Friday, January 20, 2023

 

Friday, January 20, 2023


Psalm 48
Genesis 10:32-11:9; 27-32

John 8:31-47


And the LORD said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”


The moment the Tower of Babel fell was one of the greatest displays of God’s love to us. Does this sound silly? Think about it in context. From the moment God made us, we were surrounded by the goodness and glory of God: the plants, the animals, the natural world; all this beauty and blessing. Then one brother killed another, the ground cried out with the shed blood, and violence and evil ran rampant so viciously that the whole world needed a really good wash. Even after the floodwaters subsided, a son laughed at his naked father and looked for others to join in the teasing.


God saved us from ourselves when He knocked that tower down. His grace was displayed by restraining us from the evil we are capable of. This restraining grace happens all the time in our own lives; moments, more often than we would like, when we feel anger and bitterness rising up, only to vanish when the Holy Spirit calms us down and points us to Jesus.


Humans don’t like to learn this lesson. There are plenty of organisations today, government and non-government, who would like to gather up all people into a common cause. But without Jesus, these causes look to the glory of people, and so we get situations like the social credit scheme, or a ban on certain types of cooking appliance.


This weakness in humans is not part of our design. We are not made to be evil. Evil is only an absence, not a presence. The human being is made complete by the presence of God. When God’s Holy Spirit enters us, the emptiness is filled with good things, and lots of it, pressed down, and running over.


God loves humans, and He loves us in our diversity. He is big enough and smart enough to hold all humans together in a common cause while still having us speak different languages, eat different food, wear different clothes, and dance to different types of music. In fact, I would go so far as to say that God actually enjoys the variety. Look at all the different animals He made; look at all the different stars and planets in the sky. Only in Jesus Christ, the Lord of Creation, the High King of Heaven, can all this difference be held together in common cause. Because that common cause is love, the type of love that comes from God.



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