Moses answered, “Why me?

Moses was shepherding the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. He led the flock to the west end of the wilderness and came to the mountain of God, Horeb. The angel of GOD appeared to him in flames of fire blazing out of the middle of a bush. He looked. The bush was blazing away but it didn’t burn up. Moses said, “What’s going on here? I can’t believe this! Amazing! Why doesn’t the bush burn up?”

GOD saw that he had stopped to look. God called to him from out of the bush, “Moses! Moses!”

He said, “Yes? I’m right here!”

God said, “Don’t come any closer. Remove your sandals from your feet. You’re standing on holy ground.”

Then he said, “I am the God of your father: The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.”

Moses hid his face, afraid to look at God.

GOD said, “I’ve taken a good, long look at the affliction of my people in Egypt. I’ve heard their cries for deliverance from their slave masters; I know all about their pain.

And now I have come down to help them, pry them loose from the grip of Egypt, get them out of that country and bring them to a good land with wide-open spaces, a land lush with milk and honey, the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite.

“The Israelite cry for help has come to me, and I’ve seen for myself how cruelly they’re being treated by the Egyptians.

It’s time for you to go back: I’m sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the People of Israel, out of Egypt.”

Moses answered, “Why me? What makes you think that I could ever go to Pharaoh and lead the children of Israel out of Egypt?”

“I’ll be with you,” God said. (Exodus 3:1-12, The Message)

Why me? Why you? 

Well, you see, when God is in the bush...  

any old bush will do.

DHR

The Sufficiency of Scripture

The Sufficiency of Scripture

"When the church is tempted to take on board anything other than the simplicity of the Gospel and the sufficiency of Scripture, then it will always be in danger of capitulation and its missionary zeal will diminish.” —Alistair Begg

The Enlightenment brought "to light" a fresh store of wisdom that had been lost to the western world, but it also elevated reason over faith. Thus we must always use discernment when we interact with human insights.

All truth is God's truth and where we find that truth we can safely find agreement, but we must always read and listen with wisdom and understanding for secular thought is always a mixture of truth and error. 

We must always examine the philosophical assumptions of humanistic thought for the flesh (human thought and effort) is “earthly and unspiritual" at best—it can only see “the things that can be seen."  At worst, it can be demonic (1Timothy, 4:1; James 3:15). Though an element of truth may lie on the surface, the foundational presuppositions of secular movements are often at enmity with the gospel.

We can learn from secular sources, but we must compare all that we learn with the truth that we find in scripture. As I've written before, Christians are not avant garde. We do not "go on ahead" to hitherto unrevealed truth (2 John 1:3); we go back—back to "that which was from the beginning" (1 John 1:1), to that which Jesus and his apostles taught, the truth "once for all (time) delivered to the saints" (Jude 3). 

The  material is all that we need to lead lives of faith and obedience. As the Apostle Peter has written, God "has granted to us (the Apostles) all things that pertain to life and godliness…" (2 Peter 2:3). This is "the sufficiency of scripture."

We can and should learn from our culture, for we often find common grace and wisdom in human systems of thought, but we must never allow the insights of this world to correct or modify the plain statements of scripture. 

The message, the mission and the means (the spiritual dynamic and governance) of the church are beyond the purview of natural men and women. As Paul reminds us, "the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him. He is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned" (2 Corinthians 2:14). 

Sola fide, sola gratia, sola scriptura  (faith alone; grace alone; scripture alone). These "solae" are the foundation and framework of Christ's Church, the things without which nothing of eternal value can be done.

David Roper
10.24.21

Thoughts on 9/11

E-Musings

A Ministry of Idaho Mountain Ministries

Thoughts on 9/11

 

Thoughts crowd into my mind each year on 9/11: The evil of those who instigated it, the grief and righteous indignation of the nation, the bravery of the passengers in Flight 93, the selfless actions of the first responders, the compassion poured out on those who lost loved ones, the bold response of our leaders. But one idea always stands above others: the uncertainty of life. It was a normal day: September 11, 2001. No one expected to die.

 

Carolyn and I knew one of the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93; On board was Rev. Francis Grogan, a Catholic priest who ministered in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts. In a recent e–mail, Fr. Francis had written,

Since I last wrote I have been asked to move on to be Chaplain for a retirement home for our Holy Cross Teaching Brothers. They have need of a new Chaplain having lost their Chaplain of some 23 years in an accident on their property. So, I'm packing up and moving on. All your thoughts in "Legacies" fit into my uprooting. I go from Massachusetts to New York State (to Valatie, just south east of Albany.) Actually I'll have less responsibility. I can relax in my 76th year and share my last years with retired teaching Brothers!

A few days later I read this report:

 

Washington Post, September 12, 2001

The victims (on United Airlines, Flight 93) included a Roman Catholic Priest, the Rev. Francis Grogan, 76, who had been bound for a vacation with his younger sister in Ramona, California, before assuming a new position as the chaplain of a retirement home for Holy Cross brothers in Upstate New York.

 

Life’s uncertainty has inspired numerous metaphors: It is a dream, a flying shuttle, a mist, a puff of smoke, a shadow, a gesture in the air, a sentence written in the sand, a bird flying in one window of a house and out another. The most apt symbol was suggested by a friend who reckoned that the m-dash that separates the birth and death dates on a tombstone represents the brevity of one’s life. 

 

It’s good to ponder the transiency of life now and then. I think of Moses’ prayer: “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Psalms 90:12). Life is too short to treat carelessly.

 

The country parson, George Herbert, said he used to frequent graveyards to “take acquaintance of this heap of dust,” and wrote…

 

Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem

And true descent; that when thou shalt grow fat,

And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayest know,

That flesh is but the glass which holds the dust

That measures all our time; which also shall

Be crumbled into dust. Mark here below

How tame these ashes are, how free from lust,

That thou mayest fit thy self against the fall.

 

Herbert finds himself in a graveyard and ponders his own passing. He pictures the "dust that measures all our time” running through the hourglass of our flesh, which will itself in time become dust and be laid to rest with the ashes of those who lay beneath his feet. “Mark here below (in the grave),” he writes, “how tame these ashes are, how free from lust”—how unmoved by passion for money, sex or power.

 

It’s high time we took acquaintance of our dust, its transient lust and what alone will endure.

 

David Roper

9/11/21

"Through Death and Beyond" with David Roper

"Through Death and Beyond"

(Tell the next generation) that this is God,

our God forever and ever.

He will guide us forever. —Psalm 48:14

I caught a sequence on Sports Center the other day in which the sportscaster noted that an aging, ailing former-NFL player was "listed as day to day." But then he added an unexpectedly profound philosophical one-liner, "But then again, aren’t we all?"

Indeed. "Out, out, brief candle!”

But here, in an old poem there is a happy surprise: Literally, the text reads "This is God, our God forever and ever. He will lead us beyond dying," i.e., "through death and beyond.” [Additionally, the Hebrew verb translated “lead” refers to a shepherd’s work. Indeed the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, uses poimainei, “he will shepherd (us) through death...”] 

The love, the joy, the warmth of fellowship that we enjoy each day with our Lord cannot be brought to an end by death. Once we've been joined to the eternal God—our God through Jesus Christ—how can we not be with him and he with us forever? Indeed, when our time comes, he will walk with us through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and “beyond”—into life everlasting. He will be “our God forever and ever.”

David Roper

7.23.19

E-musings are archived at http://davidroper.blogspot.com.

Welcome: Who’s Calling? with Carolyn Roper

 Welcome: Who’s Calling?

Years ago David and I were at a conference where one of the speakers was addressing the misconceptions people hold of God. I still remember the speaker saying that for some the thought is, “If I come to God and follow Him, He’ll say ‘Ah ha! Gotcha! Now spinach three times a day for the rest of your life.’” (Kale was not a biggie back then.)

None of us have a complete picture of the God who calls and welcomes us, for we only see “the edges of His ways.” We may hear and even embrace the fact that God calls us Beloved. But then things happen. 

“There were many years I thought Jesus was the mean coach who told me I had to sit on the bench....and like it!”

Our friend Kathy recently sent a note including the words above. I don’t know what “things” happened, but to me her image was powerful. I get it. 

I think we can feel benched when we lose something precious to us: health—that we or a loved one once relied on, or when we lose a family we had so desired. We might lose the dream we had for a child. This could come if that child dies, or has constant struggles or is walking in a far country. Maybe we lose a ministry opportunity or the results we wanted in a ministry. Perhaps we have a failure of faith or are betrayed, excluded or forgotten. Perhaps we feel stuck in a place we would rather not be. The thing that can cause us to feel “benched” can be anything we have but don’t want, or anything we want but don’t have. Fill in the blank in your life.

But then, on top of the sadness to think that God says “sit….and like it!” Ooooh. That thought can take the heart out of me. Not only am I a loser (because of my losses) but a failure because I don’t “like it.” And worse than that, I become suspicious of this God who calls me to come close when I think He has taken me out of the game I love because I’m not good enough.

I have a dear friend whose school-aged child died. A well-meaning person who was a Bible teacher came to be with my friend. Patting her on the shoulder, the visitor said to the weeping mother, “Don’t cry!” Agony upon agony. More hurt. “Like it!”

The good news from the note we received is that there was more. 

 “There were many years I thought Jesus was the mean coach who told me I had to sit on the bench....and like it! When I learned He was crying with me it changed everything.”

Jesus told us in this world we will have tribulation. It’s a world of great grief, as Aslan said to Digory in The Magician’s Nephew. Digory was feeling very sad because his dear mother was very ill. He asked Aslan to heal her. When he looked into Aslan’s eyes they were bright with tears.*

Jesus weeps with us when we weep. He does as He tells us to do to one another (Romans 12:15). He is not put off by our sorrow. Rather He is touched by the feelings of what hurts us (Hebrews 4). He’s been there too. He wept over the death of his friend Lazarus. He wept over those who would not come to Him and be sheltered and comforted “under His wings.” Jesus wept (John 11:35). And He weeps with us when we weep.

Knowing the tender heart of God towards us in our sufferings can change everything, as it did for our friend Kathy Woodhall.

When Moses asked God to show him His glory (Exodus 33) God said, “I will show you my goodness.” Part of that goodness is that He weeps with us as we walk the road before us. He knows that grief is great in our land. He sees. He cares. He stays with us. Jesus Himself groaned in Gethsemane and walked on to Calvary so that we, too, could share in “the joy set before Him.” This anticipated joy enabled Him to endure the pain of this life, including the final pain of the Cross so that He could bring us Home at last.

Since the welcome of Jesus includes His weeping with us, I want to take Him up on His offer and draw near, even when I am weeping. Especially when I am weeping. As I understand His tender heart I am strengthened as well as comforted on my journey. As I remember His goodness, His tenderness, His weeping with me, I am motivated to trust Him with my losses, with my life, and with my loved one. And to do the next thing He asks me to do.  

“There were many years I thought Jesus was the mean coach who told me I had to sit on the bench....and like it! When I learned He was crying with me it changed everything.”

Lord Jesus, we celebrate and rejoice in Your everlasting love for each of us. We know that our “mourning will be turned to dancing”— either here or certainly There. We count on the joy set before us and we count on Your weeping with us in our losses here and now. Thank You, for Your welcoming heart where we don’t have to pretend a loss doesn’t hurt. Thank You, for the Hope that only You can bring. Thank You for the cost You paid to love us well. Help us to love you back and to show our love for You by loving Your other children the way You love us. Amen

Carolyn Roper

7.22.19

*In The Magician’s Nephew, later in the story, Digory was tempted to not complete the task Aslan had given him. His temptation was to find his own way to heal his mother at the cost of not following Aslan’s instructions. But when Digory remembered Aslan’s tears, he trusted Aslan and did as He had asked. Of course, the outcome was much better than Digory could have expected. The book is a good read…again.

E-musings are archived at http://davidroper.blogspot.com.