• Men’s Ministry: This Saturday morning Garrett Grigas, son of Glen and Kris, will tell his story of abandoning Christ only to find out that Christ had not abandoned him. It’s an account filled with honesty and hope. Join us at 8:00 am for breakfast and fellowship, then Garrett’s journey at 9:00.
• David says in Psalm 119 that the earth stands fast by God’s “appointment.” Ps 40:26 says of the stars that God “brings out their host by number, calling them all by name, by the greatness of his might, and because he is strong in power not one is missing.” That sounds unbelievably specific, as though God were micro-managing the natural world, right down to the appearance of each star at night. Who believes that?
• One of the oddities of the typical Christian mind is the ease with which we believe both in natural processes and in miracles, which are decidedly unnatural. So, on the one hand, we think of the world as self-perpetuating under natural “laws”, a little like the people Peter speaks of who say, “…all things are continuing as they were from the beginning of creation” (2 Pet 3.4). Yet simultaneously we understand that God can violate his own natural order as he chooses, hence the definition of a miracle: “…an event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.”
• But, back to Ps. 40, what if everything that happens is a “work of divine agency?” What if passages like “you open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing” (Ps 145:16) are literally true, that in effect the birds in my backyard are eating out of the hand of God? What if the world of “natural laws” is just a failure of imagination, a failure of faith?
• Ps 139: “If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.” It seems to me this means that when I took that trip, booking fights, renting cars, reserving hotel rooms, I was actually in the hand of God the entire time, even though I can also explain to you, in “natural” terms, how every event came to pass. To God there is no natural world, no supernatural world, just his world, which he manages by “the greatness of his might.”
• Wherever you are today, wherever you are going, say this to him with each breath: “your right hand shall hold me.”