Treasuring the God who Treasures Us

Tapestry Discovery: Day 8

Genesis 19:15-16 ~ Matthew 6:19-21 ~ Psalm 8: 2 & 5 ~ Proverbs 2:11-14

The narrative makes me shudder every time. If it were a play script, the stage notes might read: Ominous music rumbles. Cue dark clouds from stage left.

Two angels arrive in Sodom and Lot welcomes them into his home. Late that night, a rowdy mob encircles the house, intent upon assaulting his guests. Lot displays immense courage: he walks out alone to meet the mob, hoping to dissuade them from this evil. No surprise: they rush him and his gate, intent upon their wickedness. No surprise: God’s angels overpower them, blinding the would-be attackers and snatching Lot right out of their angry hands.

Behind a bolted door, the two visitors inform Lot that their God-given instructions are to destroy the city. When Lot warns his sons-in-law to flee with him, they only laugh. As we read the account, we think, “Man, Lot’s the only one with an ounce of wisdom; he will gladly leave Sodom with those angels, and his family will wish they did.”

The next morning:

At daybreak the angels urged Lot on: “Get up! Take your wife and your two daughters, or you will be swept away in the punishment of the city.”  But he hesitated. Because of the Lord’s compassion for him, the men grabbed his hand, his wife’s hand, and the hands of his two daughters. Then they brought him out and left him outside the city.

What? But Lot was the only one who had believed the angels! And yet, he hesitated. Hellfire was ready to strike, but Lot was reluctant to leave his home. And ultimately, the only reason he did was because of God’s compassion, in the form of the angels literally dragging him (and his family) from Sodom’s borders.

Jesus’ familiar words in Matthew read like a commentary on Lot’s conflicted heart:

“Don’t store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves don’t break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be.”

Lot may have been the only righteous man in that wicked city (see Gen. 18:22-32). Yet his heart treasured his family and home to the extent that, apart from God’s mercy, he would have perished along with his earthly treasures.

When the deepest desires of our hearts are earthly things (even good things like home and family), we will neglect wisdom, lose perspective, even turn from God’s sure word -- to our great detriment. When we set our eyes upon Jesus and His kingdom, the things that matter to Him (love, peace, justice, righteousness, faithfulness, mercy), we stockpile heavenly treasure.

In the midst of the struggle to release passing pleasures for eternal treasures, God will pull back our grasping fingers from any earthly gift that keeps us from desiring Him as we ought. Because of His compassion, He will grab our hands and rescue us.

And, as these passages (from Psalm 8 and Proverbs 2) illustrate, He will draw our eyes to Himself: the God who guides, guards and honors us as His treasured possession:

…you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.

You have made mankind a little lower than the angels, And You have crowned him with glory and honor.

Wisdom saves you from perverse men who delight in evil.
Discretion will preserve you; Understanding will keep you,
To deliver you from the way of evil, From the man who speaks perverse things,
From those who leave the paths of uprightness To walk in the ways of darkness.

Tapestry Discovery

Those Read-Through-the-Bible plans? I love the idea of them. I’ve just never been able to actually do them.

When I first tried, early in my Christian walk, I could not make connections between Old Testament narrative, a song David wrote a thousand years later, and a Jesus story set a thousand years after that. I figured, I’m not good at the wide net approach; my personality is better suited to digging deep in one focused spot.

And, for the most part, that’s what I did for the last 25 years: dug deep into God’s Word, one beautifully rich book at a time, growing in understanding of and love for Him along the way.

So don’t ask me where the idea came; it was out of left field (God’s direction can feel like that sometimes, right?). But when my kids settled into their school routines, and I contemplated what to study next, it came to me that I should read through the whole Bible. I prayed, found a plan on my Bible app, and asked God for the grace to stick with it – at least for a couple weeks, before returning to my native dig-deep approach.

Imagine my surprise when I began to discover patterns in these “random” readings, like varied threads coming together in a tapestry, patterns my newly redeemed eyes could not recognize all those years ago. By Day 2, these eyes welled with tears to recognize God’s repeated message to generation after generation, separated by thousands of years. (And I wrote the post below: The Foolishness of Independent Agency.)

Why should this emerging tapestry surprise me? God is Who He Is, and always has been. His Word for us is consistent and straightforward, albeit narrated and fleshed out in a broad variety of texture and color. Every day, every passage, every message reveals Jesus: the fulfillment of God’s promises, the salvation of God’s people.

The Foolishness of Independent Agency

Discovering the Tapestry, Day 2: Genesis 3  ~ Matthew 2 ~ Psalm 2:2-6 ~ Proverbs 1:7

The story is certainly familiar. God clearly told Adam not to eat from that One Tree; Eve was drawn to it, and Adam with her. With some coaxing by the serpent, they judged its fruit not by God’s eternal truth, but by their own limited sensibilities (it was good for food, pleasing to the eye and offered wisdom). Exiled from Paradise for their own protection, their actions have impacted the entirety of the human race, from beginning to end.

The story is certainly familiar. Astrologers from afar followed a Star that clearly marked the birth of a new King, unprecedented in glory. When he heard the report, Herod judged Jesus not by God’s truth as divined by the wise men, but by his own paranoid sensibilities. He does all in his earthly power to destroy this perceived rival to his throne (including slaughtering a city’s worth of baby boys, just in case). Yet, God’s voice whispered to the wise men and to Joseph through dreams, guiding them away from Herod’s murderous path.

In Psalm 2, God speaks raises His voice above a whisper, and speaks clearly about Herod and his ilk, those who imagine they could stand against the Lord. Basically, He laughs at them and declares, “Who do you think you are?”

The kings of the earth rise up and the rulers band together against the Lord 

and against his anointed, saying, “Let us break their chains and throw off their shackles.” The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them. 

He rebukes them in his anger and terrifies them in his wrath, saying, 

“I have installed my king on Zion, my holy mountain.”

Independent agency is a foolish and dangerous fantasy. If God says the fruit is off-limits, then the fruit is off-limits. If He chooses to give His Son, a gift so unimaginably gracious that the world cannot understand it, no power on earth can alter His purpose.

And by Solomon’s hand, the threads of these passages are woven together: