Hello All,
(Just a general disclaimer that I must insert here at the beginning. I am but a lay person, like most of you. And these weekly “thoughts” are but my own. Not the definitive word on this or any topic. Just my own conclusions derived from my own study and faith in God. The greatest hope I have for these weekly “thoughts” is to have them be a springboard for further study on your part. Not to be a weekly treatise to be blindly accepted. So, please read them with this intent, this motive in mind).
This week’s lesson from “The Adult Sabbath School Guide” is titled “A Message Worth Sharing”. So, once again, we look into that end-time message we Adventists have claimed as our own. And, once again, we must discover how best to represent and communicate this “message”. The challenge is how to assure this message is represented and communicated in the context of love. Our “Prophet” has made it quite clear that, “the last rays of merciful light, the last message of mercy to be given to the world, is a revelation of His character of love” (Christ’s Object Lessons pg. 415). Therefore, this last message must be properly understood in order to be properly communicated. If not, we may be guilty of becoming Satan’s mouthpiece as we misrepresent God to others as Moses did when he struck the rock twice on the border of the Promised Land… “Because you broke faith with Me in the midst of the sons of Israel at the waters of Meribah-kadesh, in the wilderness of Zin, because you did not treat Me as holy in the midst of the sons of Israel” (Deuteronomy 32: 51). The last thing we need to do is to portray God like Moses did at the rock… as a God of anger (as humanly defined… not as God defines “wrath” in Romans 1: 18, 24,26,28; as “letting go”).
This Scriptural story just referenced can be a clue to us as we grapple with the idea of the “3-Angels Message” and “love”. In the Moses story, God had thundered with fire and earthquake on Mt. Sinai ~40 years before. As a result of the apostasy at that time, 3,000 were killed at God’s direction (See Exodus 32). God had the ground open and swallow Korah, Dathan, Abiram and 250 others after the Mt. Sinai experience (see Numbers 16). So when asked to provide water again on the borders of the Promised Land, Moses struck the rock again, twice, expressing anger at the hardness of the Israelites’ hearts (see Numbers 20). As Moses stood before the people as a representative of God, and because Moses invoked the plural “we”, Moses had displayed God as angry before the people (human anger… impatient, put-out, so tired-of their faithlessness). And in the scripture quoted in the above paragraph, God prohibits Moses from the Promised Land because of his display of anger… that Moses had not represented God rightly before the people. And yet, Moses had only done what he had seen God do previously (so he thought).
Yet all God’s actions are motivated from love, not from indignation (as we sinners define it). So Moses anger was a gross misrepresentation of the Father by one whom the people saw as closest to God. And at a pivotal time when the Israelites’ faith in God needed to be expanded beyond the tangible to the unseen. Hence the injunction to only “speak to the rock before their eyes, and it will yield its water; thus you shall bring water for them out of the rock, and give drink to the congregation and their animals” (Numbers 20:8). The Israelites’’ faith needed to mature beyond the seen. Moses’ act was a gross misrepresentation of the Father’s heart and the Father’s intent. Hence, the discipline toward Moses that was needed… for the people’s sake.
This serious misrepresentation of Moses’ was a duplicate of Lucifer’s in heaven. When one in Heaven who knew the Father misinterpreted the Father before his fellow angels. A misrepresentation that led 1/3 of the angels to abandon faith in the Father and trust Lucifer instead. To their own apostasy and loss. Moses’ duplication of this misrepresentation must be disciplined before the people so that they would have a chance to understand.
We stand at another, similar pivotal time. God has given us a message to represent and communicate at the end of time. A terrible, terrifying message… including wrath, fire, and death. We can be tempted to represent the God of the message just like Satan did in heaven and Moses did at the rock. But if we do, we have made the same misrepresentation of God as did they… and mislead the people even as we perform the work God would have us do. If we miss the true motive of love as we represent and communicate the message, we will have dishonored God and would not “treat (Him) as Holy” before the world. We would be treating Him as angry and as vindictive as any human can be. So wrong. As our prophet tells us as quoted above, this last message to the world is really a message of love. If we present this last message in the spirit of human wrath, then we will have proven to each of us that we really do not know God. And the pronouncement from on high will be “I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness” (Matthew 7:23).
With brotherly love,
Jim