September 14, 2010
Puppy-Sitting
Last week I volunteered to babysit an eight-week old puppy for a couple days. Apparently the eight to nine week-age is when puppies need socialization and boy did we socialize the little guy. When Snickers was awake and running around I hovered over him, not only for his protection, but for mine as well. One day when we were outside the fire and police sirens started going off. Snickers immediately took shelter between my feet until the wailing stopped and I gave him the ‘it’s OK to come out’ now talk. As believers we too should be taking shelter in the Lord when warning sirens sound off, but all too often our actions are more like those of the Jews in Jerusalem that Jesus described when He said, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” (Luke 13:34 NIV)
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Gail;
-----So what is it to be gathered together and sheltered by the Lord if our reactions to the sirens are more like those of the Jerusalem Jews? A person would think that the church would be that gathering into His sheltering. But it does not take much study into its history to see great troubles and hardship even it has laid upon those who invoke the name of Jesus. If its physical tortures have ended for centuries, its political persecutions and psychological controls have not. Today, the evil, governmental principles that will be the Antichrist’s substantive control have been brought into America through the misgivings of the church. The idea that man can and will achieve perfection through collective effort which will usher in the Millennial age is heart and soul of an early Twentieth Century theology called the social gospel. The seed of its idea lives on in the secular collectivism driving political correctness, the collective salvation of Black liberation theology, the glorification of mankind behind the Unitarian gospel, and many other idolatrous ideas.
-----I believe the sheltering makes the church, but the church does not make the sheltering. I believe the church is a passive organism through its emergence from His people’s gathering together. It is active only through what they do from their hearts. I believe the shelter is inside the individual believer. It gains strength from the community of believers, but it is not created by that community. And it is not what the believer makes it, it is what the Lord makes in the believer.
-----I think that is why Jerusalem failed to be gathered under His wings. Archeology has uncovered many artistic expressions of Jehovah being melded into the religious principles of the neighborhood cults. This was the action of people making God. But God is the I AM; He is not created by people; He is what He is. And He sent prophets with messages of Who He is and what He needed His people to become in order to know Him. My favorite passage of Scripture is still, “My son, if you receive My words and treasure up My commandments with you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding; yes, if you cry out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures; then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding.” (Prov 2:1-6) Everything about this passage indicates that neither God, nor wisdom, nor knowledge, nor understanding are made by man, but rather are found in what they are from I AM.
-----The shelter under His wings is finding and participating in the truth of what He is as He expressed it in His Word. The present tense of those participles is key to remaining under His wings. Since we are very limited in heart and mind, when we have come to consider that we have found and understood indicates that we had been sheltered. For then is when we sever from the I AM that minute piece we have learned which will die amongst our own ongoing imaginations as expressed in our actions becoming free of His sheltering wings.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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