His Encouragement #133

Welcome to His Encouragement Thursday! I don’t know about you, but Thursdays are my struggle day of the week. By Thursday, I have already been working hard at school and at home, and I just wish it would hurry up and be Friday already. LOL! I definitely need a little extra Jesus time on Thursdays.

Trisha, my blogger friend at Joy of Reading, and I decided on calling this post “His Encouragement” because our real source of peace, strength, and security can only come from Jesus Christ. He and He alone is our constant! We pray and hope that these Thursday posts become a real encouragement to you and help you end your week strong in God’s love and purpose for you. God bless!

Today’s Thursday Encouragement:

Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the Lord has comforted His people and will have compassion on His afflicted.
Isaiah 49:13 ESV

In Hebrews 13:8 we are told that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” Jesus is the same God He has ALWAYS been and He has no plans to change EVER. This is an unchangeable fact, but it is a fact most people change every single day.

IF you believe, as I do, that God is the SAME yesterday, today, and tomorrow, then it just makes sense that God has ALWAYS been forgiving, compassionate, merciful, gracious, loving and patient. He wasn’t one way in the Old Testament and a new way in the New. That would make God bipolar. God is NOT two different gods — one from Genesis-Malachi, one from Matthew-Revelation.

In John 1:1 John writes, “In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was with God, and the WORD was God.” Later in verse 14 we are told that this WORD, “became flesh and dwelt among us…” JESUS is that WORD who was with God from the very beginning. No one contests this fact until we get into the nitty-gritty of what John is actually saying here.

What people call the New Testament today did not exist when Jesus lived on this earth in human form. What did exist is the TaNaK: Torah, Prophets (Nebi’im), and the Writings (Ketubim). Jesus, according to what John has written in John 1, is TORAH. When Jesus came to this earth it wasn’t to bring us NEW material, it was to SHOW us HOW to live His WORD.

When God gave Torah to Moses and the Israelites at Mt. Sinai the idea was that humans would follow God’s Word. But humans didn’t (and don’t) follow God’s Word. Humans follow their own wants and desires. So, God sent the Judges and Prophets hoping His people would turn back from their ways and follow Him. The Judges and Prophets were to be guides among other things. But they were not enough. So God gave His people Kings. But that didn’t work either. People were not following HIS WORD. So, He finally sent Jesus Christ (the actual TORAH) to earth. And, wouldn’t you know it, SOME people started DOING the WORD.

What’s my point?

One day we will all stand before Jesus. In Matthew 7:22-23 Jesus says, “On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your Name, and cast out demons in Your Name, and do mighty works in Your Name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of LAWLESSNESS.” (Side note, TORAH means LAW/INSTRUCTION/TEACHING. When Jesus says lawless He is actually saying Torahless.) My point is that if we choose to make Jesus in our own making, some NEW and IMPROVED version of God found only in the New Testament, we are creating and worshiping an idol and one day the actual Jesus will say, “Depart, I NEVER knew you.” I don’t know about you, but I can’t hear Jesus say that to me. It will literally kill my very soul.

What does this have to do with Isaiah 49:13?

I chose this verse because it is one of the MANY examples in the Bible that shows GOD as a compassionate comforter and a merciful Father, but I also chose it because it proves that God is SO amazing that the heavens, the earth, and the mountains desire to EXULT God and SING out praises to Him. God being all the amazing things we attribute to Jesus is not a NEW idea. This is a very OLD idea. But don’t take my word for it. Get into the Bible. As Paul states in 1 Thessalonians 5:21, “Test everything.”

If you need a place to start, here is a beautiful list of the 13 attributes of God as discussed in Exodus 34: https://p9d2x4k7.rocketcdn.me/wp-content/uploads/13_Attributes.pdf. This document comes courtesy of my church, El Shaddai Ministries. Check it out!