(As usual, the text below represents a draft. I do hope you’ll listen as it’s the better version)
Sometimes life…
…brings you to a phone call with a professional colleague. The topic starts out on business, but you learn that her husband has early stage Alzheimers. You end the phone call praying.
…brings you into orbit with a complete stranger. You listen to her cry. Hear her angst over a child who is dealing with pain by hurting herself. You pray with her.
…lands a message in your FaceBook Messenger inbox. Another mom hurting for a child who is hurting. Sometimes you pray through FaceBook Messenger.
…cancels an appointment on you, and if that appointment hadn’t been canceled, you wouldn’t have been somewhere else at just the moment that a friend has come to the end of trying to be lord of his own life and gives it all to Jesus.
Sometimes life reminds you of the God’s open arms. That He hurts for you, for the distance between you and him, for the distance between you and others.
There is a crummy little plant, planted in an even crummier little pot, hanging in the window of the room from which I come to you. I rescued that plant from the house I was about to lose in a divorce many years ago.
I decided that I was going to keep that plant alive as a reminder of how and why you never give up, and that the most Jesus-like form of love isn’t one of getting, but in giving sacrificially.
…will know that I am the Lord.”
If you do a search in the Bible for the words “…will know that I am the Lord,” it shows up 71 times. There are some variations of that that would make the count higher, but here’s the interesting thing:
All of those are in the Old Testament. 59 of the 71 are in Ezekiel, and 9 are in Exodus. So if we’re looking at the big picture what might we learn?
Since we’re in Exodus in our read-through right now, let’s start there. Key themes in Exodus include the children of Israel being part of God’s promise to Abraham to bless all nations through him. Their eyes are on the promised land that was part of that promise. Moses is called to be the covenant mediator between the people and God, and God’s covenantal promise is experience in his presence.
And who’s Ezekiel? He’s a priest, also a covenantal mediator. He’s writing, roughly speaking, about a millennium later. Israel hasn’t kept up their side of the covenant – not that God needs them to – and Ezekiel repeatedly admonishes them with a message of God’s glory.
So what does this mean for us?
Think about the protracted incident of Moses confronting Pharaoh. The purpose of the plagues is what? So that they, the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord.” And by extension, the people of Israel see this as do all the surrounding nations.
On the one hand, God is not to be trifled with. He’s different…not just different by degree, but wholly different in kind. He’s not just a better God like, ‘my god can beat up your god;’ He’s all powerful. He deserves to be known as such, set apart, and worshipped as the only being or thing that deserves worship.
But this same God, come to earth as Jesus, advances the story. Jesus is the Moses, so to speak, of the New Covenant where, as Ezekiel put it, God would turn our hearts of stone to hearts of flesh. We no longer need an earthly mediator, because Jesus is that.
And we no longer need signs. Hear me carefully here…this doesn’t mean that miracles or signs don’t still happen. But the sign that says, in effect, “…they will know I am the Lord” is Jesus and his conquering of death on the cross.
Recall how the writer of Hebrews starts out:
Long ago God spoke to the fathers by the prophets at different times and in different ways. In these last days, he has spoken to us by his Son. God has appointed him heir of all things and made the universe,f through him. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact expression of his nature, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. ~Hebrews 1:1-3, CSB[1]
We, you and I, are at a different place on the timeline of salvation history. In Old Testament times God revealed himself so that the Israelites would know He is the Lord, so the Egyptians would know, so the nations will know.
Now? Jesus is the sign. And how do we know Jesus? By the Scriptures – and Jesus himself confirmed the Divine authority of the Old Testament and promised the Divine authority of the New Testament.
I could go on and on with New Testament examples besides the one in Hebrews, but I’ll leave you with this:
Why does my husband have Alzheimers? So that you and those around you will know that I am the Lord.
Why is my child struggling with mental illness? So that you and those around you will know that I am the Lord.
Why does God put you in someone else’s path at a time they need a friend? So that you and those around you will know that I am the Lord.
Let me be really clear here: God is not the author of evil. If he was, he wouldn’t be perfectly good.
But He is so utterly sovereign he can even use evil and brokenness and pain and alcoholism and mental illness and people breaking promises and migraine headaches and all of it to his own ends.
As CS Lewis put it,
“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
We’ve read the end of the book. We know how it all ends.
And this, what we do right here, is for what? For the hope. Not hope like ‘I hope I win the lottery,’ but hope as in ‘I have confidence in the object in which I place my hope…or rather…the person in whom I place my hope.’
I love you.
ForTheHope is a daily audio Bible + apologetics podcast and blog. We’ve got a passion for just keepin’ it real, having conversations like normal people, and living out the love of Jesus better every single day.
Roger Courville, CSP is a globally-recognized expert in digitally-extended communication and connection, an award-winning speaker, award-winning author, and a passionately bad guitarist. Follow him on Twitter -- @RogerCourville and @JoinForTheHope – or his blog: www.forthehope.org.
Sources and resources:
[1] Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2017), Heb 1:1–3.