Daily Reflections Feb 18, 2018

Genesis 9: 8 - 15; 1 Peter 3: 18 - 22; Mark 1: 12 - 15.

“My Lord and my God, I bless you and thank you with all my heart and all my strength for purging my sin and making me anew. Through the death and resurrection of Thy Son Jesus Christ Thou has given me, Thy humble and sorrowful servant another chance. Sorrowful because of my sins and glad because of Thy mercy. For just as Thy gave mankind a new start after the great deluge, so also, Thou has washed my sins away and in Thy mercy replenished my life”.

It was through Kindness and Mercy that God sent His Only Son Jesus Christ our Lord to take the form of a Human, remind His people Israel about His Covenant with Abraham and save His people from their sin by taking it all upon Himself on the Cross. Now wherein history has anyone ever heard about the innocent being punished for the sake of saving the guilty? Nevertheless, God Loves His creation and He is faithful to His covenant with Noah as mentioned in the book of Genesis 9: 8-15. He would not turn His back on the earth to let the righteous few die along with the evil. He has created a regular reminder through the rainbow to never let another deluge wash away mankind and the animals from the earth. And through the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, God shows us that he remembers his promises forever and that He is willing to show greater mercy to save the world from evil and sin.

Science teaches us that a rainbow is a meteorological phenomenon that is caused by the reflection, refraction and dispersion of visible electromagnetic waves of light in water droplets resulting in a colourful spectrum of light appearing in the sky. Science is our way of understanding what God has designed and created and the Bible is God’s way of reminding us that He has interacted with our ancestors for thousands of years and that He remember every detail and every Word spoken to them.The Bible is physical record maintained and passed down the ages through human generations as evidence that God continues to live among us and he continues to speak to mankind in a way that we will understand His will. Inasmuch as we think that a human mind is supreme because of their understanding of science, the human has only understood enough to describe what God has created. What God created thousands of years ago, humanity has just started learning to use in the last two hundred years of scientific evolution and for that bit of Godly blessing, the human ego has swelled up enough to dare to dismiss God’s hand in creation.It is this great sin of disbelief and discrediting of God that is shearing mankind’s relationship with His creator. Mankind ought to be grateful and thank God on their knees for the opportunity of experiencing life. Justice would require punishment, but God has decided that Love and Mercy are greater tools to humble the human soul. It is extremely easy for God to destroy the world and replenish it with life all over again. And yet, in His Fabulous Wisdom, God has decided to slowly touch the human heart with mercy while respecting the gift of free-will that He Himself bestowed upon us. Even though, the entire exercise may seem to be extremely time consuming and painstaking, nothing is too difficult for this Marvellous God for there is none like Him. He is the One and Only God who created everything to bless mankind with an awesome gift, ‘Mankind’s experience of God’.Those who doubt God and the Bible are terribly lacking in wisdom because throughout the scriptures, right from the time of Adam, God has always been foretelling events and prophesying through His prophets. But it is the insufficiency of our wisdom and the presence of our sinfulness that prevents us from understanding the Lord’s prophecies and taking heed of them.

Peter’s first epistle 3: 18-22, describes God’s love for each and every being ever created that lived on earth. His love is so immense, that Jesus after being crucified, visited the souls that were harboured in the darkness of ‘Sheol’ since the days of Noah. In Jesus’ visit of mercy, he became their light in mercifully guiding them to eternal rest. For those souls had to wait thousands of years for the arrival of the promised Messiah. Their generation and their descendants had been prophesying and writing about the arrival of the Messiah for a great number of years.Through the great deluge, God washed away all the sins of the world in one clean sweep as a baptism for the descendants of Noah. Thus, through Noah and through the covenant that God established through Noah, we continue to belong to God, we continue to benefit of the goodness and promises of that covenant and thus, we must continue to abide to serve our end of that holy covenant. For as Son of the Living God, He sits at God’s right hand and will judge us all at the end of age. The Covenants have been made forever, God abides by those covenants forever and out of duty, we must humbly do our share, since we are shareholders of God’s Covenant with the world.

Since the time of Adam, the devil has been burning with jealousy over God’s relationship with mankind. In his disobedience, he was banished from God’s light and he has been moving along with his evil confederate through time with no place to rest and no dominion to control.And since then,the devil has been labouring to destroy mankind and steal the earth from God’s creation to establish a domain to himself.Since Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, the devil has exploited mankind’s weaknesses. But with the limitations that he is forced to endure, he is only allowed to whisper temptation into the human ear. When the Word of God incarnated into the flesh, He had to endure some time living the lowly human life through all its blessings and its hardships. The desert is a place of despair where life lacks in all its pleasures. The food is scarce, the water is scarce, it is lonely in earthly terms and it is a place where the wild must struggle to survive. As the Gospel of Mark 1: 12-15 states, Jesus was never lonely, the Father was with Him wherever He went and angels kept in His company. But Jesus had to endure the weaknesses of the flesh. Perceiving that, the devil made His attempt to tempt Jesus and he started with the basic necessities that would otherwise drive a normal person to despair. And while struggling in the hardships of physical hunger and thirsts, the devil tried to tempt Jesus in bigger ways. But, the devil was not wise enough to understand that food and nourishment meant nothing to Jesus in His relationship with God. The devil did not understand that in His Holiness, Jesus is capable of far greater sacrifices than the mere human necessities. But then, until Jesus was born the devil only knew of the term ‘Messiah’, but he never had the understanding nor the opportunity of knowing the reality of the Son of God. That is because angels have a hierarchy in heaven and not all the angel are allowed to see the splendour of the Lord that rules over the Cherubim and the Seraphim. Stepping down from that Splendid magnificence, the Son of God put himself through the test of human life, humbly enduring so that His Father’s Covenant could be fulfilled in its exactness. Not missing a single detail, Jesus preached God’s mercy through the children of Israel touching their lives with compassionate healing and forgiveness of sins. He did come to fulfil and in dying on the cross, Jesus Christ brought fulfilment to God’s Covenant that was made for the Salvation of His chosen people. God has provided us will all possible measures to take benefit of His unfathomable mercy. We must follow in Christ’s teaching to bow down our spirits and repent for our sins. We must seek God’s mercy with a humble and broker heart because God has provided us this path that leads to our Salvation and Eternal life.

- By Bro Maryo