Faithfulness of God

We are faced with a “being” dilemma.  Our “being” is human, something we share, presently with about 7 billion others of like “being” on this planet.  The variety of lives and circumstances of us 7 billion is impossible to grasp fully.  However, we can connect with any one of them because we share this one big thing, ‘being’ of the same “being,” namely humans.  Interacting with any one of them, we find many feelings, ideas, fears we share in common, and our distinctives would be smaller than the root similarities.  Solitary confinement is a particularly painful experience (which is why prisons use it for disciplinary purposes); there is nothing that can fully replace sharing our ‘being-ness’ with another like being.  Even in the perfect Garden environment, God Himself said it was “not good that man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18 NKJV); note the appearance of that little-but-weighty word “be.”

The situation is as opposite as it could be were you or I to encounter God.  There is a fundamental difference in “being” between any one of us 7 billion humans with God Himself.  As the Scriptures say, God lives in “unapproachable light.”

[Jesus Christ] who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see, to whom be honor and everlasting power. Amen. 1 Timothy 6:16 NKJV,

We greatly err if we think that God is basically like us, just a little stronger, a little smarter, and a little more careful about the ‘righteousness thing.’  No.  He is our Creator, not our peer.  Since the expulsion from Eden, we are corrupted even in our sensory apparatus let alone our ‘being-ness’ to apprehend God on our own.  If we say–thinking about the nature of God–that “God must be like…” we speak as fools.

We do have in the Bible the testimony of God Himself.  Certain of those words recount for us a demonstration of God’s power over all creation, for He brought it out of nothing, sustains it presently, and one day will burn it up in some way.  Some of those passages provide for us a dramatic revelation of God.  When He overtly acts within the confines of His creation, we can immediately see His power, omniscience (all knowing), and so forth, as summarized in the chart below:RBC Retreat, Emmanuel Longing Final Sept 2014 copy.018So, when Christ in the fishing boat with His disciples on the Sea in Galilee, is called upon by His disciples to rescue the crew from the sudden and apparently life-threatening severity of winds and waves.  The disciples, we are told in the text were afraid in the storm.  Yet, when Christ does calm both the wind and the waves, the Bible records that the men in that boat were even more afraid.  They were present with a Being unlike any other in their experience, because there was and is no One else in the entire universe, or beyond even our universe of space-time, that is ‘like’ God.

But what does the below chart illustrate regarding the “Being” of God?RBC Retreat, Emmanuel Longing Final Sept 2014 copy.019When God foretells a manifestation of His Divine power, and which later comes to be, we ‘see’ two other important dimensions of the character of God.  Now it is not just His Sovereignty over anything we would call a law of nature here in space-time, but also that He expressed in words comprehensible to us human beings that has not yet appeared in our experience and He is faithful to His word in fulfilling what He has foretold.

One of the reasons God proclaims His acts is exactly for this purpose:  to demonstrate His ability to communicate with us, together with His faithfulness.

Now let us consider our 4th key word, Good.

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