Saturday, April 1, 2017

"God's Goodness"

PSALMS 92 [A Psalm or Song for the sabbath day.]
As I was preparing for this post, I was reading through this Psalm to get a sense of what might be ahead; then I heard a voice within me, maybe my own, saying, Preparing for what is ahead is utterly useless. It really is, if you stop and think about it. Don't get me wrong, the Lord tells us to prepare for what's ahead, but in all honesty, the only thing that really matters is to be with the Lord in heaven. So if we are going to prepare anything, then it had better be our hearts; beyond that, we should just prepare to be amazed! As you should have guessed, "God's Goodness" is the title above this Psalm in my Bible. In reading this Psalm, there seems to be a contrast mentioned, several times actually, concerning the difference between those that are for God and those that are against God. When it comes right down to it, God's goodness really only matters to those who accept it; those that reject God and His free offer of Salvation, for them nothing good is waiting at the end of the road. In other words, you could say that God's goodness only counts for those who are good; and when I say good, I mean that we are good, as in good to go: our bags are packed and we have our tickets punched and are ready to meet our Maker! The Sabbath Day was meant to be a day of rest, a day to reflect upon all of God's goodness; to worship Him for all that He has done, and to just rest from the routine work and labor that living requires. Oddly enough, my Bible has Sabbath Day just as I typed it above, in lower-case spelling. My curiosity had me going, so I had to check it out in the NLT, and sure enough, it had the words in upper-case. Was it a mistake? Which one has it right? Well, according to the spelling in the Blue Letter Bible, the King James Version has it in lower-case; and as many should know, the King James Version is the only one that gets the Blue Letters, which are actually a Letter with numbers. With all that is specified within the Psalm, the tile being considered, and the fact that lower-case letters are being use, I can only reach the conclusion that the Sabbath Day being spoken for is a day for man's benefit and not actually the holy day, as in the Sabbath. Which reminds me of something very important when it comes to our salvation, in that we can never work for it, ever! Our salvation is never gained by working for it, which also means that are rest is never ever based upon something that we have obtained or made to happen on our own. We, God's people, enter His rest; it is what God has provided for us, that is where real rest is found...
"So God's rest is there for people to enter, but those who first heard this good news failed to enter because they disobeyed God. So God set another time for entering his rest, and that time is today. God announced this through David much later in the words already quoted: "Today when you hear his voice, don't harden your hearts." Now if Joshua had succeeded in giving them this rest, God would not have spoken about another day of rest still to come. So there is a special day still waiting for the people of God. For all that have entered God's rest have rested from their labors, just as God did after creating the world. So let us do our best to enter that rest. But if we disobey God, as the people of Israel did, we will fall. For the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God. Everything is naked and exposed before his eyes, and he is the one to whom we are accountable." (Hebrews 4:6-13) NLT

No comments:

Post a Comment