The local church is not the hope of the world. Whoever said that might have been well-intentioned, and the statement may have come with the expected qualifiers and modifiers. The local church is not the hope of the world. Jesus is, always has been, and forever will be the only hope for this world. Jesus is the hope of the world and the head of the church. The gates of hell itself will not prevail because Christ himself has conquered.
Christian hope, in a word, is resurrection.
If Christian hope is resurrection, we are saying it is something other than progress.. Resurrection sayys, "This is not the end." It is a voice calling from beyond, not from within. Resurrection is God being faithful to his creation to bring it through death into completion and perfection.
Jesus the crucified and risen Lord is the hope of the world.
As fire consumes the forest or a flame sets the mountains ablaze, so pursue them with your tempest and terrify them with your storm. Cover their faces with shame, Lord, so that they will seek your name. May they ever be ashamed and dismayed; may they perish in disgrace. Let them know that you, whose name is the Lord - that you alone are the Most High over all the earth.
The psalmist seems to want only death for his enemies, but the surprise in verses 14-16 is his prayer that wrongdoers be brought to see the truth and come to know God's name (verse 18). In biblical times that would have been a remote possibility for the pagan nations surrounding Israel. And the psalmist is more interested in God's vindication than his enemies' salvation. But in light of Christ and the cross, we see that this is the main way we are able to defeat evil.. Christ gives us great resources for turning enemies into God's friends. He died for us while we were yet God's enemies (Romans 5:10), which motivates us to overcome evil with good (Romans 12:14-21). --
Do to them as you did to Midian, as you did to Sisera and Jabin at the river Kishon, who perished at Endor and became like dung on the ground. Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeeb, all their princes like Zebah and Zalmunna, who said, "Let us take possession of the pasturelands of God." Make them like tumbleweed, my God, like chaff before the wind.
How do we respond to these "imprecatory" psalms that ask God to destroy enemies instead of forgiving them? We should recognize something important here, namely that even in the Old Testament the psalmist is not trying to take revenge himself. These psalm, then, "allow us to turn our anger over to God for him to act as he sees fit" and align us with Paul's advice to "not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath" (Romans 12:19). Once you relocate your enemies - taking - them out of your hands and putting them into God's - you may find yourself developing sympathy for them. Ultimately, no one will get away with anything. --
When God heard them, he was furious; he rejected Israel completely. He abandoned the tabernacle of Shiloh, the tent he had set up among humans. He sent the ark of his might into captivity, his splendor into the hands of the enemy. He gave his people over to the sword; he was furious with his inheritance. Fire consumed their young men, and their young women had no wedding songs; their priests were put to the sword, and their widows could not weep. Israel became so indifferent to the things of God that he allowed the Ark of the Covenant - the sign of his presence with them - to be captured by the Philistines. A child born that day was named Ichabod - meaning "the Glory has departed" (1 Samuel 4:21). Because God is holy, sin separates us from the presence of God (Isaiah 59:2). Even in Christians whose sins are pardoned, Jesus finds spiritual halfheartedness as nauseating to him as uncooked food. "Because you are....neither hot nor cold....I....spit you out of my mouth" (Revelation 3:16). Have you become nonchalant toward sin in your life because you sat, "God is love"? God does love you, and that is why he will not support you in living apart from him. Helping people live life with Jesus everyday,
And so he brought them to the border of his holy land, to the hill country his right hand had taken. He drove out nations before them and allotted their lands to them as an inheritance; he settled the tribes of Israel in their homes. But they put God to the test and rebelled against the Most High; they did not keep his statutes. Like their ancestors they were disloyal and faithless, as unreliable as a faulty bow. They angered him with their high places; they aroused his jealousy with their idols.
The epitome of Israel's failure is that the people turned from the living God to worship idols. Idolatry is foundational to what is wrong with the human race (Romans 1:21-25). Anything that is functionally more important to you than God is an idol. Anything you love more than God - even a good thing like a spouse or child or social cause - is a false god. Because we love them too much, we are wracked with uncontrollable fears and anger when they are threatened and inconsolable despair when we lose them. Until you can identify your idols you cannot understand yourself. Until you turn from them you can't know and walk with God. --
He turned their river into blood; they could not drink from their streams. He sent swarms of flies that devoured them, and frogs that devastated them. He gave their crops to the grasshopper, their produce to the locust. He destroyed their vines with hail and their sycamore-figs with sleet. He gave over their cattle to the hail, their livestock to bolts of lightning. He unleashed against them his hot anger, his wrath, indignation and hostility— a band of destroying angels. He prepared a path for his anger; he did not spare them from death but gave them over to the plague. He struck down all the firstborn of Egypt, the firstfruits of manhood in the tents of Ham. But he brought his people out like a flock; he led them like sheep through the wilderness. He guided them safely, so they were unafraid; but the sea engulfed their enemies.
The plagues God inflicted on Egypt were natural disasters. He made the Nile River undrinkable. That forced frogs out of the marshes, Where they died. Their carcasses led to a plague of flies and gnats, which in turn led to epidemics. The unraveling of nature in Egypt points to a crucial truth. God created the world, so when we disobey him we unleash forces of chaos and disorder. When you, a being created to live for God, live instead for yourself, you violate your design. The ultimate plague is sin, and it will disintegrate you without the antidote - the grace and forgivenss of God in Jesus Christ.
The men of Ephraim, though armed with bows, turned back on the day of battle; 10 they did not keep God’s covenant and refused to live by his law. 11 They forgot what he had done, the wonders he had shown them. 12 He did miracles in the sight of their ancestors in the land of Egypt, in the region of Zoan. 13 He divided the sea and led them through; he made the water stand up like a wall. 14 He guided them with the cloud by day and with light from the fire all night. 15 He split the rocks in the wilderness and gave them water as abundant as the seas; 16 he brought streams out of a rocky crag and made water flow down like rivers. The "men of Ephraim" are the northern tribes of Israel that fell into idolatry (1 Kings 12) and were deported and lost to history (2 Kings 17). The root of their problem was spiritual forgetting. Christians too can stagnate because they "forget that they have been cleansed from their past sins" (2 Peter 1:0). The key is to have a heart constantly vitalized by deliberate remembering of the costly sacrifice of Jesus. We must remember that for our sins Jesus was, as it were, forgotten (Matthew 27:46) so that God can now no more forget us than a mother nursing her infant (Isaiah 49:14-16). Remembering that will make you a great heart.
