Tuesday, August 9, 2022

 

Tuesday, August 9, 2022



Psalm 89:39-53


Hosea 14


Romans 9:14-24


Lesser Festival: Mary Sumner, founder of Mother's Union (d. 1921)



But who indeed are you, a human being, to argue with God?



I wonder which of these two readings you found more difficult. Was it the prophecy of the horrific war crimes the Assyrians were to commit? Or was it the reminder that God gets to decide for Himself what happens to every individual human being?


There are many attributes of God we need to hold together in our mind at once when we sit in our prayer closet. God is loving, merciful, kind, just, and so on. There is one word that describes God really well, that holds all these other attributes within it. We recite it every time we gather at the Lord's Table. Of all the things God is, the one thing God is the most is holy. Holy, holy, holy the angels sing at the throne of God. If we didn't get it the first time, we better have by the third. Holy, a word tragically fallen out of fashion, means to be perfect in a way that is completely separate from how this material universe considers perfection. When Jesus told us that He gave His peace to us, not how the world gives, He meant a holy peace. When the apostle John wrote that “God is love”, he meant a holy love, utterly unlike anything we recognise in this fallen world. We could go on and on.

Paul has taught us about predestination: that God has already decided who receives mercy, and who receives justice. This is our security. Paul has also taught us that God's decision had nothing to do with who we were. This is our humility. Now Paul is teaching something really hard: that God is justified in this. Today's lesson is about worship. Many people find this difficult. We are proud, and this is what makes it difficult to worship a God who operates on His own terms. But what about a God who is magnificently powerful, completely perfect in goodness, unable to abide any sort of evil even in its smallest form, so holy and also loving, that to bring people into this place of perfect holiness and love, He gave himself up in human flesh to die the way we should have, so that we could be where He is?





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