“In everything
give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.”
1 Thessalonians
5:18
The past few days I have been reading
through Genesis in my Daily Bible. As I read about the history of the beginning
days of man, I am fascinated by it all. Genesis does not provide all the
powerful, insightful verses that stand alone to teach us what we should do or
not do, as the verse from Thessalonians above does or as the verses from the
book of Luke are filled with being straight from the mouth of Jesus, but it
does give a very accurate picture of our human nature and the human condition
in general, even though the events and people described lived in a completely
different land and time from our own. On
the 11th, I began reading about Jacob and Esau, twin boys born to
Isaac (Abraham’s son) and Rebekah. These two were destined from birth to be at
odds, like Cain and Able. They grew up
to be two totally different men, then Jacob deceived Esau more than once in
order to claim Esau’s birthright. After
their father’s death, he was forced run to another land under the threat that
Esau would kill him if he remained in Canaan.
Sounds like a soap opera, right?
The good news is that Jacob and Esau never went so far as to kill each
other (like Cain killed Able), and they came to a truce later on, but in so
many ways, instead of learning from history, as humans, we tend to repeat
it. Abraham had problems with deceit,
and these problems were passed onto Isaac, and then to his son, Jacob. As hard as we may try not to repeat the
mistakes of our ancestors, at times, we’re just too human; we can’t seem to
help ourselves. In the stress and fear of the moment, we will do things we
never thought possible of ourselves, things we swore to ourselves we’d never
do. In spite of our fallible nature, God
loves and blesses us still. So, in everything,
I will give thanks, even the mistakes I make regularly, because this is the
will of God or at least it’s already a part of his plan because he knows us so
well. It’s amazing that we ever even
doubt that God knows us, our plight, our fears, and our human condition today.
It should be easy for us to believe that if we know anything about the history
of man as recorded throughout the Bible.
He’s watched over us as we’ve acted and reacted to our relationship with
Him and others in the same ways over and over and over again. This is the human condition, to be born
knowing nothing; as we grow, we learn about life through our very human
experiences, experiences that often take us through making the wrong choices
first and often based of our emotions instead of rational thought, then we
figure out that we need to consider looking inside ourselves and hopefully, we
find God throughout some part of this journey, and we begin striving to follow
Him and become more like Him. The problem is that learning to become more like
God is a life-long process because we start out without knowing anything and
are raised by other humans who are still learning too. In so many ways though,
it’s comforting to know that this life we live and the way we live it is part
of the normal human experience ever since the days of Adam and Eve. It means that when I make a mistake, there’s
no need to sit around and beat myself up about it or have a “woe is me” pity
party because I’m not alone in this world. We all make mistakes, and the best
way to learn from them is the ask forgiveness from God and those who we may
have hurt with our bad choices and move on, finding ways to become better
through it, thanking God along the way for how he is able to take those lemons
in our life and make lemonade out of them.
That’s one thing I’ve noticed about the people in Genesis, they thank
God for the good and the bad, building altars and making ceremonies out of
every truce made, every blessing given, ever narrow escape from an even worse
fate that might have befallen them. God
is paramount in their daily lives, in their thinking. Every child born has a
name based on how God has blessed them. Upon the completion of every successful
journey, God is praised and remembered. That would be the one difference I see
between the human lives recorded in Genesis and our lives now, God was not left
out or forgotten, even in the midst of their sin. He was a central focus in
every part of their lives. We will make mistakes, often the same mistakes
humans were making thousands of years ago, but God has not changed either. He
is still walking right there beside us. He may seem quieter than He was back
then, but he’s still here, still working, still there for us, loving and
blessing us. All we have to do is stop long enough to notice and listen for His
voice in the darkness.
No comments:
Post a Comment