EMMAUS SCHOOL OF BIBLICAL STUDIES

            In Exodus, we see God’s plan of redemption. He wanted to rescue his people out from slavery for the purpose of dwelling with them and knowing them. Despite their complaining and temporary memory of his faithfulness, he continues to be faithful and make a way for them. He provides food for them day after day and merely asks that they would trust it would be there the next day. This story is such a picture of the gospel – God rescues his people for them to be freed and to know him.

            God rescued them from their enslavers and started on the long journey with them to get the slavery out of them. What a portrayal of the Christian life. God rescues us from our sin and death, and then while we await the real promised land, God is working to get the slavery out of us – our old habits and our old ways of life. However, he is faithful to his promises. He will not leave us where we are. He rescued us for a purpose – to make us like his Son. While our tendency may be to turn back and worship golden calves, he is patient and forgiving. If we will listen and let him, he will teach us his ways and lead us. In Exodus, he shows his extreme patience and love towards humanity. This book ends with him dwelling among his people. That is what he wants with us. He wants to dwell with us and for us to know him. All we have to do is let him. 

Exodus, what an incredible story of God’s patience and God’s mercy on his people! From the very beginning of the book, when God calls Moses to lead his people out of Israel, Moses questions God and his own ability to be the voice for the people. Even after God gives Moses Aaron to speak for him, he is still in doubt. Then when they make it out of Egypt and see that Pharaoh and his men are pursing them, the people cry out angrily that God brought them out of Egypt to die. Even after the episode with the Red Sea, God’s people still try his patience when they complain in the wilderness that they do not have any food or water! God rains down manna and brings forth an enormous flow of water from a single rock and that was still not enough. As if God had not been patient enough, he provides the people with the 10 commandments and the law and they turn around and break it immediately. Even though the Israelites upset God over and over, God still chooses to live among them and bless them with his presence at the very end.

It is funny because as I read through this book I kept thinking how annoyed I was that the Israelites could keep sinning and keep doubting God when he was blessing them left and right with miracles and mercy. Then of course I had to look at my own life and I thought, how many times has God done things for me and I have so quickly forgotten them? When you apply this to yourself and realize that it is a blessing that God still has this much patience with us the story of Exodus becomes more real and more meaningful for our own lives! Moses really did such a good job writing this book and emphasizing how freeing the Israelites from Egypt and then dwelling among them was more than just a story to pass on to the kids, but a story to make you reevaluate how much gratitude you express to God daily for putting up with such sinners as ourselves!

Exodus is a book that is packed full of the demonstration of God’s glory, power, mercy, judgment, and love. It is crazy to me how one God can have so many different characteristics! Throughout this book, I learned so much about the power and wisdom of God; not just in delivering his people from the Egyptians and bringing them the law, but also in his overarching plan of redeeming the world. I learned specifically how each thing that God did with the Israelites, was a forerunner, and a shadow of the overall and original plan he had all along to redeem mankind from their slavery to sin.

Therefore, this whole story was a mere picture, and shadow of the overarching story of God’s plan to eventually redeem the world. It is so fascinating how each thing in the tabernacle pointed to Jesus who would come later; this helped the Jews of Jesus’ day recognize that the system of worship and sacrifice God had established in the OT was fulfilled by Jesus, who sacrificed himself to rescue their spirits from slavery to sin.

Therefore, the whole thing was a great illustration of self-sacrifice, judgment, and wrath for Jesus, but mercy, forgiveness and love for believers. We now can understand the system that God set up at creation for the punishment of sins by the shedding of blood, and the forgiveness that happened at Jesus’ death.

Therefore, as a result of studying Exodus, I came away with such a deeper and greater appreciation of the self-sacrifice that Jesus gave of his blood, for my sins – for the world’s sins. I have begun to fall in love with the God who wanted so much to know us and dwell with us, that He planned from the beginning of the world how he would rescue us, and then carried out that plan; in the OT, by devising a temporary sacrificial system, and then in the NT, by completing the system with Jesus’ death – resulting in our life. Thus, now he can dwell with us and love us forever! And this has been his plan all along!

Therefore, the great wisdom and plan of God is perceived, both in each individual story in Exodus, and in the overall original plan of redemption for the world, so that God could dwell with man, in a loving relationship. And what a beautiful plan and result that is!

            The book of Genesis is the beginning story of God redeeming his people. We see his heart in how he created everything. He wanted man and woman to walk with God in his perfect creation. However, we quickly messed that up. What unfolds in Genesis is the story of God beginning to work things together, using broken, sinful people, to bring about his purposes – his purpose of making a way for people to be reconciled to him through his son Jesus Christ.

            Looking specifically at the life of Joseph, I was able to see God’s heart and hands so clearly. Joseph, who was sold of by his brothers at age seventeen, after having been put in prison for two years after being wrongly accused, acknowledges that God used all that for his own good. His own good was his family ultimately being saved during the famine and his own faith being made firm. He could have let his life leave him bitter and resentful towards his family and God, yet he chose to see God using that to bring about his purposes – and he is grateful and worships God. He valued God’s purposes and plans above his own.

            Our response should be the same. We should be so confident in God’s love for us and his amazing sovereignty that when things do not turn out the way we think they should or we experience suffering, we can still trust him that he is working all things together for our good – and that through those experiences, he is still working to bring about his purposes of redemption. It has always been about knowing him. Since the fall, he has been working to bring us back into a right, reconciled relationship with him. Genesis paints such a picture of God loving broken and messed up people and ultimately using them to show others his love.

            Reading through the book of Genesis has been so refreshing and so enlightening this week.  There are so many stories with minute details that are a testament to God’s loving nature, that it really becomes overwhelming.  Even the authorship of the book is tedious to figure out; whether or not it was Moses or some nameless author, there have been books upon book written to figure that out.  I do, however believe Moses is the author & I believe his intention in writing the book was to encourage his people who had just made it out of captivity and were wondering in the wilderness.  He wrote this so that they would be able to remember how God always provides & guides his people. 

            What I loved most about my study of Genesis was seeing the mess God’s children would make of their lives and how God would always and without hesitation go behind them and clean it up like a parent to his toddler.  There are so many stories that are evidence of this such as when Abraham doesn’t believe that the Lord is going to give him a son and instead of waiting he has a child with his servant Hagar.  Instead of letting that blow up in their face God resolves that situation for them by bringing Isaac into the world and still letting Hagar’s child Ismael be the father of a nation.  It just becomes so clear how God knows the perfect way to handle every situation in a manner that is most suitable for everyone involved and the way God loves and cares for his children is so evident.  Reading through Genesis is a good way for us as Christians to remind ourselves of how involved God really is in our lives and how much we have to thank him for!

As I studied Genesis, the importance of honesty and keeping a pure heart before God, kept coming up. I noticed that numerous stories in Genesis involved people who were living in secret sin, that they did not think anyone else knew about. However, all these people eventually caused more hurt and grief by living in their secret sin, then if they had just asked forgiveness for it, and lived out of a pure heart instead.

Abraham hid his wife Sarah’s identity from two different people, and caused hurt to come upon them. Isaac did the same with his wife Rebekah. Then Jacob deceived his father into thinking that he was Esau, so that he could have the blessing instead. This continued on into Laban’s secret sin of deceiving Jacob by giving him Leah instead of Rachel, to marry. Then, Jacob’s sons secretly get rid of Joseph b/c they hate him b/c of his father’s favoritism. Not to mention the numerous secret sexual sins that are mentioned in the book! All of these sins were done in secret, as if the sinner thought that that would make them less evil or less hurtful or wrong. However, the result was not that at all! Instead, b/c they were never confronted or asked forgiveness for them, the sins grew into a habitual pattern, and continued on into the generations. This shows that secret sins are not any less evil than blatant sins. In fact, they may be worse, b/c they are the kind that you never acknowledge and repent of, but just hope will go away. However, they never do go away, but instead, keep growing and becoming more and more habitual.

Therefore, from this book, I learned the importance of recognizing your sins before God; even secret sins that are only known to yourself and God. You must get rid of these sins by asking forgiveness, and stopping the habitual pattern that they bring; because God is not concerned whether we are sinning privately or publicly; all sin is the same to Him, and He only sees our hearts.

Therefore, whether we sin in our hearts, or in front of others, we need to ask forgiveness for it, and remove it from our hearts, so that our lives will be more like Christ, lived in righteousness, and purity of heart before God. Because we were not created to live only pretending to be righteous. We really ARE created to be like God, living in righteousness and purity before Him. Therefore, we should all ask God to remove the secret sins we have in our hearts, thoughts, minds, etc. so that we can live out of a pure heart, the way that we are intended to live.

The book of Ecclesiastes was one that I had never read all the way through before, which if you understand what the book is about, you will understand why it was so important that the book be read all the way through and not picked apart.  There are different ideas about who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes and what their purpose was: one thought is it was written by an older King Solomon speaking on his earlier life and speaking with a repentant heart, and another thought is that it was written by an anonymous author to their child, saying the things Solomon would say, but then pointing out how that is wrong,  etc.  Whichever way you look at it, the heart of the book is that this person searches the ends of the earth to find fulfillment in the world, whether with wisdom, riches, pleasure, and at the end of the day, it has all been in vain for the void in their heart is still a void. While this book seems to be dark, the beautiful message that should come across is that there IS hope for fulfillment and ultimate enjoyment in life and death, and that is through knowing the Lord.

I think what I liked so much about this book is that it truly represents the frustration, confusion, dissatisfaction and despair one who doesn’t know the truth feels when they are at the end of their rope and yet it is followed by a message of hope that can bring anyone out of this darkness.  Even people who know Christ can empathize with this book, because we all have had times when we have lost sight of the message of the gospel and we struggle in these same ways, and this should be a sweet reminder to us that God is always with us to comfort us, even when we don’t feel him there!  My prayer is that anyone who reads this book focus on how God should be glorified, even through the oppression of His people, because God is ALWAYS merciful, loving & present; he is a God who cares for us and is anxious for us to come home!

 

 

            So often people, myself included, believe that their life only has meaning if they are successful, if they leave a legacy, and if they are enjoying it. The author of Ecclesiastes, however, speaks truth to those lies. A life of meaning is that of a person who knows God and obeys him. As humans, we feel a pressure to prove ourselves – to show to others that if there is a lifeboat that only holds 9 people, and there are 10 of us, we should not be the one person to get thrown off. Look at what I have accomplished! Look at how great I am, how successful I am! As I am currently in the process of detoxing from the university mindset of proving oneself, it seems we judge others’ value based on the success of their non-profit organization in Africa or how well they plan on bringing justice to the educational system in America. While those things are inherently good, they should not be the rubric for which we measure a person’s value and worth.

            I have really been forced to examine my own heart in my study of this book and see what motivates me to live. Am I living for the respect of others so that someone will look back at my life one day and praise me? Or am I content with knowing God and following him? Do I make decisions based on how adventurous it seems or how I will enjoy it? I do hope to enjoy life. But even if my life does not consist of comfort, pleasures, and “success”, I can know my life was not wasted if I am pursuing God. I don’t want to waste this one, precious life. But, if I never “change the world”, if my business fails, or if no one remembers my name once I’m gone, I can rest knowing my life was not wasted because my life is not defined by how successful I am or how well I am liked. I will be able to say I met and knew my Creator and I followed him. That is a life of meaning. 

In Ecclesiastes I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the only thing that matters in life is to know God. Period. This means that it doesn’t matter what job I have, what my social or financial situation, is, etc; life is not about material possessions or things, but about a relationship with God.

Of course, God may sometimes direct you to a certain situation, and this is where the knowing and obeying comes in; because you know God, you will recognize His voice, and be willing to obey Him, wherever He leads you. But the only reason you will know the will of God in the first place is because your life has been centered not on outward things like success, career, and money, but around your relationship with God.

Therefore, does it really matter what you do or where you live? No! What your career is or where you live is, not of first importance; the first priority in life is your relationship with God. Then what is the will of God for your life? The will of God is to know Him and obey Him.

Therefore, we can say with certainty that when we are seeking to know what God’s will is for our lives, we can rest assured that it is not just an external situation he is leading us towards, but a relationship along the way. This means that we can be doing numerous things in life, and living in numerous places, but all of them should be a direct result of knowing God and obeying Him. This is all that matters!

Thus, regardless of physical career or success, the importance is that we are living in such a way as to know God and obey him. This is the first priority in life, and this is why we were created. How stress-free our life will then become! Because instead of worrying about a job change, financial crisis, etc, all we really have to do is focus our attention on Jesus, and knowing Him, trusting Him, and obeying Him. He will then take care of all the externals.

Song of Solomon is a different book because it is full of such erotic love poetry that not even the Christian church today thinks it is appropriate. I found that this book is a beautiful picture of the love that exists in marriage between a husband and wife – and is not at all G-rated, and definitely not an allegory about God and the church.

While most of the book is about sex life in marriage, some of it is particularly applicable to singles, b/c it discusses heart purity before marriage. The book talks about how purity is not just a matter of physical dress, but also a matter of keeping your thoughts pure, your actions pure, even your behavior and what you spend your time looking at, pure. The way you live comes from what is in your heart, therefore, in order to live purely, it is important to keep your heart pure.

While studying through this book, it struck me that so many people do not really realize what it means to keep their heart pure. Even Christians. Purity is not just a matter of dressing modestly, although that is a part of it. Purity is also a matter of what you do when no one is watching. We learned that America spends over $12 billion on pornography per year. Why? Because when no one is watching, people are not pure. This shows that purity is much more than just appearance or public life; purity is consistently living out of a pure heart in both public and private life, in both thoughts and actions. And that is a message for both married people and singles alike.

Song of Solomon is a compilation of love poems written about the intensely passionate love between a man and a woman. I love that this book is included in the Bible. God has given humanity the gift of love – not only his love, but also the ability to love each other fiercely and passionately.

He wants to redeem humanity’s view of sexuality and restore us to a place of enjoyment of the gift he has given. Within marriage, there is meant to be passion and deep love. While God does not owe us any pleasure, in his goodness and mercy he has decided to bless humanity with the gift of sexual intimacy and love. People are meant to enjoy one another and speak affirmation and love over each other.

This sensual love poem depicts what God desires. He wants husband and wife to radically and intensely love each other. He created such a depth of love and passion to be experienced and enjoyed. This paints a picture of the kind of love that he desires for all marriages to attain. What’s the point of mediocre love when God has created something so rich? He wants husbands and wives to be passionate, exclusive, and intimate. Throughout the whole poem, the man and woman cannot stop admiring the other. Their passion is rich and their attraction strong. What a fun, good God to bless humanity with such a gift!

           Today we finished up the study of the book Song of Solomon and like almost every other book I have studied so far, this book caught me off guard with it’s truths and wisdom that reflect so much of God’s character and purpose.  I will admit, it is still hard to read some parts of the book and not blush or giggle, but what I got out of this text was more than funny descriptions of passion and sex, it was the description of a love filled marriage as God intended.  The theme of longing and anticipation appears in every word in this book, for every word is infused with the deepest, purest, most enjoyable love I have ever seen or heard from magazines and movies.  The adoration the man and woman have for each other and the way they verbally affirm that makes me speechless.  It just makes so much sense to see how the love overflows in this relationship, because God’s love overflows on us and he desires that we feel this same admiration that the couple in the book do.  Too much of the media today makes marriage out to be a ride at the fair-you pay for it, ride a little while and then get off and go on to the next one without consequence.  If we really analyze this it doesn’t match up with God’s character, so there is no way it is right. God would not intend for us to enter into a shallow, meaningless relationship, get our hearts broken and wounded and then be left picking up the pieces so we can go on to the next and do it again.  We need to go back to the garden of Eden and think about how Adam and Eve lived before there was sin, without knowledge of their nakedness and living freely and gaily in paradise-that is what God intends. 

For me this book gives me great joy and excitement for the future, for a marriage I will hopefully one day enter into with a man who shares the same affinity for our Lord and Savior that I do.  On that day I will enter into the strongest, most intimate bond of love humans can know that comes from the love of God, and I will praise him for a chance to experience the euphoria of love that he intended for us to have from the beginning! So women out there, I encourage you to guard yourselves from the false love that the media presents.  Do not sell yourself short, but rather hold yourself at a high price and wait for the right man to come along and snatch you up! Fairy tale princesses are not the people one’s who are entitled a happily ever after you know!

 

 

In the book of Job we see the struggle of a man who was stripped of everything good in life, everything except God himself. He lost his family, his possessions, and his health. He questions God as to why and wrestles with his friends as to how this could have happened to him who did not bring it upon himself. As a reader, we are able to see that God wanted to display to all of creation that he is worthy of praise for who he is, and not what he gives. Job had the honor of showing that – even though he didn’t know it. So, Job is left with wondering what led to his suffering and he wishes to die, despairing of life itself. Throughout the dialogue he loses sight of the preciousness of knowing God. All he sees is pain in his life and therefore wants out of it. He does not see that suffering produces deeper faith and trust in the person of God. He does not see that he will know God in a much deeper and intimate way because of his suffering and he loses the perspective that knowing God is more valuable than any comfort or pleasure this life can offer.

When God shows up and interrupts his questioning, he does not condemn Job for his questions. Rather, he tells him who he is. When God describes his character and his creation, Job is silenced. His pompous, arrogant accusations against God hold no merit when he sees God for who he really is. He sees that he had been deriving truth from his past experiences and his own wisdom. As we see, his own wisdom is silenced in the face of God’s wisdom and that God is enough of an answer for Job.

I have come to believe that God welcomes our questions. He wants us to invite him into our pain and wrestle with him through our issues. He is gracious to listen. However, there is a certain posture that is expected of us and compelled when approaching our maker. We can approach him with arrogance, or we can approach him with humility and a soft, broken heart. We must recognize our rightful, appropriate place as the clay to the potter. From that position, God will hear us and respond.

His response, as seen in Job, however, may not be in the form of an explanation. Most likely it won’t be. God doesn’t owe us anything. God responded to Job’s agonizing pain with himself. He described his own majesty, and in that, Job was able to rest. God himself was sufficient for him. Job believed that God was out to get him. However, we see that from the beginning God loved Job and was proud of him. If he is even tender towards insignificant animals, how much more concerned will he be with those whom he loves and gave his life for? When we experience suffering, God wants to be with us. He wants us to invite him into the pain. In that though, he wants us to look at the cross and remember his steadfast love for us. We can never question if he has our best interest at heart – he proved that through the death of his Son on our behalf.

In the end, this whole journey is about knowing God. And so, with that perspective, over time, the comfort and deep love he brings and reveals through the suffering and pain become worth the whole experience.

            Well this week began our venture into the mysteries of the Old Testament.  I am very excited to finally unravel some of the most perplexing passages of the Bible and come to a more firm grasp of their meaning on my own terms and not through the reading or hearing of others’.  The book we started off with is the book of Job, a little light reading to bring in the new year! Lol.  In all seriousness this book really turned out to be light reading to me because I gained new perspective in how to read it and get the true meat out of the passage instead of by tearing it apart and trying to question why God would do such horrible things to one of his most beloved servants.  The first thing I had to understand was that God did not choose Job and present him to be tested to Satan because he wanted to spite him, but he did it out of love and admiration for Job.  He chose Job over everyone else, having full confidence in his strength in faith, to prove to Satan that he was wrong to believe he could destroy his righteous standing.  The second thing that was particularly interesting to me was that Job’s three friends were not giving sound counsel to him in his time of need but were tearing him down and trying to falsely accuse him.  They were taking what they understood of God and his character and fitting that into Job’s situation resulting in them blaming Job for being wicked and bringing such havoc on himself. Some friends they were!  My favorite part of the book that I had never paid attention to before were chapters 38-41 where the Lord appears to Job in a whirlwind (which thinking about the Lord appearing in the form of  a tornado is incredibly intimidating) and revealing his great power over all of creation in comparison to the power that Job considered himself to have.  I think it is just an acute display of the power and majesty of God that should humble every creature before Him.

            It is unsure who wrote the book of Job or even when but it is quite clear that the theme of the book is just that God has control over all of our lives and even if we do not get answers to all the questions we ask (like why do good people have bad things happen to them, why do people suffer, etc.) does not mean that God is not in control or that he does not have the power to handle that.  What it should show us believers is that God’s knowledge is infinitely greater than anything humans can comprehend and that itself should erase any “why” questions in our mind.  We need to focus on the character of God and not put God in a box and then blame him when things don’t happen as we think they should have!

In the book of Job, I was surprised to find that the whole message of the book was not to show how awful Job’s suffering was, and that ultimately God gave him everything back again. I had previously thought this book was just about showing how good God is when he delivers us from suffering, and gets us back on our feet again, so that we may praise him for rescuing us from the suffering. However, I was totally wrong. While it is true, that God CAN rescue us from our physical suffering on this earth, that is not the whole point of our life, and it is not the reason that we should praise God at all. Job taught me that God is good even when He doesn’t deliver us from suffering, and that we should praise him in the midst of it.

The very reason that we exist on this earth is to know God. That’s it. As believers, we can know him very intimately through a relationship with Him, and continually have all our spiritual and physical needs met in Him. However, that does not mean that God will always give us every physical desire we want. We may have desires that will never be fulfilled, or longings that will never be met, in this life. Does that lessen the goodness of God or our ultimate purpose here on earth? Well, if God had promised to bless us physically with every physical blessing on earth, then it would. However, he hasn’t promised us those external things; instead he has promised us every spiritual blessing in Christ.

Therefore, this means that we may very well have a life of physical suffering on this earth, or a life where our secret longings are not met. However, the whole purpose of our life is not to have God fulfill our physical wishes, but for us to know God, and through this, allow God to fulfill our spiritual needs. And he HAS promised to do that every day, through our relationship with him – by KNOWING Him. Therefore, this goes back to the whole purpose of our life: to know God.

This shows that whatever situation we are living in, whether we are wealthy and prosperous, or poor, sick and suffering, we can be living according to our life’s purpose of knowing God. God can satisfy our every spiritual need and bring us true contentment, if we recognize this eternal perspective of living for God, and not God living for us.

Thus, God is good both in physical well-being, and in the midst of suffering; He never changes, and our dependence and trust in Him should not either. We should be able to praise God for any moment of our life – even in the hard times when we are suffering, or some of our physical desires may not be met – we can still bless the name of the Lord, and recognize that God is good no matter what.