“And since God gave these Gentiles the same gift he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to stand in God’s way?” (Acts 11:17, NLT)
After Peter proclaimed the gospel of Jesus in Caesarea to the Gentiles in the house of Cornelius, a Roman officer, Peter had to explain his actions to the apostolic leadership and believers back in Jerusalem.
As Peter recounted the sequence of events, he explained it was only by God’s initiative that he took the gospel to the Gentiles.
“Then Peter began to speak: “Now I really understand that God doesn’t show favoritism, but in every nation the person who fears Him and does righteousness is acceptable to Him.” (Acts 10:34, HCSB)
A Roman military commander by the name of Cornelius lived in the city of Caesarea in the region of Samaria north of Judea. Although Cornelius was not a Jew, he worshiped God in the custom of the Jews.Cornelius had a vision to request the Apostle Peter, who was staying in the city of Joppa about 50 miles away, to come to his home.
“You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book. My enemies will retreat when I call to you for help. This I know: God is on my side!” (Psalm 56:8-9, NLT)
Did you ever play games as a child that required the choosing of “sides?”
A “side” was one of two or more contesting groups or teams. A captain would be selected or appointed for each “side” and each captain then would choose others to be on his or her side.
Of course, sides were chosen strategically so that a winning team would be assembled, or so all of one’s best friends were on the same side!
The psalmist declares that he has assembled a winning team that can defeat his enemies because God is on his side.
Take a moment to savor the word picture the psalmist portrays in these verses.
Continue reading“Yes, your complaints are against the Lord,not against us.” (Exodus 16:8, NLT)
When the Israelites escaped from Egypt, God did not lead them straight to the promised land because they weren’t prepared for war with the Canaanites: “God said, If the people are faced with a battle, they might change their minds and return to Egypt” (vs. 13:17).
Instead of going north towards Canaan, Moses led them south into the wilderness or desert region of the Sinai peninsula. After three days they came to an oasis but the water there was not potable.
The people complained against Moses and he threw a piece of wood into the water, which made it drinkable (vs. 15:24-25).
Then after a month of traveling south down the Sinai peninsula the people began to complain about the lack of food: “There, too, the whole community of Israel complained about Moses and Aaron” (vs. 2). They even went so far as to say they wished they were back in Egypt.
God heard their complaints and instructed Moses to tell them that He would rain down food from heaven each day and they should gather just enough food for the day. God wanted the Israelites to learn to depend on Him to supply their needs on a daily basis.
Moses announced to the Israelites what God was going to do, including a stern warning about complaining: “In the morning you will see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your complaints, which are against him, not against us” (vs. 7).
One of the great dangers of complaining is that it distorts our perception of reality.
The Israelites complained for the “good old days” in Egypt when they had plenty to eat, yet somehow forgot the severity of human bondage they suffered there.
Like the Israelites, God wants us to develop a lifestyle of dependence on Him to supply our daily needs–a lifestyle of hope vested in God’s provision.
When you complain, you are not depending on God to supply your needs so your complaint is really against God.
Hope is the fruit of faith while complaining is the fruit of unbelief.
Complaining focuses on what is wrong with the present and glorifies a distorted view of the past while hope focuses on making the best of the present reality in anticipation of a glorious future.
Complaining demonstrates a lack of faith or confidence that God is in control of the circumstances of your daily life and of His ability to carry you through or supernaturally intervene.
Complaining can become a bad habit. And, the best way to rid yourself of a bad habit is to replace it with a good one.
Giving praise and thanksgiving to God acknowledges His sovereignty over the circumstances of your daily life and over all His creation.
So, stop complaining and start praising God!
“When the Israelites saw it, they asked one another, ‘What is it?’ because they didn’t know what it was. Moses told them, ‘It is the bread the Lord has given you to eat’… The house of Israel named the substance manna. It resembled coriander seed, was white, and tasted like wafers made with honey.” (Exodus 15:15,31-32, HCSB)
The word manna is the anglicized form of the Hebrew word man, which is the interrogative “What?”
God sent manna in response to the Israelites complaining that began not long after escaping from Egyptian bondage. The Israelites complained that in Egypt they had all the bread they wanted (vs. 3).
God continued sending manna and Israel continued eating it for forty years until the day following the first day they ate food grown in the promised land (vs 36; Joshua 5:12).
“What?” was probably a pretty good name for manna because no naturally occurring substance matches the description, constancy, and duration of manna well enough to account for it other than as a supernatural phenomenon.
During the earthly ministry of Jesus the Jews were still questioning “What?” and alluded to manna and these verses when they asked Jesus what sign He would show them to prove He was the Messiah. (John 6:30-31).
Jesus reminded them that it wasn’t Moses but God who gave the Israelites the manna and that manna typified the giving of eternal life.
In contrast to the manna, which lasted only during the Israelites’ forty-year wilderness wandering, Jesus said He was the real Bread of Life because He gives eternal life to those who believe and follow after Him!
Jesus is the answer to our “What?” He will save us and provide His loving care to us, not just for a while, but for all the days of our life on this earth and for eternity!
“So those who were scattered went on their way preaching the message of good news. Philip went down to a city in Samaria and proclaimed the Messiah to them. The crowds paid attention with one mind to what Philip said, as they heard and saw the signs he was performing. For unclean spirits, crying out with a loud voice, came out of many who were possessed, and many who were paralyzed and lame were healed. So there was great joy in that city” (Acts 8:4-8, HCSB).
Because of the persecution of the church in Jerusalem, the believers were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria.
Among those who were scattered was Philip, who went to a city in Samaria. Philip proclaimed to the people in that city that Jesus was the Messiah and performed many miracles among them and many people believed his message and were baptized.
The church in Jerusalem had become a megachurch and was adding new members faster than they could count. It seemed that just when things were going great and church growth was exploding, a great wave of persecution targeting these Jewish Christians caused them to scatter throughout the region.
What seemed to be a great success story had now become a tome of tragedy!
But, had this extensive persecution never been perpetrated against the Jerusalem Christians, who knows when they would have got around to fulfilling Jesus’s great commission to “be My witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (vs. 1:8).
God sends each of us on a mission for Him. But sometimes where God is sending us and what He wants us to do when we get there is, perhaps, beyond the boundaries of our respective comfort zones.
God’s plans and will for us may be located outside the box…of our own plans and wills.
Sometimes it becomes necessary for God to nudge, push, or even shove us out of our comfort zones through bad circumstances. Then, our discomfort helps us escape from our own zone of comfort!
In driving us from our comfort zone, it may be that God is sending us to do something quite different than what we planned to do, or even thought we were capable of doing.
That was certainly the case with Philip. Philip was appointed to help administer the daily food distribution in the church in Jerusalem. But in Samaria Philip was conducting a full-blown preaching-healing-deliverance ministry!
God advanced Philip from a behind-the-scenes administrative role to front-line ministry!
So, what is God sending you to do?
Accept His call, even if it requires you to escape from the comfort zone of your everyday existence.
“But Moses told the people, Don’t be afraid. Just stand still and watch the Lord rescue you today. The Egyptians you see today will never be seen again. The Lord himself will fight for you. Just stay calm.” (Exodus 14:13-14, NLT)
After Pharaoh let the Israelites go, he changed his mind yet again and ordered the Egyptian army to pursue Israel. The Egyptian army caught up to the Israelites while they were camped along the shore of the Red Sea.
As the Egyptians approached, the Israelites began to grumble and complain that they regretted leaving the slavery of Egypt. This complaint was to be a common one among the Israelites over the next forty years.
But in one of the great affirmations of faith in the Bible, Moses declared in these verses his confidence that God would rescue the people of Israel from the Egyptians.
In order for God to rescue them, the Israelites needed not let the approaching Egyptian army distract them from focusing on God and His deliverance.
The psalmist also assured us that when we turn our attention to thanking and obeying God and not to worrying about impending trouble, then God will come to our rescue: “Make thankfulness your sacrifice to God, and keep the vows you made to the Most High. Then call on me when you are in trouble, and I will rescue you, and you will give me glory” (Psalm 50:14-15, NLT).
Make this your prayer in difficult times:
Heavenly Father,
Don’t let my problems distract me from calling on you for help and deliverance.
I will listen for your voice and in calmness I will see your approaching deliverance and my fears will be assuaged.
Rescue me from my trouble and I will give you glory.
Amen.
“Listen, My people, and I will speak; I will testify against you, Israel. I am God, your God. I do not rebuke you for your sacrifices or for your burnt offerings, which are continually before Me…If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and everything in it is Mine…Sacrifice a thank offering to God, and pay your vows to the Most High. Call on Me in a day of trouble; I will rescue you, and you will honor Me.” (Psalm 50:7-15, HCSB)
God did not need the sacrifices of Israel to be exalted.
Since God already owned every kind of animal, He did not need their sacrifices to make Him glorious or almighty.
Yet, Israel continually offered sacrifices to God.
So, a lack or religiosity was not Israel’s main problem. They certainly knew how to be religious!
The problem was that their religious practices were not transformative! The burnt offerings sacrificed in worship to God did not seem to make a difference in them.
So their sacrifices made no difference to God!
And, today, our best religious practices do not exalt God. Even being our religious best does not make God more glorious or almighty!
God is God, Exalted, Glorious,and Almighty, regardless of anything we can say or do.
So, what God was trying to tell Israel then, and us today, is that it’s not He Who needs us, but we who need Him!
God does not need our worship or our religious practices to somehow make Him omnipotent. He IS omnipotent!
Our worship is a celebration of God’s majesty, His exalted state of being. Our worship is a pledge of our allegiance to Him, a surrender of our lives and wills to His authority.
We cannot give God something He needs, but we can offer ourselves fully and completely to God and then He will be everything we need.
Therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your spiritual worship. (Romans 12:1, HCSB)
“In fact, it was on the last day of the 430th year that all the Lord’s forces left the land. On this night the Lord kept his promise to bring his people out of the land of Egypt. So this night belongs to him, and it must be commemorated every year by all the Israelites, from generation to generation.” (Exodus 12:41-42, NLT).
The Passover was the major festival associated with the Exodus and the formative event of the Jewish religion.
The Passover was so-named because it memorialized God saving the Israelites from the death of the firstborn by marking their doorways with the blood of the Passover lamb: “For the Lord will pass through the land to strike down the Egyptians. But when he sees the blood on the top and sides of the doorframe, the Lord will pass over your home. He will not permit his death angel to enter your house and strike you down” (Exodus 12:23, NLT).
Why did the Passover require the Israelites to apply blood to their doorposts when they were not required to perform such a ritual to escape harm in any of the other preceding nine plagues?
The Passover commemorated deliverance from death, not political independence.
As with all people, Israel’s main enemy was not bondage to Egypt, but bondage to death.
So, God could not simply exempt his people from this plague as he had preserved them from the other plagues.
Death reigned in the world because of sin, and because of God’s justice, sin could not be ignored; it had to be punished or atoned for.
Because blood represented life, it alone was acceptable for the forgiveness of sins. Thus, Passover demonstrated that deliverance from death was only by means of a substitutionary blood sacrifice, the Passover lamb, that took the place of the firstborn son of every family of Israel.
It is significant that Jesus’ death and resurrection were associated with the Passover season.
The Passover symbolized the reality that Jesus Christ gave his life as “a ransom for many” (Matt 20:28; Mark 10:45) and became “the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).
Through His sacrifice, sin and death were once and for all fully and finally defeated.
Now, God’s judgment passes over those to whom the blood of Christ is applied.
Worthy is the Lamb who was slaughtered— to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing. (Revelation 5:12, NLT)
“We are witnesses of these things and so is the Holy Spirit, who is given by God to those who obey him.” (Acts 5:32, NLT)
After a first wave of persecution by the Jewish religious leaders, the early Church flourished because it had been empowered by God: “Yet more and more people believed and were brought to the Lord—crowds of both men and women.” (Acts 5:14, NLT).
Acts 5:1-11 records the events that precipitated this great demonstration of the power of God in the Church.
A man named Ananias and his wife Sapphira sold some property and brought a portion of the proceeds to the apostles, claiming it was the full amount.
The Apostle Peter, by the power of the Holy Spirit, recognized their deception and told them they had embezzled the money from God: “You lied to the Holy Spirit, and you kept some of the money for yourself. The property was yours to sell or not sell, as you wished. And after selling it, the money was also yours to give away. How could you do a thing like this? You weren’t lying to us but to God!” (vs. 3-4).
Both Ananias and Sapphira fell dead when Peter confronted them with their sin!
Their lack of integrity had the potential to compromise the Church and so they fell under the direct judgment of God.
The sudden judgment on Ananias and Sapphira had a sobering effect on both the believers and others who heard about the incident.
A believer’s integrity is critical to the effectiveness of his or her witness to others.
The power of the Holy Spirit is not hindered when believers live and act with integrity.
To engage in deception and somehow think that God doesn’t know is a fundamental misconception of one’s faith (or lack of faith). That sort of behavior would certainly call into question whether the deceiver really knows Christ and has the indwelling Holy Spirit.
For the Church to thrive and effectively (and powerfully) declare the gospel, Christ’s followers must be people of the highest integrity.
Steve's Bible Meditations 