Choose Your Words Wisely

 

President Calvin Coolidge was known for being a man of few words. His preference for not speaking earned him the nickname “Silent Cal.” His wife Grace told a story about a White House dinner party in which a young lady was seated beside the President. She told Coolidge that she made a bet with her friend that she could get him to say at least three words during dinner. 

 

“You lose,” Coolidge said, without even looking up from his plate, and he didn’t speak another word during the course of the meal. Talk about choosing your words wisely! Coolidge didn’t say much, but when he did, he tried to make his words count. 

 

Some speak more than others, but on average people say about 7,000 words a day. Whether you are on the top end of that number, or whether you are closer to Silent Cal, you should still choose your words wisely. That is what David wanted to do. He once wrote, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer (Psalm 19:14).” 

 

A great question to ask is, “Are my words acceptable in God’s sight?” Sometimes we deem things as unacceptable. A parent tells their child their behavior is unacceptable, or a teacher tells a student the assignment they turned in is unacceptable. I would hate to know that God found my words to be unacceptable. That assessment is probably true of all of us from time to time, but for some their overall speech patterns are unacceptable. 

 

Crude words are unacceptable, and Paul said, “Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification…(Ephesians 4:29).” Dishonest words are unacceptable, and Solomon said, “These six things the Lord hates…a proud look, a lying tongue (Proverbs 6:16-17).” Blasphemous words are unacceptable, and Moses wrote, “You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain (Exodus 20:7).” 

 

Some might wonder what the big deal is. How can words uttered into the air really be a problem? For starters, our words reveal a heart issue; if we are losing our temper and saying angry things, those words are just symptoms of a worse problem. But another reason to choose our words carefully is that they are a reflection of the God we serve. If we are liars, the world will not trust us when we tell them they need Jesus. When we are crude, they will not think they need Jesus if Jesus hasn’t cleaned us up. When we blaspheme, they won’t think Jesus is special to us. 

 

The words we say matter to God because they can turn people off to Him. You don’t have to be Silent Cal, but please choose your words wisely. 

 

The Importance of Pitch

Pitch is very important. No, I’m not talking about hitting the right note with your voice or instrument. And no, I’m not talking about the person on the mound trying to get a fastball past a batter. I’m talking about the asphalt-like substance found in the Bible. 

Pitch is found in connection to Noah’s ark. In Genesis 6:14 God instructed Noah this way: “Make yourself an ark of gopherwood; make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and outside with pitch.” The word pitch in Hebrew literally means to cover, specifically with bitumen. Bitumen was an ancient asphalt used by many different people groups in the Middle East similar to our cement and mortar. Since the word meant to cover, it was used figuratively for covering a debt, as in forgiveness or appeasement. 

The same Hebrew word translated as pitch in Genesis 6:14 is translated as atone or atonement throughout the Old Testament. This is incredible. The reason the ark was covered in pitch was to ensure that water did not come in the cracks and spoil the vessel. Remember, the floodwaters were part of God’s judgment on man’s sin, so the pitch, or atonement, kept Noah and his seven relatives safe from God’s judgment. In a similar way, Moses’ mother used pitch to cover the basket that she placed her young son in (Exodus 2:3). 

That bitumen used as pitch covered Noah and his family from God’s wrath, and animal sacrifices were later made for the same reason. Leviticus 17:11 says blood makes atonement for the soul. In the Old Testament atonement was made to cover sins, but sin could not be forgiven because the blood of goats and bulls is not sufficient for that task. In this regard God’s wrath was appeased, but a better covering was needed. 

In the New Testament atonement carries the idea of man being reconciled to God, but that is only possible because of the death of Jesus. Pitch—whether covering a boat, a basket, or a believer—was only a foreshadowing of what Jesus would do once and for all at Calvary. Moses and Noah were covered; so were all who trusted in God’s sacrificial system. The only question now is, have you been covered by the blood of Jesus?   

The Sun and Moon

Which is bigger—the sun or the moon? I’m sure you know the answer: the sun is much larger than the moon. But let me ask you another question. How did you know that? You would not come to that conclusion with the naked eye because the moon often appears to be larger than the sun. This is a fact we have learned in school as a result of science. 

The moon is big. It has a diameter of more than 2,100 miles, making it about twenty-five percent of the Earth’s diameter. While the moon is big, it is dwarfed by the sun, which has a diameter of almost 865,000 miles. Our sun is so massive that if it were a cookie jar and the moon were cookies, it could hold 6 million moons! 

When Moses was writing down the history of how God created the world, he described the fourth day in this manner: “Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also (Genesis 1:16).” I cannot help but wonder how Moses knew the sun was larger than the moon. In the book Exploring Genesis, John Phillips wrote, “Ordinary observation would lead to the opposite conclusion. We have all seen the giant harvest moon, seemingly eight feet in diameter, hovering over the skyline, dominating the evening sky. We have never seen the sun look as large as that. Ancient peoples thought the moon was far greater than the sun, and accounted for its lack of light and heat, as compared with the sun, by assuming it was very much farther away from the earth than the sun.” 

In truth, the moon appears to be larger than the sun because it is much closer to Earth than the sun is. While the sun is 93 million miles away, the moon is fewer than 240,000 miles away. By the way, the precise location of the sun and moon in relation to the Earth is optimal for life, proving God’s intelligent design of the universe. 

The only way Moses could have known that the sun is larger than the moon is if God told him that was the case. The prevailing thought for thousands of years was the exact opposite, and when the Bible appeared to be incorrect, it was later justified by science. Not only can we trust God’s Word, we can be reminded that we never have to altar our interpretations of it just because the prevailing thoughts today say the Bible is wrong. When there is a contradiction between God’s Word and man’s, just hold on; soon we’ll find out that man was wrong once again, and God is always right.  

The Most Expensive Meal

In October of 1971 the Shah of Iran hosted a banquet for sixty kings, queens, and heads of state. The purpose of the event was to celebrate the 2,500^thyear of the Persian Empire, and the price tag for the celebration was an estimated $100 million. It has been suggested that this was perhaps the costliest table ever spread.

I would disagree with that assessment, however. I believe the Lord’s Supper is the costliest table ever spread. No, the ingredients do not surpass the $100 million that the Iranian shah spent; we only spend a few bucks on grape juice and crackers. The Lord’s Supper is the costliest table ever spread because the meal cost Jesus His life. The greatest Man who ever lived had to lay down His life. The only perfect Person in history would have to pour out His life’s blood so that we may have a seat at the table. 

When we gather together to take communion we share in one of the richest rites in history. Our Lord took the bread and cup from the Passover Seder and greatly changed the meaning that had stood for centuries. The bread was called the Affikomen,which means “The Coming One.” It was eaten each year at Passover in anticipation of the coming Messiah, and all who ate it did so in hopes that soon God would send the Rescuer. Jesus told them the bread represented His body. The Coming One had arrived. In other words Jesus was saying, “The Messiah you have been looking for is now before your very eyes. I am He.”

The cup He took was the third cup of the Passover, called the Cup of Redemption, and it followed the Affikomen.This cup was about looking back to the Exodus, when God redeemed Israel out of Egyptian slavery. In Exodus 6:6 God said to Moses, “Say therefore to the people of Israel, ‘I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from slavery to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great acts of judgment.’”

Jesus changed the meaning of this cup to the redemption that would be made available through the new covenant cut in His blood. Peter, who was in the Upper Room that night, would later write, “You were not redeemed with corruptible things such as silver and gold, …but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a Lamb without blemish or without spot (I Peter 1:18-19).” 

In other words Jesus was saying, “No longer drink this third cup simply looking back to redemption from Egypt. From now on drink this cup thinking about the redemption of your souls made possible by my shed blood.” 

When we sit down to the Lord’s table we partake of simple ingredients available at any grocery store, but it is a costly meal in that it required the body of Jesus to be broken, and the blood of Jesus to be shed. As often as we eat it, we pause and give thanks to Jesus for the redemption that only He could make possible. 

Don't Make Me Come Back There!

In honor of Father’s Day, I have been thinking about some of those classic lines our fathers said to us over the years. When riding in the car, how many of us heard our fathers ask, “Do I need to pull this car over?” Maybe you and your siblings were arguing, and he would threaten, “Don’t make me come back there!” Dads don’t have to say what they are going to do when they pull the car over or when they come back there; it is understood. If he pulls over, punishment will soon follow. 

God, the Righteous Father, gave similar threats to His people. Most notably through the prophet Jeremiah, God said, “Behold, I will visit upon you the evil of your doings 23:2, KJV).” Through Moses God promised to “visit the iniquity” of those who hated Him (Exodus 34:6-7, Numbers 14:18, Deuteronomy 5:8-10).  When God promises to come for a visit, He isn’t coming for dessert and coffee. He doesn’t need to describe exactly what will happen when He comes; it is understood. When God comes to visit people because of their iniquity, punishment will soon follow. 

Yes, God is a God who is rich in mercy and slow to wrath, but there is a time for everything, and that includes discipline and judgment. Just like a good Father, God first warns His children of the consequences of their rebellion, so they cannot be caught off guard when God “comes back there.” We have been warned, so the ball is in our court. If we do not want God to come to us in discipline, then we simply need to live in accordance with His instructions for us. 

The good news is that God’s corrective action is to make us better people, not to simply inflict pain or suffering. The hardships He may bring into our lives are meant to get our attention, to steer us back into right living. When we repent, God relents. When we stop doing whatever caused Him to visit us in discipline, the discipline subsides. 

Not every visit from God is for judgment. In Revelation 3:20 God says He stands at the door and knocks, and if anyone lets Him in He will come in and dine with them. This kind of visit is a warm one between friends. Jesus wants to have a relationship with us, so if we let Him in now, He won’t have to come in judgment later. 

Moses and Jesus

Last week I wrote about Moses and the snake he grabbed at the burning bush, and now I want to think about the rock that Moses used to get water for Israel in the wilderness. In Exodus 17 God told Moses to strike a rock with his staff (the same staff that was turned into a snake in chapter 4), and when Moses obeyed, water gushed out of the rock. There were an estimated two million people, not to mention animals, in this wilderness caravan, so a substantial amount of water would be needed to satisfy the group. About forty years later God instructed Moses to speak to a rock in order to get more water (Numbers 20), but instead of speaking to it, Moses hit the rock with his staff, but this time he struck it twice. For this act of disobedience Moses was told he would not be able to enter the Promised Land with the rest of Israel, and that Joshua would be his successor.

This seemingly harsh punishment for Moses makes a little more sense when we factor in Paul’s words in I Corinthians 10:4; speaking of those years in the wilderness, the apostle said they “all drank from that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ.” We need to think about that rock Moses struck as a picture of Christ. As the Suffering Servant, Jesus needed to be struck, or crucified, only once (Hebrew 9:28); because of that we can speak directly to Him (Hebrews 4:16). Moses misrepresented the Messiah by his actions.

It is actually fitting that Moses was not able to lead Israel into the Promised Land. In that same passage from 1 Corinthians Paul said Israel was “baptized into Moses (v.2),” who was the mediator of the Old Covenant law and its system of works. Jesus became the mediator of a New Covenant (Hebrews 12:4) by His shed blood. Moses is the face of a system of works that cannot save, so he could not have led the nation into the land that is a picture of eternal life with God. His successor, Joshua, was the perfect man for the job; Joshua, after all, means “Jehovah saves,” so he serves as a picture of Jesus, the only way to the Father (John 14:6). Jesus’ Greek name was actually the equivalent of Joshua.

If you are relying on your own goodness to earn you a spot in heaven, you need to instead focus on Jesus, the only one able of taking you to the Promised Land.   

Moses' Snake

The story of Moses at the burning bush is one that is probably familiar to most of us, but there is one detail that may get overlooked. In Exodus 4:2 the Lord asks Moses to throw his rod on the ground, and when he does the rod becomes a snake. The Lord next asks Moses to pick up the snake, and again Moses obeys. When he grabbed the serpent it was immediately transformed back into Moses’ walking stick. The point of this exercise was to demonstrate God’s sovereignty to Moses, proving to him that this call was real and that God would empower Moses to stand before the most powerful man on earth.

But here is the detail that may often get overlooked: “So he cast it on the ground and it became a serpent, and Moses fled from it (v.3).” Moses was scared of the snake; scared enough to actually run away from it. Yes, Moses grabbed the snake when God told him to, but we must not think Moses was a snake person. He was not the kind of guy to keep a pet python in a terrarium in his bedroom. Moses is a man after my own heart—I once dialed 911 when I found a snake in our bathroom. If God told me to pick up a snake I’d like to think I would obey, but until then, I’ll keep a safe distance.

Moses not only obeyed God’s instruction to pick up the snake, but he even did in it the specific way God told him to: by the tail. Snakes are not normally grabbed by the tail, unless you just want it to turn around and bite you. But that is what God told him to do, and his obedience caused the snake to turn back into a harmless rod. This was God’s way of getting Moses to trust Him. After all, if he could not confront a snake, he would never be able to confront Pharaoh. No one promised that obeying God would always be easy, but when we trust Him, good things happen. Even if we do not understand what God is doing in the present, it could be that He is equipping us to do something in the future. When you are tempted to run from your problems, stand in God’s strength and face them. What looked like a deadly snake may just turn out to be a harmless walking stick.

Why is the Bible so Bloody?

One of the strangest parts of Christianity, especially to those of us in the modern, Western Hemisphere, is the seeming obsession with blood. God commanded the slaughter of animals as part of the Old Covenant, and for centuries His followers slit the throats of goats and sheep without batting an eye. In order to appease God’s wrath, the animal’s blood was sprinkled onto the mercy seat atop the Ark of the Covenant. This was commanded and carried out for hundreds of years.

Even before the first Passover, where through Moses God instructed everyone to put lamb blood on the posts of their front door, God killed a lamb in the Garden of Eden. After Adam and Eve sinned and realized they were naked, they tried to cover themselves with fig leaves, but God made them clothes of animal skin. The only way to skin is animal is to kill it, and it is a bloody process. While the Bible does not specify the type of animal skin, I absolutely believe it was a lamb. This may seem unsettling to some. What is with all the blood in the Bible?

The gruesomeness of the blood makes it crystal clear to us that sin is a big deal. We may be tempted to downplay sin, especially in this era of grace, but sin leads to death. Our first parents were warned that if they ate from the forbidden fruit, they would surely die. Once they ate it, the ones who deserved to die did not die, and instead, an innocent animal died in their place. That was the first death in history, and it came about because of sin. Adam and Eve would forever remember the wages of their sin.

Animal sacrifices forever looked back to that sacrificial animal in Eden. When the Israelites deserved to die for their sin, God promised to transfer His wrath to a lamb; when they offered it as a sacrifice, God was punishing their sin by punishing an innocent animal. Again, the ones who deserved to die did not die, because an innocent lamb died in their place.

That takes us to Mount Calvary. When Jesus came on the scene John the Baptist introduced Him as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29).” As we noted last week in Isaiah 53, God was pleased to crush His Son on the cross, for it was “by his wounds we are healed.” Calvary was the culmination of years of animal sacrifices, and now we “are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (Hebrews 10:10).” Because of the cross, those of us who deserve to die do not have to because the innocent Lamb died in our place.

Some reject the idea of the Suffering Servant; they cannot comprehend the necessity of God’s Son dying on the cross. My question is, if the Messiah didn’t pour out His blood on the cross, then what are all the sacrifices about, and why did they end? Only Jesus explains the blood; just as the sacrifices looked back to the animal in Eden, they also looked forward to Christ on the cross. The only reason the sacrifices ended is Jesus rendered them unnecessary with His perfect blood.

What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

Jesus is my Rock

I often hear people use the expression that “Jesus is my rock.” Please allow me to point out a few ways from Scripture where we see Jesus as our rock.

First, we are safe behind the rock. In Psalm 18 David says, “The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my strength in whom I will trust (v.2).” In verse 31 he asks, “Who is a rock, but God?” And in verse 46 he says, “The Lord lives! Blessed be the rock, and let the God of my salvation be exalted!”

David wrote these poetic words after God delivered the future king from the current king who was trying to kill him. With Saul hot on his trail, David hid in a cave, which was an opening in the side of a mountain. That was the image David had in mind when he called the Lord his rock, his fortress, and his strength. David was safe behind the rock, and we can find refuge from God in times of trouble.

Second, we are satisfied by the rock. In 1 Corinthians 10:4 Paul wrote of the Israelites in the wilderness that they “all drank from that spiritual rock, and that rock was Christ.” Paul was referring to the rock Moses struck in order to provide water when there was nothing to drink. Paul saw that rock as a picture of Jesus who satisfies us when the things of this world leave us unfulfilled. The concept of drinking from Christ also reminds us of the words spoken by Jesus in the Upper Room: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. As often as you drink of it, do this in remembrance of me (1 Corinthians 11:25).” There is nothing we can do to satisfy the wrath of God apart from drinking from Jesus, the rock.  

Finally, we stand on top of the rock. In a familiar passage, Jesus said to the disciples, “Upon this rock I will build my church (Matthew 16:18).” Some say the rock to which He referred was Peter, but the original Greek language does not allow for that. Jesus was either pointing to Himself or was referencing Peter’s statement that Jesus was the Christ sent from God. Either way, Jesus said the church is built upon the rock of His Messiahship.

Jesus concluded the Sermon on the Mount by speaking of the wise and foolish builders; the wise man builds his house on the rock, which gives it a firm foundation. When we base our lives on the foundation of Jesus Christ we build lives that can withstand any storm. If your life is not what it should be, try building it upon the Rock of Jesus.