God is not fair and

there is no justice!”

Oh, but I AM.

In the hell-hole where any reasonable person gives up because his “why” saps all his innards, the caged Joseph asked again… “what?”

What is Your will?

What is my task?”

“Do the task at hand. Live the life in which you are trapped. Do it well in the faith that I have a Divine Aim.”

And Joseph did.

Even there.

The question is not “why” but “what,” and through the devoted acceptance of what God wants, the “why” of His purpose emerges.

In some off-the-record unveiling to his heart, Joseph came to see God’s unimaginable but brilliant purpose. We know the end of the story. Joseph didn’t.

For him it had been a blank mystery, a puzzle he couldn’t have solved. It was God’s secret. Only He could reveal it. And He did.

Genesis 45:7

God sent me ahead of you

to preserve for you a remnant

on earth and to save your lives

by a great deliverance.

He knew. Joseph knew why. It was a purpose so great, so heroic, he was willing to have suffered for its fulfillment.

Trauma creates

a dilemma with God,

not only with life.

It throws His character into dispute, His power into doubt, His love into question. Suffering twists our view of God so He seems both small and inept.

Suffering doesn’t need explanation. The experience of it calls for healing, not reason, because suffering splits you in two, creates a breach between you and your own existence.

The rigid stance you take

against your personal pain

straining to erase your event,

and not to include it

in your present, makes you

your own murderer.

For your suffering has a life of its own, full of unborn ideas, pulsing with mystery, rich with potential to solve your future suffering, and – most amazing – your past as well.

Your suffering

holds the secrets to your

appointed lot and is

therefore the hiding place

of your power.

You must value your suffering enough to coax its treasure into your using.

In the end, Joseph found out why. He’d been in school, the making of a ruler, whose power saved many lives.

The “why” unmasks itself

only to the faithful.

For Joseph, I AM had been enough. God could have. God didn’t. So God had good reason.

Most men never

make it to the end…

to see.

Their furious “whys” have gnawed their mammoth potential down to a tiny bitter nub of ineffectiveness… long before the end.

Balaam

The man who doesn’t

let God rule him

is lowered beneath the

donkey who does…

God is so much God that no person can thwart Him, no person can fool Him and no one can use Him.

Balaam is a name that stands for greed; through the ages of eternity it will so stand.

Shameful corruption

of a pure calling.

The king of the Moabites wanted to pay Balaam to curse a protected Israel. And he would pay well to secure that curse. Being a valid prophet, Balaam asked God. The answer was “no,” clear and unequivocal.

So the king upped the price. Balaam asked again and the answer seemed to have changed to “yes.” When you ask God a second time, it exposes that you want something more than you want His will.

And Sovereign Lord will often release you to the thing.

You now have to

walk it out.

It nests in your heart

so you must see its

sorry conclusion.

It’s not His will but it is His permission. However, make no mistake. His will will prevail… with you or without you.

So Balaam’s donkey corrected him. Balaam’s lust to go was such that he didn’t realize his pride had just been insulted by God’s use of the dumbest and basest of animals.

Balaam drew a sword to kill the animal that would dare to stop his prosperous adventure.

Donkeys and angels

belong to God.

They serve Him…

faithfully.

It is only humanity

that is so foolish

as to know better

than God.

Still God let him go, even sent him. See? Sovereignty does not mean unmitigated control.

God’s purpose is not in

the slightest threatened by

our failure to get in it.

Nor do lawless actions

limit in any way His

ultimate end.

He had pronounced Israel blessed. No man could out-pay or out-pray that blessing. A man’s curse over what God blesses only returns back to him, in dreadful fullness.

Balaam, man of money, tried but couldn’t curse. When he opened his prophet’s mouth, he could only pronounce a victorious benediction to Israel and a clear prophecy about the Christ.

The man who can be bought

may be anointed but

he is not absolute.

Payment for God’s Word

can be a terrible corruption

of the man of God…

Be careful. Be careful!

You cannot use God’s enemy for your own aggrandizement nor evil for your good. Such pay is vile.

God Himself pays his own servants. No need to compromise. Wait for the miracle of the raven and the widow’s cruse.

God will use men.

He has that right.

He may spend, wreck,

and send a man.

But He is honorable

and that one will be

rewarded entirely and

sustained absolutely.

The Only God will not tolerate being exploited to increase a man’s stature or his purse. Public exposure will come upon that man’s motive and condemnation not only from God but men as well.

As are prophets and donkeys, the power of a curse is entirely subject to the wishes of the…

Great I AM.

Saul

Haughty little kings may

strut, prance, and run amok,

but the Eternal still

rides their backs and

holds the reins.

God crowns kings. They reign for Him. Should they cease to reign for Him, they are then dethroned.

Saul was a grand specimen of a man but of sorry mettle as a king. He began well, but lasted only briefly as Sovereign Choice.

King was not enough for him.

He would be priest as well.

Victor was not sufficient.

He would be God as well:

decreeing who would live

and who would die,

by the deliberate ignoring

of God’s ruling.

Giving witless mercy

where The Father did not,

to the sworn enemy

of His purpose.

Though he kept the power and the position, he lost the Favor of the One who enthrones man. So his crown was hollow and jewelless.

Enough, God said. But kings are God’s. He will use them for His own ends. He will.

So Saul became

the instrument of

Divine Supremacy to train

the successor he hated.

This was God’s original intent and Saul would fulfill it positively or negatively… but discharge it to the ultimate, he would.

So David learned from Saul how not to rule as king by the instruction of… his suffering. This is just as valuable and fundamental as when the role model is ideal.

God prevails. His Brilliant Design is fulfilled either way.

This is Sovereignty!

David

One only praises

whose God is God.

David praised. Never before had a man worshipped like David. Maybe never since.

He praised…

- seven times a day

- continually

- in the midst of trouble

- in and after tragedy

- after guilt and its punishment

- after blessing

Emotionally, creatively, poetically… physically!

Oh, yes, we are commanded to praise. We are called to and created for that activity. Yet do we praise as an instant rule of response?

For a burned treasure?

A stolen reputation?

An untimely death?

The unfair, the unkind,

the ridiculous,

the excruciating?

Oh, yes, Satan is there and he must be resisted, even silenced. Yet is that not a secondary rather than a primary concern?

Is not his activity limited to the boundaries God sets? Does not Job’s story prove this forever?

Oh, yes, there are consequences to my sin. I reap the evil I sow. But doesn’t God alone determine the extent, the scope of that reaping? Didn’t he do so with David? And David worshipped in acceptance of that cost.

I can only worship and

I will only praise

to the exact, proportionate

degree of my belief that

God is the Final

Determiner of all.

To that degree I will worship… the real God.

Man worships. The question is not whether he worships for that is his unconscious purpose. The question is what does he worship?

Worship is the centrality

of every life.

You worship

what owns you, and you

choose quite deliberately

what does own you.

We are all orphans seeking a Father… to meet our need. And what we perceive holds the means of sustenance, that source is where we begin to build our sacred altar and call it “father.”

We build an altar at

the foot of the

fountain of supply,

whatever we perceive

that is… be it man,

job, idea, object.

But what we need has power over us and that power is frightening and unsettling for the vulnerability it exposes.

So this is the basis for every person’s choice of god: something in life you believe is essential. And that essential-need has power over you. And what has power over you, you fear - deeply do you fear.

A man reserves his worship for what possesses highest supremacy. Nobility doesn’t enter into it. It’s raw power that captures us and makes us subjects.

And what you fear

you worship.

You may hate the

object you worship.

You may chafe under it,

but it is still worship.

We are mistaken to believe that what we love is what we worship. Not so. It is possible to hate with grim force the thing that towers over us, but still be caught in the veneration of it.

What you need

is what has power

over you.

What has power is

what you fear.

And what you fear,

you deify.

You are owned by whatever you need and by that which you fear. And what owns you becomes your god. No matter your testimony. No matter your words. No matter your opinion of that to which you give obeisance.

You give your life to the object of your worship. And you will die for your object as well. You live and die for that which you believe holds your life in the balance.

What you need, you fear. What you fear, you worship. What you worship, you serve… and die for.

The same holds for man.

If you suffer constant

fear of man, then

man is your god.

If your terror is of poverty, then poverty you will serve. And so on and on.

David learned Who was sovereign in the treacherous hills of Israel. He discovered the God who had more power than the bear and the lion. So when Goliath threatened, David was not afraid! The God who empowered him to meet the beasts, would rule the giant. And it was so!

David’s courage

could be attributed to

the size of his concept of

God’s power to rule.

Courage isn’t

a character quality.

It is the result of

what you believe

has power.

David’s faith in a Sovereign Lord took him into battle and brought him victory.

But the mad tyrant, Saul, came close to killing him and with his monarch’s powerful throne intimidated David. And his sovereignty foundation was shattered by the fear of death that took him.

His courage left him and he ran to hide. His honesty left him and his lie brought the death of 85 men! “Men who wore the linen ephod” (1 Sam. 22:18).

His dignity went down with it until he took to saving himself by slobbering in his beard (1 Sam. 21:13).

You will grovel

for your idol, your

fear-object.

You will… and you

will become just

like it, too.

But somewhere in those barren hills, the hounded fugitive settled it. No change in Saul to prove God big. No vindication of David’s innocence.

Somehow though, he found his Sovereign Lord again and the peace from accepting His strange ways of control.

He recovered his worship,

and with it his heroism

to once again

battle great powers…

and win.

He never lifted his hand again to protect himself, to straighten out the mess, nor even to kill the king when he could easily (and perhaps justifiably) have done so. His Great Master was Lord of all. He could and would oversee his release.

Who can imagine the throes of David’s thrashing it out? Who could fathom his dealings and communion with God in the wastelands to lay hold again of his faith?

In later years, as king with power to kill, David knew that a foul mouth that cursed him wrongly was sent from God. And God was able to bless David through evil as surely as through good because He was thwarted by nothing, stopped by no one.

Again, when his own son laid siege to David’s throne, David left it all to God, left the City – not to fight – but to leave the fray to God’s determining, yielding his crown to God’s protection alone.

One level of faith

lays hold, grabs

and grips.

And that is good faith.

But another level of faith

relinquishes entirely to

Almighty God and that

is higher faith.

Higher faith in a

Bigger god.

David was a praiser because his God was God, big enough to rule and good enough to be right in His ruling.

Esther

GOD prepares

His Sovereign Solution

and hides it in

the very middle of the crisis,

long before it rises.

History lies not in fists of forceful kings but in the imploring hands of one who prays.

History belongs to God

and He can change

its entire course on the

effect of one small life.

Esther was such a one, an obscure maiden imprisoned under a barbarous king. By her beauty cursed to slavery in his harem.

But a Sovereign God is not limited by what limits us. The imperfect situation is merely the stage of Triumph, the test of His Ascendancy.

God’s favor can make

you invisible or

mark you as a beacon.

That Divine preference

of one person over another

is based solely on His

predestined choice.

Not on worth or merit…

or preferential love.

Esther walked out her little life with excellence and simplicity, deferring always to those who ruled her and never dreaming the import of every move she made.

Shy and always unassuming, she was forced to let herself be placed in the middle of a dangerous kingdom. In such a place she became a woman careful with her steps.

Esther let herself be parented by the uncle of adoption. She allowed another’s older wisdom to guide her. Esther let herself be helped… taught, and as such she was given the eunuch’s secrets that earned her favor.

And time… time is

the worthy price for

developing the spirit

of a woman.

Six months with oil of myrrh, the bitter substance of suffering. Taking time to accept the suffering of her life – what appeared to be its complete loss into a hopeless nothingness. No way out! Without her people and without a life of any free choices.

What suffering she swallowed and how she allowed it to gentle her! When she finished her work of grieving and let God choose her place… then she spent six months with “sweet spices and perfumes for the purifying of the women…” (Esther 2:12).

Fragrance doesn’t rise

from suffering.

A perfumed life exudes

from surrender to

God’s hand of limitation

and only this is

a waft of sweetness,

intriguing by being rare.

Her adorning was not in flashy devices. True beauty lies in simplicity… from divesting not acquiring.

Real elegance comes from a private heart of quiet mystery. Withholding more than giving.

She wore the dignity and grace of a queen, made so by God in some lovely crucible, veiled and terrible.

The king did not

choose her; he merely

recognized her.

Who had been just

one of many, became

the one.

So Esther took her

place in God’s order…

exalted through surrender.

She learned to be apart from her people and alone with her secret of Jewish identity. A woman surrounded by numbers and numbers of women, yet who was incredibly alone.

And she entered that solitude, that terrible isolation, with the internal submission to God that makes for nobility. Her particular brilliance: that she always stayed in her place.

By intense acceptance she had the power to see her boundaries and tolerate their limitations with quietness. Never overstepping or underplaying.

Truly, she died to

her own destiny, never

dreaming that by

that very perishing,

she was at its threshold.

Because she gave up power over her own life, she was entrusted with the Power to save the nation which was to mother the Christ child.

The power she possessed was not only the power of her position, (that power is obvious). Her hidden power was inherent, the inner strength of abdication… the great power of surrender to the gusts of God’s changing winds.

Any and all have natural

strength to seize.

Few have wrung out the

capacity to abdicate.

And even fewer understand

that in that relinquishment,

God’s Sovereignty

has no limitation, by

having no rival.

He can expose a murder plot to just the right person. He can give a king insomnia and guide his hand to a book of records.

And He can give an insignificant maiden a crucial and pivotal role in the move of history, and prepare her for “such a time as this” (Esther 4:14).

The crisis came. With her people threatened with extinction, the sole power of their salvation lay with Esther.

Her natural reticence made her shrink but her acquired valor made her bow once again. Bow to the most awful danger she had yet faced: to reveal her secret and have to share the fate of her people’s annihilation.

Her position alone did not secure the king’s automatic favor. He was a monarch burned by a public shame at the hands of the insurgent Vashti.

He was not

approachable.

So she and her maids fasted in silent desperation. And Wisdom came, advising her to give before she asked.

To exalt the man who had imprisoned her. To acknowledge his God-given power with reverence. To “feed” his secret hunger.

To display her own splendor for the sake of his legitimate pride. She gave her best glory of womanhood to him, for him. The thing Vashti had refused to do.

She took her distilled life, gathered its hidden riches, and revealed herself fully, without reserve, to him in the presence of his watching world.

Esther understood his

need from her,

before she required

her own to be met.

She acknowledged his crown and honored his throne before he crowned her with the scepter of half the kingdom. She earned, I say EARNED, his favor before she asked for her own.

Bowing in humble surrender, she gave him his due of perfect freedom, not dictating or forcing his decision.

She knew he was… King! And she let him be so, conceding to his vast power over her, placing her literal life in his reigning hand.

And he gave her all she asked and more. Killed her enemy instead of her people and gave her uncle-father the position closest to the throne.

Such is the power

of a woman who

abandons herself to God

and the life He

chooses for her.

Power of influence to

change the flow of history

in God’s direction.

For to give up power is to be visited by the Intervening Presence of the One who has All Power… and who rules rulers.

Job

A man can face

suffering only if he

wrings it out in

naked honesty with God…

not man, not Satan.

Satan asked for Job. I AM, the Protecting Force, agreed. Why would I AM do such a thing?

Job’s friends knew why. Some dark and secret crime was surely in Job, who deserved his suffering or he wouldn’t be suffering.

God, displeased with friends who dealt in proud whys, in human explanations of divine inexplicables… never justified Himself.

It was not an issue of sowing-and-reaping, of justice, of cause-and-effect. It was simply God’s choice for Job.

When you are God,

you don’t owe anyone an

explanation of Yourself.

Not anyone.

God simply chose Job’s experiences.

Instead of answering questions of a striving man, God asked a few questions of His own:

“Job, where were you

when I WAS?”

“Job, who are you to

ask why of the One

who made all?”

“Job, do you think

you can tell Me anything

I don’t know?”

Those questions, those terrible questions showed Job the gap between his intellect and God’s. He shriveled from this recognition and… saw God, really saw WHO HE IS for the first time.

Job’s friends live on… forever finding imagined whys in the story. “It was Job’s pride,” but God Himself had said there was no flaw in the man.

We will have our answers,

even if we have to

make them up.

Job’s friends are ever lustfully unsatisfied with mysteries. God’s final answer to the matter was, “I AM (and that means sovereign). That’s all I have to say.”

Read the book backward. Read it forward, it still comes out that God simply said I AM WHO I AM.

Job was introduced to a Tremendous God. His God was so little that He could only bless Job out of blessing. Job didn’t know he needed a God who was big enough to bless him out of great catastrophe.

Job’s fear was that I AM

was not able to protect him,

and his world.

Job’s God wasn’t

absolute.

And God loved Job enough to magnify Himself before the man.

When he suffered and blessings went, God’s character came into question. So it is with us.

In talking about the most frightening creature on earth, God argued for His supremacy, having made that creature. Job’s fear in life, of life, was keeping him from a higher worship.

God didn’t consider his fear a condemnable wrong, merely human ignorance and so God resolved his fear, called him to fear only… the Sovereign One.

I AM. No other is.

Not the crocodile.

Not man.

Not Satan.

Not Job.

Habakkuk

In the living

experience of I AM,

“whys” shrivel into

boring irrelevance.

Habakkuk sat in a powerless heap, a witness to the bloodshed, injustice, idolatry, and wanton destruction of Judah at the hands of godless Chaldeans.

When he got sick of it, he did what any honest man does. He questioned the absence of God. He asked Why, What and How long?

The difference between

Habakkuk and others is this:

he deliberately hurled the

insults to God Himself.

We usually complain about an impotent God to each other and rumble about His failures in secret to our own counsel.

The everyday type of

person is without the

integrity to face Him

and the courage to

hear Him out.

But Habakkuk roared his moral outrage. “Justice never prevails,” he said. “Destruction and violence are before me” (Hab. 1:3).

I AM answered quickly. But instead of pacifying the indignant man He loved, God proceeded to incite him further. He shocked Habakkuk by telling him a thing “never heard of before” (v. 5).

The savage nation out to destroy Judah had been sent deliberately by the Controlling Hand of God.

The wicked sent against the righteous to make them more righteous? The evil given predetermined power over God’s people, a cruelty sent for the express purpose… of suffering?

Habakkuk’s idea

of justice was shaken.

“How could You, who

are innocent of wrong

use that same wrong for

Your purposes?”

So the man interrogated His Feeble God for His inaction and began to accuse Him of being untrue to His own character. And God loved the fight.

Some will never

say to God’s face what they

imagine He doesn’t hear

in their hearts.

Now Habakkuk climbed upon the ramparts to watch and listen. He gave God opportunity to answer. Few will do that.

Habakkuk 2:1

I will keep watch to see

what He will speak to me.

And he set himself to wait.

What came was the certain promise of Divine Justice from the very mouth of Justice Himself. The question was not “whether,” only “when.”

Habakkuk 2:3 KJV

Though it (the vision of justice)

tarry, wait for it;

because it will surely come,

it will not tarry.

Justice is not made up of what “I” deem fair. Rectitude is what God ordains.

I AM… justice.

And justice delayed is not justice denied.

Habakkuk 2:20

The Lord is in His Holy temple.

God is on the throne. No one has ever usurped that throne. No one ever will. Or ever could.

No one thwarts Him, stops Him, or stumps Him.

Habakkuk 2:20b

Let all the earth be

silent before Him.

Man has nothing true to say against God and no advice for Him. Because He is I AM, shut up.

God is God… ruling and omnipotent. He can do whatever, whenever, and for whatever unstated purpose He deems right.

The man who wrestles

with God always comes out

with a drastic life change.

But the man who

rails about Him becomes

cemented in his

doubting opposition.

He is left… alone,

to think he’s right.

God loves an honest battle. He has no amenity for cowards. He wins. He always wins. This also Habakkuk knew beforehand.

He set himself on the rampart to be corrected and wanted to be so.

God Almighty

is never wrong.

He bests you always.

Expect it.

But in wonderful defeat

you touch His burning glory

and bitter suspicions

about Him are purged.

God comes to the man who seeks His counsel, and in that the answer is ever and only… Himself. This is who I AM. Sovereign. His Towering Presence shook this man and put him in his smallness.

To study God

is to think you have

mastered Him.

But to meet Him is

to be decimated.

Habakkuk was faint in body, his obdurate flesh stricken. Shattered by His Words and Presence, Habakkuk was reduced to naked faith in a Breathtaking God.

A man doesn’t require faith.

He is reduced to it…

by humiliation.

No longer would poverty divide him from His God. No more would trouble disturb his certainties. And no more would he mistrust the Throne.

The division between his emotions and his beliefs, dissolved. The gap from the seen to the unseen, bridged Habakkuk burst forth in exuberant recognition. A Magnificent God, a Flaming Force. Utterly potent in the heavens:

Habakkuk 3:11

Sun and moon stood in

their places; they went away

at the light of Your arrows,

at the radiance of

Your gleaming spear.

And upon the earth, no less a Fearsome God:

Habakkuk 3:6

He stood and surveyed

the earth; He looked and

startled the nations.

Yes, the perpetual

mountains were shattered,

and the ancient hills

collapsed.

The man who has met “I AM” face to face knows all he needs to know, and afterwards can only joy his way through life.

Jonah

Every person

is a living tale of

God’s sovereignty.

But few – oh, very few,

are finished scripts of

His vindication…

Free choice and sovereign rule. It seems an insoluble contradiction… We can’t stomach both at the same time so we go back and forth.

Though God IS sovereign (through Christ’s Cross having taken back His creation), He has limited Himself within His own rights. He won’t violate a man’s priceless free will.

The great gift of the Cross

(after forgiveness) is the

magnanimous gift

of choice.

It is true freedom

under God,

real and actual.

Autonomy is fact. However, every choice, no matter how small, is an issue of life and death.

We are blissfully blind as to that. We see “either/or.” If I don’t take this road, why I can always take that one.

Not so with God. He has one Plan and no second arrangement. A man who chooses an alternate road loses God. Utterly.

God’s will admits

no substitute, no matter

how good its fruit.

He is not flexible.

The choice is there. It’s real, but it is only dual, not multiple. Only yes… or no. His will or nothing. That is the only choice.

Jonah chose. He was free to do so but he was ignorant that life would crush him apart from the Plan.

Nature would oppose him. Man would expose him and dispose of him. Being with him made them subject to his danger.

The wrath of God

does rest on the

disobedient

(Eph. 5:6; Col. 3:6).

You can go against the Plan. You can! But you will find that to do so is worse than the Plan.

God didn’t push Jonah into Nineveh. He never forces. He merely makes the issues very clear. And the consequences.

What He did was orchestrate the earth so that Jonah could fathom that it was a crisis of life and death. Not Nineveh or voyage. Not this or maybe else that… but actual life versus literal death.

God IS life.

All else is death.

With Him is Life and

apart from Him is Death.

And that cannot be

altered nor diminished.

In the belly of the whale, Jonah recognized the cost of resistance. We seldom comprehend it. How blessed is the man who meets the shock of it.

We were created for God… not for spouse, nor children. Not for deeds or jobs. Not for achievement. Not even for natural abilities. For Him… only.

And God is under no obligation to support our existence or our agenda if it is given to anything other than His Intention, His Idea.

We do have free choice

but it is only the right

to choose death.

God rules fish and sea and wind… and unknowing men. The flow of life and of events exists for God. Everything fulfills His wish.

All things serve Him and give account to Him. The great powers of the universe roll in His direction and to go against that inclusive tide is to call upon yourself the most miserable drowning.

It isn’t God’s fault.

He’s not to blame

when I put my face

against the wind

and am pelted by the

natural order of things.

Jonah had the exceptional privilege of seeing that one can refuse God but one cannot escape Him.

When Jonah went away, God didn’t seek another man. God tolerates no second choices. It was Jonah or no one.

We pet this delusion: When God calls and we lack the grit to say yes, we imagine that to say nothing is to stave off the question. But no answer is counted as no.

A good substitute is considered a no. Postponement is reckoned as a no. Anything other than yes is no. We cannot befuddle Him while we are fogging up our own vision.

You want an ocean

between you and God’s

city of need?

Then you shall

have the ocean.

Its depths and terrors.

Its powers and vastness.

In the unimaginable slime of the whale, Jonah made three new choices to rescind his stupid option. Three “I wills.”

Jonah 2:4

I will look again toward

Your holy temple.

God will not twist our neck toward Himself. It is our job to turn. And the direction of our looking is the direction of our going. This is the first volitional move toward God: to bring your gaze to face His awful penetration of your pitiful self.

Next, Jonah determined:

Jonah 2:9

I will sacrifice to You

with the voice of thanksgiving.

Ingratitude is ever why we leave the Way. We never think God has done enough for us until we are threatened with its loss.

And thanksgiving is the willing sacrifice of the man who has come to an ended life that will not die. In the end, we will all have the shameful poverty of possessing nothing to offer but praise.

Not loyalty, not success, not purity… a wretched nothingness, and a total devastation. “I’ve wrecked it all. All I have left is to praise the astonishing God who has lowered me below every other form of life. But I will do that.”

To praise God at this juncture is a sacrifice! It’s the giving up of understanding, the surrender of an arrogant mind.

It’s the relinquishment of your right to your way, the death of the will. It’s the oblation of your horror, the submission of your wandering emotions.

Praise cuts through

mind, will, and emotion

to the bowed knee of

pure acquiescence.

Praise is giving

God His due

at the expense

of my proud control.

It’s an acknowledgment that God is right and that He is the only one WHO IS.

The third determination was:

Jonah 2:9b

That which I have vowed

I will pay.

Jonah had committed to obedience and gone back on it. The cost is ever higher than we count, speaking ‘yes,’ always easier than its carrying out.

It was Jonah’s

own promise that gave

God the right

to corner the man.

God usurps no rights

over us that we have not

yielded up, but He will

receive as binding those

agreements we

volunteer.

And it is kind of Him to hold us to our bargain, to “help” us be true. We can’t escape Him easily. How comforting!

Were I God, I’d gladly shove out the one who didn’t want me. But Love brings the whale, and it is no cruelty.

Crisis alone

makes us regret

our disloyalty.

Ultimate Wisdom

knows us well.

Rebellious choices plunge us into the whale but the choice to be owned sets us free.

With God it’s all paradox: Jonah came out of the whale’s control when he gave up entirely the government of his destiny.

Nothing has the power

to hold the man who

has surrendered control to

the Blessed Controller.

Life is an immense tapestry of God’s spindle. Events are woven one upon another, connected by meaning.

No experience is isolated nor is any person. There are borders that touch and color distant places.

Years may stand between their connection – some never known – but God is weaving, ever throwing His shuttle over many threads, pulling them inexorably together in ways that cannot be undone.

We are the threads and we are crossed upon other yarns, linked together, holding each other in a final unfathomable tapestry of humanity we call “life.”

We all have a Nineveh

that waits for us to come,

that is our charge:

our city of despairing lives.

We must be willing to be “dyed,” spun and strung for Nineveh. We dare not spoil that immense but secret pattern by so much as a thread of resistance.

God allows us the great privilege of importance. But it is only importance insofar as it fits His scheme.

God is going.

He will crown His Son.

He will give Him all.

He will!

He is moving inexorably, unrelentingly toward that end. We can join His going, but He will not join ours.

There is a fitted

role for each.

But the fruitless will

be cast aside and the

useless burned.

So no one is indispensable and no one is necessary. Yet all are invited to be needed… to join the “move.”

God will finish.

He is not ultimately dependent on us but He deigns to reveal His eternal goals to us, condescends to share His stage and the spoil of His victory.

To go to Nineveh is an unspeakable privilege… and yet under Absolute Sovereignty dwells entirely free choice.

But Jonah wasn’t through with resistance. The whale didn’t cure him. It got him on the right path but not yet of the right heart.

He wanted the Nineveh rebels treated with the same harshness his own revolt had drawn. But the God who wrung him out had not the same technique for the city. Rather it was unpunishing grace. Jonah deemed that unfair and pouted over it.

Humanity

ever stands in

judgment of God’s ways

by the standard

of its own

self-centered justice.

Jonah had acknowledged that God had won, but he had yet to concede that God was right.

I AM… always right.

Daniel

Only those who bow

to God have eyes to see

His Unmatched Dominion.

All others see a

Dispassionate Weakling.

Marvelous, those persons whose God is Sovereign. Like Daniel.

He stood at a vulnerable age of 16 and watched his home and city burn. Saw his parents, brothers, sisters, friends… slaughtered.

Carried away to a foreign land of cruel heathen people and remanded to serve the murderers of his people. Robbed of his manhood, stripped down to the barest bone of human existence.

What would you

have thought of God

in such a plight?

Where would you fit

His Sovereignty into

this horror?

How would you have assessed His goodness? Yet to all of it… somehow… Daniel bowed.

When Daniel told the story, this is how he worded it:

Daniel 1:2

Nebuchadnezzar… came to

Jerusalem and besieged it.

The Lord gave

Jehoiakim king of Judah

into his hand...

And he brought them to

the land of Shinar, to the

house of his god…

For Daniel, the Cause behind the cause was God.

If you lose sight of God’s ruling hand, your world is in automatic chaos. Order – perhaps not understanding – but order issues from certainty in God’s Dominion.

One can only bow to God

who knows He is the

Power Behind All,

Above All.

God didn’t give Daniel peace in this abysmal mess. Daniel’s accurate beliefs about God gave him peace.

God was over all.

God was good.

We submit to the one we think has power over us. We do. We don’t fight great power once we see it.

Daniel was to be made a servant. That was God’s idea and Daniel got in touch with it and agreed.

By the long tests of serving, he was groomed to be a ruler, with vast power over the very ones who captured him.

No man can serve

an enemy faithfully

or fruitfully.

He must see his enemy

as a Divine Instrument.

For hatred begets

hatred and bitterness,

bitterness.

To think it is a human being who is dealing with you will make you want to kill that man… and he will know it.

And though you be trustworthy, he will not trust you. Should you be commendable, he still will never commend you…

This belief about His God, worked through in the hurting places, gave Daniel a Great Faith. And when a crisis came, he could expect His God to not only interpret a dream, but reveal its forgotten pictures.

Daniel 2:21

It is He who changes

the times and epochs;

He removes kings and

establishes kings.

To Daniel, He had been “God of heaven,” ruler of the unseen. Now He saw Him anew as “God of my fathers” (v. 23).

Having intervened in their lives, He was available to Daniel also in the practical. Daniel pulled himself out of his tragedy and stepped into tremendous influence.

Sniveling views of God

will leave a man in

mediocrity.

Since God was the Unseen Force behind the kings, Daniel had no fights with man. He didn’t love his cruel kings because they endeared themselves. He met each with reverence, who were cruel heathens, because they were God-appointed.

The staggering proof of his mettle was that he was esteemed by a king whose condemnation he announced, and then honored by that king's enemy. What man is there so enduring?

Blessed by kings to whom he always delivered bad news, placid conqueror of his killers, in quiet companionship with hungry lions.

Sovereignty

serves a man well.

Peace pervades his story. Peace with authority. Peace forced on his enemies.

His only discomfiture was in the face of his visions. Those visions! They began with dreams, interpreting enigmas to his kings. But every vision grew in scope, both of future events and the awesome dominion of God.

His visions predicted downfalls of kings before they fell down.

Because he grasped that God was the Author of History, he was given the privilege of seeing the events of history the Author was planning… in detail… beforehand. Long, long beforehand.

Daniel saw visions. Then He saw God on His throne and the Son of Man. Such a view of God… to be envied, to be sought.

Daniel’s view was

continually changing,

expanding.

His names for God implied his moving revelation of Him:

First, he called Him

God of Heaven

Ruler of the Unseen.

Next, he saw Him as

God of Fathers

Ruler of my Ancestors.

Then

God of gods

Ruler over other powers,

Most High God

Ruler over earth,

My God

Ruler over me,

Ancient of Days

Ruler of the past,

Highest One

Ruler over all,

Great and Awesome God

Ruler over His own Word,

And even…

Messiah

Ruler over sin.

After every crisis, Daniel’s light was brighter; his God bigger; the vision grander; and Daniel’s personal exaltation in exact proportion.

But most to be noted is that at the end of Daniel’s record, his magnificent view of God created a striking intimacy between them, not implied in the earlier chapters.

God shared His deepest secrets with the man, and Daniel, in poignant passion, called Him over and over…

“O my God.”

Potential does not lie in skill alone, for skillful men and women go down. Potential for eternal worth lies in knowing this:

Daniel 4:25-26

… the Most High is ruler

over the realm of mankind,

and bestows it on

whomever He wishes…

… it is Heaven that rules.

Nebuchadnezzar

The one who worships

himself is a maniac

and knows it not.

All worship not given to God is at root, the worship of self.

You worship what you need, so you are yourself the center of your universe and you, the only motive for all you do.

You are your own lover.

The shocking root of Nebuchadnezzar’s insanity was simply and only the displacement of God by the deifying of self.

Nebuchadnezzar decreed the worship of himself. Three Jews refused to bow. Their extraordinary belief was that God could deliver them if He chose to. That massive furnace was no obstacle to their God!

Their God ruled over

the pompous ruthlessness

of little strutting

potentates.

And they were

not afraid.

Nebuchadnezzar was a firsthand witness not only to their survival but to the presence of their God in the blaze. For a time he basked in the wonder of that God and gave Him His due.

But his dream warned him that he still lusted for God’s place.

The man who

thinks he has achieved it,

imagines he owns it,

will have a season of

bestial humiliation.

That is certain and

absolutely inevitable.

God’s Ruling Position will not suffer competition. It is holy and unapproachable. While God is approachable, His Position is not.

He is God. All of us are jealous of that. We covet His throne. The root of our depravity is a likeness to Satan:

Isaiah 14:14 KJV

I will be like the

Most High.

And we will not settle even for that… being “like” God, equal to Him. We will go yet grander: “I will exalt my throne ABOVE the Most High.”

Isaiah 14:13

I will exalt my throne

above the stars of God.

And our hidden idea is that God should be our servant.

That secret thinking is insane. Indulge in it for long and madness takes over.

The King reaped a seven year harvest from usurping dominion:

- isolation from the company of normal men

- a primal beast existence

- exposure to the elements

until a complete (the number seven) recognition came, of the difference between self and God.

These are symbols of

real experiences:

of inner desolation and

public indignity.

We will only resign as gods when forced to. We can only be shamed off our throne.

We have to be slammed to the ground of obeisance. Our faces must know the lowly taste of grass and our likeness to the beasts.

We have to be drenched

with the dew of

heaven’s abandonment

to ever comprehend its

sweeping rule.

The unhinged state lasts until this comprehension is full:

Daniel 4:25

… until you recognize that the

Most High is ruler over the

realm of mankind and bestows it

on whomever He wishes.

Nebuchadnezzar believed he was king because he was a noble being, and only he could be such. He had to learn that he was king because God deigned to make it so and for no reason in the man himself.

Daniel 4:17 NIV

… the Most High is sovereign

over the kingdoms of men

and gives them to anyone

He wishes and sets over

them the lowliest of men.

And such was himself…

Nebuchadnezzar’s soliloquy is worth pondering:

Daniel 4:34-37

But at the end of that period

I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised

my eyes toward heaven and my

reason returned to me;

and I blessed the Most High

and praised and honored

Him who lives forever.

For His dominion is

an everlasting dominion,

and His kingdom endures from

generation to generation.

All the inhabitants of the earth

are accounted as nothing,

but He does according to His will

in the host of heaven and

among the inhabitants

of the earth.

No one can ward off His

hand or say to Him,

“What have You done?”

At that time my

reason returned to me…

my majesty… and splendor.

I was reestablished in my

sovereignty and surpassing

greatness was added to me.

Now I, Nebuchadnezzar,

praise, exalt and honor

the King of heaven,

for all His works are true

and His ways just.

He is able to humble

those who walk in pride.

Nebuchadnezzar understood who he was, and who God was, and the unbridgeable gap between the two.

When he took his place, stayed within its God-ordained bounds, he was blessed, even exalted.

God can give much

to the man who will let

Him have His throne.

In the practice of life, if we try to orchestrate the immediate universe, praying that God will obey us by the support of our agenda, we have become Nebuchadnezzar.

There is a pitiful unawareness to this control. To be blind is one thing but when you are blind to your blindness, you are dangerous and must be stopped.

And as Nebuchadnezzar discovered, God is up to the job.

Only God’s

Sovereign Interference

can convince you of…

sovereignty.

Me

Many know Him as

Forgiveness,

some know Him as

Love, Truth, so on.

But few know God

as… God.

I walked with furious “whys,” buried far below in secret tortures.

My mother died an awful death when I was 15, devastating me into a mean and barren world from what had been a warm hearth. That young suffering cried out for reasonable explanation… to satisfy me.

A great conflict raged in hidden places. I knew it not, till God revealed it. This was the conflict:

Who took my mother?

Was it God?

Oh, no, God is good…

couldn’t have been God.

My mother’s death was so bad for me. But God is ultimately in control. Or is He?

Satan’s evil force?

Yes. No doubt.

Was it God’s will?

How could it be?

Or was it her fault?

It had been a long and sweating question… with no solution.

When finally He pulled that “why” from its dark musing place, He answered. But notice please, He didn’t explain.

“I hold the keys to

hell and to death.”

“Yes, Martha, I took

your mother just as

you suspected.”

“But there is no

contradiction between

My Goodness and

her death…”

“I am God.

And I am good.

And I took your mother;

therefore your mother’s

death was good.”

“Now praise Me.”

So I thanked Him for that which had wrecked me, for what I had resisted for years. Somehow it was easy.

Still no explanation why. Just that it was good, for my good, because He is good.

His sweet answer

resolved my division,

healed my pain.

And somehow I was

deeply satisfied.

I hadn’t needed

to know “why” after all.

I had needed to know if God was irrevocably in charge. If I was really vulnerable to life and evil… to anything that would want to harm me.

If as a sheltered, rather helpless youngster, my world could almost overnight be ruined, then it must follow that anything might happen, any horrible prospect was a possibility.

Did I have any protection? Any security?

My moorings had

been shaken.

An explanation of why

it had happened would

not have answered

my real need:

The need to know if life

could shake me

unmercifully while God

watched in indifference

or worse still,

helplessness.

The answer was I AM. And that was what I most needed to know. He WAS God. He really was.

A God, not a

Judging Observer, but a

Very Present Force.

I walked out of the buried sickness my lonely “why” had caused.

For it was not her death that made my agony, nor did any related suffering… but my failure to comprehend the God above and behind it all.

My deep question was

not really of events

(as I imagined) but of

His Innate Goodness

and His Overriding Power.

After all the errors of man and their consequences; after all obvious evil has had its way, was God still God? Did He have the final say?

I saw that His Goodness and His Power were so vast that no evil, no suffering has any power to harm me in His realm.

All disaster is

swallowed up in His

supremacy and becomes,

not just benign, but

beneficial!

The problem was not the suffering; it was my separation from God while I was in it. As soon as I dug it up and put it inside His Sovereignty, the pain was gone.

When one has no longer any pain in suffering, what matters the suffering?

The transformation

of those beliefs about

Who He IS made me whole,

and I saw in my daily living,

the proof of it.

Giddy, incredulous, I knew that God had given me the key to the healing of man’s inner pain. I sensed I had touched, not just my own solution, but an eternal cure. An audacious claim for sure!

But one of which I was, and would remain, absolutely certain. A truth which was crystal clear and undeniable in His Word.

The key: a single belief

and a simple response,

based on scripture:

God is sovereign.

I thank Him.

For God is… and He is God!

Romans One

Inch by defiant inch,

we build our suicidal ruin

by forsaking God.

He is not to be blamed

when we chase the darkness

and catch it.

It was 12 years before I found the scripture that presented the truth I had lived and by which I had been made secure. It was Romans 1:18 (NIV) and following…

… what may be known

about God is plain to them,

because God has made

it plain to them.

For since the creation of

the world God’s invisible qualities -

His eternal power and divine nature -

have been clearly seen, being

understood from what has been

made, so that men are

without excuse.

His eternal power… that is sovereignty. His divine nature… that is goodness. These are written in nature, clear in creation. Visible and unmistakable.

For although they knew God,

they neither glorified Him

as God nor gave

thanks to Him…

God is obvious. Plain. Our response should be awe at His power and gratitude for His goodness. To fail in these responses is to begin a downward spiral to certain and unending disaster.

… but their thinking

became futile…

Thoughts void of His sovereignty and goodness make a mind that is ineffective.

… and their foolish hearts

were darkened (v. 21).

The mind feeds the heart its futility. And the heart begins to spew emotions of darkness and stupidity.

Although they claimed

to be wise, they became

fools… (v. 22).

Empty minds make hearts in secret, foolish. Soon the fool goes public and thinks his dim wit is wise.

… and exchanged the glory

of the immortal God for

images made to look like

mortal man and birds and

animals and reptiles (v. 23).

We must have a god. To spurn the real One is to fabricate an absurd counterfeit, dead and useless.

Therefore God gave them over

in the sinful desires of their

hearts to sexual impurity for

the degrading of their bodies

with one another (v. 24).

Sexual immorality is the evidence (and the result) of forsaking the God of All, who IS pleasure and fulfillment.

They exchanged the truth of

God for a lie… (v. 25).

God is not only Truth, but He is Reality. And He is the only source of it.

Where God is… Truth is. Where God isn’t… the lie lives instead.

… and worshipped and served

created things rather than the

Creator – who is forever

praised (v. 25).

If you don’t serve the Creator who created you to be His, you will slave for the things He created.

Because of this, God gave

them over to shameful lusts.

Even their women

exchanged natural relations

for unnatural ones.

In the same way the men

also abandoned natural

relations with women and

were inflamed with lust

for one another.

Men committed

indecent acts with other

men… (v. 26-27).

Down and down, worse and worse. God spurned is Satan enthroned. And this master spawns his obsessive perversion in you to the loss of your own magnificent gender.

… and received in themselves

the due penalty for their

perversion (v. 27).

There are terrible consequences to twisting His order to feed our lusts. A penalty due us, that we chose and fostered.

Furthermore, since they

did not think it worthwhile

to retain the knowledge

of God, He gave them over

to a depraved mind,

to do what ought not to

be done (v. 28).

Mental illness is the choice we make to refuse what we know… that God is good and God is God.

They have become filled with

every kind of wickedness,

evil, greed and depravity.

They are full of envy, murder,

strife, deceit and malice.

They are gossips, slanderers,

God-haters, insolent, arrogant

and boastful; they invent

ways of doing evil;

they disobey their parents,

they are senseless,

faithless, heartless,

ruthless (v. 29-31).

Complex problems and heinous sins have two simple, basic roots: one, the refusal to recognize the all-powerful God and two, the absence of simple gratitude for who He is.

God is Good

God is great, God is good,

little children know.

Adults have had

that knowledge

destroyed.

Tell me God is sovereign and I quake. Tell me He is also good and I relax. His sovereignty is made tolerable by His immeasurable goodness.

In fact, the word good is insipid when used of His goodness. His “good” is beyond vocabulary.

When Jesus was called “Good Master” He said:

Matthew 19:17 KJV

Why callest thou Me good?

There is none good but one,

that is God.

“There is only one good”… That excludes every other appearance of good. In fact, according to that statement, there is no good except God.

All that man produces is not good. The noble acts, the heroic deeds, the generous behavior – all the good of man – is not good. Not true good.

His goodness is

incomprehensible to us.

And the enemy’s favorite device is to cruelly blind us as to that goodness… to present proof it doesn’t exist and leave us in the fearful dilemma of that.

“Holy" isn’t usually

in question

concerning God.

Holy we can buy.

But good, really good,

ah, that is another matter.

God’s goodness is vindicated by His restoration not only of Job, but of Job’s recalcitrant friends who received God’s high disapproval.

His goodness is seen in His divine plan for Joseph. He was all along, in secret design, preparing him for good, even splendid things: the rulership of Egypt and the salvation of his people, the very ones who caused him such unjust suffering. God was even good to those treacherous brothers!

Jeremiah 29:11 NIV

For I know the plans I have

for you… plans to prosper

you and not to harm you,

plans to give you a hope

and a future.

God always has His plans: exciting, splendid orders for the future.

To Daniel He gave the unimaginable rulership of his captor’s nation! And more than that, to Daniel He gave a place of significance in all human ages and throughout eternity.

Abraham, He made rich in the very incident of his disloyalty to Sarah… made rich by the king to whom his lie caused great suffering. God’s goodness knows no limits except those we create.

God can bless the one

who knows He is God

and doesn’t object.

But most poignant and most inscrutable is the offering of His own Son to hideous suffering. Why? So that He could freely bestow His goodness on mankind who deserved only His wrath.

We can never take it in. Rarely is even one of us able to approach receiving it. We weigh His goodness by our standard: by the sensual, by peace or happiness, by the things He gives. And by that external we judge Him.

We have no real vision

of His vast good,

His complete goodness.

God’s goodness is in a realm of pure motive, the motive of His own love in the face of our unworthiness of it. It is absolute integrity, impeccable character, wherein He never can be accused of wrong or even the slightest injustice.

He is not the “God of feeding the five thousand.” He is the “God of twelve baskets left over!”

He has not withheld

one thing from us,

and even beyond

what we need,

He has given everything

He has, even to the

rulership of the world,

a throne with His Son!

Do you understand? He has withheld nothing from us!

Ephesians 1:3

…every spiritual blessing

in the heavenly places…

1 Corinthians 3:21

…for all things are yours.

Romans 8:32

He who did not spare

His own Son... how will

He not also with Him freely

give us all things?

The problem is never, ever with God. The problem only is in our receptiveness. We buy the ancient lie: God is not good, as proven by what He has withheld.

So we banish our

bitter selves from

His lavishness.

We hold onto our transgressions by failure of admission, and when we don’t experience His outpouring, we say He isn’t outpouring.

In our proud destitution, we would rather die than need Him. And in our insane independence, we would rather fail than give Him the credit for our victory.

The beggarly alone

find themselves in the

wondrous kingdom.

I AM… good.

Sovereignty Shared

God gives a place

in His own dominion

to the one who doesn’t

try to out God God.

Though God is sovereign, having unchallenged dominion, He limits His involvement to our invitation.

Many, so tragically many, of God’s purposes fall to the ground. Things are not always as He would perfectly have them. But that is not His fault – it is ours.

We are given the most

incredible responsibility –

that of changing the world

through prayer.

Not by our “fixing,”

not by our ruling, but by

the opposite, being involved

in only one power… His!

And that great dynamic obtained through prayer to watch Him intervene in man’s futility.

God has given man the chance to have power over events. Only for the sustaining of His will, only that! Not independent power, not for man to decide, to rule, to “be.”

Humanity is meant to be

the very instrument of

God’s own sovereignty.

Each person has, as Esther did, a moment of history where one’s birth comes to its divine design, “for such a time as this.”

Even so He will obtain His ultimate purpose. He will. And such is His brilliance that He will use even man’s rebellion to do so.

Psalm 76:10

The wrath of man shall

praise You.

So sovereignty cannot lull us into passivity. “Ah, well, what will be will be.”

Humanity drools

for power.

The whole world is embroiled in an obsession with power. The quest for money is really for the power money gives.

Nations vie for power. Families struggle to gain power over each other. And the workplace is a place of the scratch and fight to get domination.

Wherever man is,

there is the contest,

the fray over power.

Man wants God’s place of government but God has given a different power to mankind, a monumental place of dominion by acquiescence.

In resorting to prayer, abdicating the human powers which are all illegitimate, man picks up his intended power – the power to change events without participating in them, without exerting so much as a word.

Prayer alone,

seeking only God’s will,

brings God’s will into

dominion over humanity’s

stupid mess.

Jesus’ term in the wilderness was a contest of power. The temptation was to use real but illegitimate power.

The first was power over matter. “Change the stone into bread” (Matt. 4:3). Jesus preferred to suffer, even to starve, rather than manipulate matter.

The next was power over God. “Jump – and let the angels catch you” (v. 6). Step out beyond yourself and force God’s hand. Jesus would not jump until and unless God directed so. He gave up His own influence over God… forever.

The third was power over man, the temptation to govern man rather than serve him.

These are the

three categories of

man’s ambition:

Supremacy over

matter, God, and man.

Jesus abdicated those human powers. In doing so, He relied only on the Power of the Most High, gained through prayer… and let God be Himself,

the Great I AM.

Pictures of Jesus

Empathy is a bond

forged only by

sharing the same fire,

and this Jesus did…

He entered the fire

of every person.

The characters of the Old Testament are real. Some of their ordeals are like ours – they look like our wrestlings with God and they ring of our opposition to the life He oversees.

So we view some of them from personal eyes.

But there is One

who relates to all

those struggles.

They are really

pictures of Jesus.

As God, we see Jesus in His perfect surrender, His flawless obedience. But in the peculiar prison of humanity, He faced it all.

He lived through Joseph’s rejection by his brothers. He faced the weakness of Abraham, the wrestlings of Habakkuk.

He suffered the misunderstandings of arrogant friends and mortal pain just like Job. He probably lost a parent to death… just like me…

Jesus knows the feelings

of our weakness,

the futility of our sweat…

Jesus faced it all.

Some we know about.

Most we don’t.

The amazing fact, given to us in scripture, is that He was tempted in all things just as we are yet He didn’t sin.

The Bible says, “in every way” (Heb. 4:15).

All of human experience

in some measure,

in ways unwritten,

by secret struggling,

was His experience.

What a God! Sovereign and powerful in the heavenlies, yet put His Son in our miserable moccasins so that God could actually live the human dilemma!

All of it. Including… Yours.

I AM

All and Only.