Insightful Musings on the Scriptures

by

Raymond P. Sparre
Northwest University class of '67

Greetings, dear ones.

It’s another beautiful day—cold, crisp, and clear. We’ll run off to church in a few minutes. Then we’ll scramble to follow through with a plan to provide lunch to a niece and her husband who are still wrapping up things at the vacated Wilson home. They’ve had quite a challenge.

Here’s hoping you have a great day—a God-honoring blessed day.

Love. Dad/Ray.

There is an implicit struggle going on in the biased minds of these Jewish believers following Peter’s explanation for going to the house of Cornelius. Their attitudes could be phrased this way—“Oh no! Does this mean we’re not so special to God after all?!?” Yup! That’s exactly what it means.

This helps to trigger a struggle of my own: Why doesn’t God give more attention to protecting His gifts by imparting greater clarity of thought to the recipients of His gifts in order that they better serve as accurate representatives of God’s priorities, plans, and purposes? Obviously, the Sovereign Lord does not seek my advice, and has clearly chosen to not be bound by that strategy. Instead He simply requires a HEART AFTER GOD that serves as foundational to everything else He wants to impart. I can draw no other conclusion that can explain how and why even Christ’s own star disciples could be so out of step with His priorities, plans, and purposes. Rather than instantaneous maturity, God clearly orders a course of growth. Peter certainly came to understand that, ending his second epistle with this punch line: “But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever! Amen” (2 Peter 3:18).

I love the quip we saw recently on a church reader-board sign—“Don’t trust everything you think!” But that is a very common presumptuous failure of many other believers who have experienced evidences of God’s special grace, intervention, and enlightenment. Because God’s touch is so clearly individual and profound, the recipient can easily reason, “Wow—God really likes me!”—and presume that, due to receiving that exceptional gift of divine intervention, “I must be exceptional,” and reason that He is placing His stamp of approval upon everything else in that person’s life, including everything they think, with all their views and attitudes. That can be a huge dangerous mistake. As I think more about it, that line of reasoning was the ideological fuel driving the crucifixion of Christ, the stoning of Stephen, and all the other cases of ugly persecution following in the wake of religious presumption.

Listen again to the circumstance that prompted the verbal attack on Peter from the hard-headed Jewish believers at Jerusalem: “The apostles and the brothers throughout Judea heard that the Gentiles also had received the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him and said, ‘You went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them’” (Acts 11:1-3). Oh no! Can you imagine anything so terrible?! I have to wonder if some in that group were wanting to wrap their hands around a stone about then—wanting to release it at high speed toward Peter’s head—in typical Jewish fashion. Notice that their offense was two-fold—

1. Irritated with God that He would allow Gentiles to get in on what they thought was their exclusive rights and privileges, and
2. irritated with Peter for violating traditional Jewish rules of exclusivism.

Do you think that my thinking is trustworthy if I conclude once again that my general best personal policy is a non-presumptuous, 24/7, Bible-directed, HEART AFTER GOD?