Jump Start # 975

1 Samuel 3:1 Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord before Eli. And word from the Lord was rare in those days, visions were infrequent.

Jump Starts are back! I was delayed longer than I expected. The move, setting things up, getting the internet running, and then a few computer snafus got me off my schedule of writing. I missed it. I was thinking about our passage recently. The word from the Lord was rare and visions were infrequent. Rare and infrequent—we don’t think of those words in terms of God.

A very common thought today is that in the Bible days, God spoke just about every day and to just about everyone. That impression has led some to “look” for divine urges and pushes from God. Some even feel that things are not right unless there is something coming from God. Wise Bible students know better. What some classify as “divine urges” may be nothing more than what a person has been thinking about for a long time. Those urges are not divine, but human. They are not sent from Heaven down, but from the inside out of a person. There are long gaps of time between God speaking to people.

The Hebrew writer reminds us that in these last days, God speaks though His son, Jesus Christ. God is talking through Jesus, in a way similar to God talking to Moses. God spoke to Moses and Moses delivered the message to the nation. God has spoken through Jesus and Jesus delivered the message. This is why all things are to be done by the word of Christ, and, we will be judged by every word that Jesus spoke. The message for this age is the word of God. That Christ delivered message is the same here as it is in other places.

How did people get by when the word was rare and the visions were infrequent? They relied upon what God had already given them and they built their faith upon what they knew. Faith is not in the unknown, but the known. We can speculate and guess what God wants, but too often, we are wrong. God doesn’t think like we do. The parables are one illustration of how upside down the kingdom of God is to the way people would think. In the parable of the laborers going into the fields, no master would pay a man who worked one hour the same as those who worked all day long. That doesn’t make economic sense. In the parable of the 100 sheep, if a shepherd left the 99 sheep to go looking for the one lost sheep, he would return to find 99 missing. In the parable of the prodigal son, a father wouldn’t grant the inheritance before his death and he certainly wouldn’t celebrate the return of a reckless and irresponsible son. Those parables didn’t fit into the thinking of the first century world.

The audiences who first heard those parables could not anticipate nor predict how they turned out. All of this illustrates that when we try to fit our thinking, our world, our social causes into how God thinks, most often, we will be wrong. God is not politically correct today. Have you noticed those “Coexist” bumper stickers? They display the various religious symbols of: Islam, peace, Judaism, wicca, Confucianism and Christianity all together. Coexist. Accept each other. That is the flavor of the month these days. That isn’t what God says. Ephesians 4 says that there is One Lord, One God, One faith, One baptism, One Spirit, One hope, One body. Those “One” phrases toss out the coexist concept.

When we try to think for God we fail. When we get the idea that God likes what we like, we fail. Those that have redefined worship into a rock ‘n roll side show assume that because the congregation loves it, God does. Wrong. Remember Cain? God didn’t think so highly of his sacrifice. Those that want to restructure the church into a social platform fail. That’s not how God thinks.

The word was rare and visions were infrequent. Back then, as it is today, we must stick with what we have. Trying to update, modify or fit God into out thinking fails. It fails first because we are not satisfied with what God has given us. We want more, so we make it up. Second, it fails because it does not honor God. Third, it fails because it lacks trust in what God has said.

Give me the Bible, is an old hymn. It’s about time for some folks to dust that off and sing it again. It’s time we let God speak for Himself.

Roger