Don’t Be Foolish!
Trust In God, Not Tempt Him!
How are you holding up in the midst of this plague in which you find yourself, my blog reader? I do not know about you, but in my elderly age I can truthfully say that I have never seen or experienced a Palm Sunday such as we have had today. I have seen snow on Palm Sunday. I have seen summer-like warm weather on Palm Sunday. I have never seen a plague, however, on Palm Sunday.
I ask you how you are holding up, because President Trump is telling us that our country is now coming to the worst of the weeks to be expected. As of an hour ago the news reported over 234,000 cases of the coronavirus and that over 9,100 deaths have resulted from it. I am sure those numbers will be much higher by the time I finish writing and posting this blog. Those statistics are bad enough, right? And now we are told that the worst is still to come? O Man! How many more in our country will die before this plague is over? Could we be one of them? This is anything but the kind of a Palm Sunday message that we wanted to hear. Do you not agree? How thankful we can be that we have God’s promises in the Bible to protect us.
This Thursday we commemorate Maundy Thursday of the Church Year. On that day almost two thousand years ago our Lord Jesus ate the Passover Meal with his twelve disciples for the last time and instituted the Lord’s Supper (Holy Communion) as another means to convey God’s forgiveness of our sins to us. On that Thursday the Passover lamb had been slaughtered in preparation for that meal. Jesus was fulfilling that prophetic imagery of the Passover, for he himself was the true Passover Lamb to be sacrificed. He was the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. He would go to the cross and be sacrificed by God to pay for the sins of all people – yes, even your sins and mine, my blogger. Because Jesus suffered the punishment for all our sins, we have God’s forgiveness and peace. He is no longer angry with us, sinners though we are.
The original Passover that Jesus commemorated with his disciples and that he was about to fulfill himself as the true Lamb of God had taken place at the time of Moses about 1,450 years earlier. That first Passover was also a plague. It was a plague upon the Egyptians. The Israelites had seen nine previous plagues that God had inflicted upon the Egyptians. They were all bad. None, however, compared to the tenth plague of the Passover. At midnight the Lord struck the firstborn of the Egyptians dead. Not an Egyptian house escaped the carnage; every one had a dead corpse in it. Loud cries of Egyptian anguish and horror rose up in the night’s sky. How unsettling, even frightening, those excruciating cries must have been in the ears of the Israelites, who were staying in their closed-up houses listening to them. Death was all around them. But they themselves were spared, because when the Lord saw the blood of the sacrificial lamb on the doorposts and lintels of their homes, he passed over them. That blood of the lamb that saved the Israelites from death symbolized the blood Jesus would shed to save us from eternal death and damnation.
Now we are hearing that the silent stalker, the invisible enemy as the coronavirus is called, is going about infecting over 230,000 of our fellow Americans, killing thousands of them. At this deadly time, we need to trust, not tempt, God to watch over us and spare us from death.
Jacob is a good example of what we need to do in a time of crisis. Twenty years earlier Jacob had stolen his brother Esau’s blessing by deceiving his father Isaac. Jacob had to flee to Haran to save his life, because Esau had been intent upon killing him. In Haran Jacob had worked for his uncle Laban. During that time the Lord had enriched Jacob. Then the Lord told Jacob it was time to return to the Promised Land of Canaan. En route Jacob sent a humble, kind message to his brother Esau that he was returning home to Isaac in Canaan. Jacob sent the message in the attempt to soothe Esau and pave the way for a friendly, not hostile, reunion. Jacob then learned, however, that Esau was coming to meet him with four hundred of his men. That news alarmed and frightened Jacob. He feared for the worst. Esau was coming to attack and to kill him. Jacob divided into two separate companies all his male and female slaves as well as his vast herds of sheep, goats, cows, camels and donkeys. Jacob figured if Esau attacked one company, the other could flee to safety. Then Jacob prayed to God, thanking God for his lovingkindness that had so enriched him, reminding God of his promises to remain with him, and pleading with God to deliver him from the murderous intentions of Esau.
I want you to notice what Jacob did; he not only prayed to God, he also did all that he could to help himself. That is a good example of what we need to do in the midst of this coronavirus plague in which we find ourselves. We will not only want to pray but to do what we can to help ourselves. We don’t want to be like the two foolish men. The first man trusted in God and prayed that God would give him his daily bread. But he did not work to earn it and buy it. He just sat back and waited for God to rain the bread down out of heaven. He starved to death while waiting! The other foolish man complained in his prayers about getting wet, but he didn’t have enough common sense to come out of the rain! They both trusted in God, but they both put God to the test by doing nothing to help themselves. During this coronavirus plague we should be praying to God to protect us from the virus, but at the same time we should be doing what we can to protect ourselves, such as staying in our houses as the Israelites did while the plague was going on. We do not want to be foolish by trusting in God to protect us while at the same time tempting him to do what we refuse to do ourselves – protect ourselves!
The ancient Israelites at the time of Moses also put God to the test to act in their behalf. They were in a life and death crisis also. They were out in the deserted wilderness with no water to drink, about two million of them, not counting all their flocks and herds. They tempted God by putting him to the test to supply them with water. Moses named that place Massah, which in Hebrew means “Test”. God did supply them with water by making water flow out of a rock, but he was not happy with them for their lack of faith in him to provide them with water. During Moses’ second giving of God’s law to the Israelites, he gave them this command, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah” (Deuteronomy 6:16 NASB).
When the devil tempted Jesus in the wilderness, the devil tempted Jesus to prove that he was the Son of God by making God the Father save him from certain death when Jesus would throw himself down from the highest point of the temple. Jesus then declared what Moses had told the Israelites, saying, “YOU SHALL NOT PUT THE LORD YOUR GOD TO THE TEST.”
Likewise, during this coronavirus plague when death is surrounding us, we need to trust in God to protect us but without tempting him in the process. You, my blog reader, may be wondering what I mean by that. What I mean is quite simple really. We have by the goodness of God’s providence an excellent government with a president that has been doing everything possible to keep us safe and provided for throughout this virus crisis. He has called in knowledgeable experts from just about every field you can name – medicine, manufacturing, transportation, economics, banking, law enforcement, the military, and probably some others I am not thinking of at the moment. So, our government has seen to it that we have been provided with superb information on how to protect ourselves from becoming infected with the coronavirus. Specifically: “Stay at home! Practice social distancing and stay away from people in general! Don’t touch your face! Wash your hands!” Following those simple instructions has been proving to work. But if we do not follow those simple instructions, and instead only trust in God to protect us, we put God to the test! On the one hand we are tempting God, while on the other hand we are trusting in God. That don’t work! That is as foolish as grumbling about getting wet without having the sense to come out of the rain! We should not expect God to do miraculously what we could naturally do for ourselves. We need to do both – trust in God and do what we can to help ourselves.
I do not know about you, but I become upset with those who do not follow the urging of our government officials to do our part to defeat this coronavirus by practicing the simple steps stated above. Unfortunately, there continue to be those who do not take this crisis that our country is in seriously. Like this one man I know whom I have seen going about his life like everything is just fine, he has nothing to worry about, and continues to mix and gab with the neighbors. Individuals like that are not only endangering themselves but everyone with whom they come into contact. That kind of behavior in effect puts God to this test: “Keep me from becoming infected, O God! But I am going to continue to do as I please, when I please, with whom I please without any concern for anyone else. And I will put myself in danger in the process and others as well.” May none of us become such a foolish person.
God does promise to protect us in many verses of the Bible. Every verse in the Bible, for example, that describes the Lord our God as a shelter, refuge, rock, fortress, and defense assures us God is watching over us and protecting us. When we pray, let us pray as Jacob did, by reminding the Lord our God of the promises that he has made to us, asking him to fulfill those promises to watch over and protect us now at the time of this coronavirus plague. For example, we could remind him of his promises in Isaiah 41:10 and fulfill them for us now: “Do not fear, for I am with you; do not look fearfully about you, for I am your God. I will strengthen you; what is more, I will help you; moreover, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”
And here in Psalm 91:1-10 are promises of comfort for you who are in this crisis:
He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
Will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.
2 I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress,
My God, in whom I trust!”
3 For it is He who delivers you from the snare of the trapper
And from the deadly pestilence.
4 He will cover you with His pinions,
And under His wings you may seek refuge;
His faithfulness is a shield and bulwark.
5 You will not be afraid of the terror by night,
Or of the arrow that flies by day;
6 Of the pestilence that [a]stalks in darkness,
Or of the destruction that lays waste at noon.
7 A thousand may fall at your side
And ten thousand at your right hand,
But it shall not approach you.
8 You will only look on with your eyes
And see the recompense of the wicked.
9 [b]For you have made the Lord, my refuge,
Even the Most High, your dwelling place.
10 No evil will befall you,
Nor will any plague come near your [c]tent. (NASB)
God’s blessings be with you in this Holy Week.
Rev. JC
I ask you how you are holding up, because President Trump is telling us that our country is now coming to the worst of the weeks to be expected. As of an hour ago the news reported over 234,000 cases of the coronavirus and that over 9,100 deaths have resulted from it. I am sure those numbers will be much higher by the time I finish writing and posting this blog. Those statistics are bad enough, right? And now we are told that the worst is still to come? O Man! How many more in our country will die before this plague is over? Could we be one of them? This is anything but the kind of a Palm Sunday message that we wanted to hear. Do you not agree? How thankful we can be that we have God’s promises in the Bible to protect us.
This Thursday we commemorate Maundy Thursday of the Church Year. On that day almost two thousand years ago our Lord Jesus ate the Passover Meal with his twelve disciples for the last time and instituted the Lord’s Supper (Holy Communion) as another means to convey God’s forgiveness of our sins to us. On that Thursday the Passover lamb had been slaughtered in preparation for that meal. Jesus was fulfilling that prophetic imagery of the Passover, for he himself was the true Passover Lamb to be sacrificed. He was the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. He would go to the cross and be sacrificed by God to pay for the sins of all people – yes, even your sins and mine, my blogger. Because Jesus suffered the punishment for all our sins, we have God’s forgiveness and peace. He is no longer angry with us, sinners though we are.
The original Passover that Jesus commemorated with his disciples and that he was about to fulfill himself as the true Lamb of God had taken place at the time of Moses about 1,450 years earlier. That first Passover was also a plague. It was a plague upon the Egyptians. The Israelites had seen nine previous plagues that God had inflicted upon the Egyptians. They were all bad. None, however, compared to the tenth plague of the Passover. At midnight the Lord struck the firstborn of the Egyptians dead. Not an Egyptian house escaped the carnage; every one had a dead corpse in it. Loud cries of Egyptian anguish and horror rose up in the night’s sky. How unsettling, even frightening, those excruciating cries must have been in the ears of the Israelites, who were staying in their closed-up houses listening to them. Death was all around them. But they themselves were spared, because when the Lord saw the blood of the sacrificial lamb on the doorposts and lintels of their homes, he passed over them. That blood of the lamb that saved the Israelites from death symbolized the blood Jesus would shed to save us from eternal death and damnation.
Now we are hearing that the silent stalker, the invisible enemy as the coronavirus is called, is going about infecting over 230,000 of our fellow Americans, killing thousands of them. At this deadly time, we need to trust, not tempt, God to watch over us and spare us from death.
Jacob is a good example of what we need to do in a time of crisis. Twenty years earlier Jacob had stolen his brother Esau’s blessing by deceiving his father Isaac. Jacob had to flee to Haran to save his life, because Esau had been intent upon killing him. In Haran Jacob had worked for his uncle Laban. During that time the Lord had enriched Jacob. Then the Lord told Jacob it was time to return to the Promised Land of Canaan. En route Jacob sent a humble, kind message to his brother Esau that he was returning home to Isaac in Canaan. Jacob sent the message in the attempt to soothe Esau and pave the way for a friendly, not hostile, reunion. Jacob then learned, however, that Esau was coming to meet him with four hundred of his men. That news alarmed and frightened Jacob. He feared for the worst. Esau was coming to attack and to kill him. Jacob divided into two separate companies all his male and female slaves as well as his vast herds of sheep, goats, cows, camels and donkeys. Jacob figured if Esau attacked one company, the other could flee to safety. Then Jacob prayed to God, thanking God for his lovingkindness that had so enriched him, reminding God of his promises to remain with him, and pleading with God to deliver him from the murderous intentions of Esau.
I want you to notice what Jacob did; he not only prayed to God, he also did all that he could to help himself. That is a good example of what we need to do in the midst of this coronavirus plague in which we find ourselves. We will not only want to pray but to do what we can to help ourselves. We don’t want to be like the two foolish men. The first man trusted in God and prayed that God would give him his daily bread. But he did not work to earn it and buy it. He just sat back and waited for God to rain the bread down out of heaven. He starved to death while waiting! The other foolish man complained in his prayers about getting wet, but he didn’t have enough common sense to come out of the rain! They both trusted in God, but they both put God to the test by doing nothing to help themselves. During this coronavirus plague we should be praying to God to protect us from the virus, but at the same time we should be doing what we can to protect ourselves, such as staying in our houses as the Israelites did while the plague was going on. We do not want to be foolish by trusting in God to protect us while at the same time tempting him to do what we refuse to do ourselves – protect ourselves!
The ancient Israelites at the time of Moses also put God to the test to act in their behalf. They were in a life and death crisis also. They were out in the deserted wilderness with no water to drink, about two million of them, not counting all their flocks and herds. They tempted God by putting him to the test to supply them with water. Moses named that place Massah, which in Hebrew means “Test”. God did supply them with water by making water flow out of a rock, but he was not happy with them for their lack of faith in him to provide them with water. During Moses’ second giving of God’s law to the Israelites, he gave them this command, “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah” (Deuteronomy 6:16 NASB).
When the devil tempted Jesus in the wilderness, the devil tempted Jesus to prove that he was the Son of God by making God the Father save him from certain death when Jesus would throw himself down from the highest point of the temple. Jesus then declared what Moses had told the Israelites, saying, “YOU SHALL NOT PUT THE LORD YOUR GOD TO THE TEST.”
Likewise, during this coronavirus plague when death is surrounding us, we need to trust in God to protect us but without tempting him in the process. You, my blog reader, may be wondering what I mean by that. What I mean is quite simple really. We have by the goodness of God’s providence an excellent government with a president that has been doing everything possible to keep us safe and provided for throughout this virus crisis. He has called in knowledgeable experts from just about every field you can name – medicine, manufacturing, transportation, economics, banking, law enforcement, the military, and probably some others I am not thinking of at the moment. So, our government has seen to it that we have been provided with superb information on how to protect ourselves from becoming infected with the coronavirus. Specifically: “Stay at home! Practice social distancing and stay away from people in general! Don’t touch your face! Wash your hands!” Following those simple instructions has been proving to work. But if we do not follow those simple instructions, and instead only trust in God to protect us, we put God to the test! On the one hand we are tempting God, while on the other hand we are trusting in God. That don’t work! That is as foolish as grumbling about getting wet without having the sense to come out of the rain! We should not expect God to do miraculously what we could naturally do for ourselves. We need to do both – trust in God and do what we can to help ourselves.
I do not know about you, but I become upset with those who do not follow the urging of our government officials to do our part to defeat this coronavirus by practicing the simple steps stated above. Unfortunately, there continue to be those who do not take this crisis that our country is in seriously. Like this one man I know whom I have seen going about his life like everything is just fine, he has nothing to worry about, and continues to mix and gab with the neighbors. Individuals like that are not only endangering themselves but everyone with whom they come into contact. That kind of behavior in effect puts God to this test: “Keep me from becoming infected, O God! But I am going to continue to do as I please, when I please, with whom I please without any concern for anyone else. And I will put myself in danger in the process and others as well.” May none of us become such a foolish person.
God does promise to protect us in many verses of the Bible. Every verse in the Bible, for example, that describes the Lord our God as a shelter, refuge, rock, fortress, and defense assures us God is watching over us and protecting us. When we pray, let us pray as Jacob did, by reminding the Lord our God of the promises that he has made to us, asking him to fulfill those promises to watch over and protect us now at the time of this coronavirus plague. For example, we could remind him of his promises in Isaiah 41:10 and fulfill them for us now: “Do not fear, for I am with you; do not look fearfully about you, for I am your God. I will strengthen you; what is more, I will help you; moreover, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”
And here in Psalm 91:1-10 are promises of comfort for you who are in this crisis:
He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
Will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.
2 I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress,
My God, in whom I trust!”
3 For it is He who delivers you from the snare of the trapper
And from the deadly pestilence.
4 He will cover you with His pinions,
And under His wings you may seek refuge;
His faithfulness is a shield and bulwark.
5 You will not be afraid of the terror by night,
Or of the arrow that flies by day;
6 Of the pestilence that [a]stalks in darkness,
Or of the destruction that lays waste at noon.
7 A thousand may fall at your side
And ten thousand at your right hand,
But it shall not approach you.
8 You will only look on with your eyes
And see the recompense of the wicked.
9 [b]For you have made the Lord, my refuge,
Even the Most High, your dwelling place.
10 No evil will befall you,
Nor will any plague come near your [c]tent. (NASB)
God’s blessings be with you in this Holy Week.
Rev. JC
If you would like to make a comment, send it to me through the Contact Christian Inconnect link. I will look forward to reading it. If you would like to be informed when I post another blog, along with your comment tell me you would like me to add your name to my mailing list.
I would appreciate your telling your family and friends and circle of contacts about my Christian blogs. Please spread the word!
I would appreciate your telling your family and friends and circle of contacts about my Christian blogs. Please spread the word!
If you like my blogs, I am confident you will like my books. Try one.
They are available as ebooks as well as paperbacks. Click on the book cover of your choice to see its details and description.
They are available as ebooks as well as paperbacks. Click on the book cover of your choice to see its details and description.