Consider THIS from a Friend:
“If you doubt that GOD could love you and still allow you to experience difficulties in life, look at JESUS’ life. Born sinless, went 33 years without sinning 1 time, GOD spoke aloud 2 times saying how proud HE was of HIM.
ROMANS 6:23-26, 5:8,
10:9-10,
EPHESIANS 2:8-9
And look what JESUS went through and as a lamb to slaughter, never said a word. In Romans 8:35 when the Bible says, “Who can separate us from the love of CHRIST.” It’s talking about JESUS’ love for us and then it makes a list that proves nothing can separate us from CHRIST! If we allow the death, burial and resurrection of JESUS, on the cross, to forever settle any questions we might have about GOD’s love. We will approach difficulties in our lives with confidence. Knowing that there will never be anything that could separate us from GOD’s perfect love, we’ll start looking at every circumstance to see how GOD is going to express HIS love. Don’t ever judge GOD’s love based on your circumstance. Instead, evaluate your circumstances from the perspective of GOD’s love. There are many things in life we may be able to doubt but we can never look at the cross of JESUS CHRIST and doubt the love of GOD. So let’s return that love to HIM through every person and event that happens in our lives.”
Now consider this observation I add:
God Himself, in Christ, was walking the beirit’, ( Hebrew beriyth describes a compact made by passing between pieces of flesh) taking upon Himself the full weight of responsibility for keeping the covenant between Himself with man, just as it was first revealed when God Himself walked the path laid out by Abraham according to God’s instructions in the covenant ceremony carried out with Abraham while Abraham was in an induced deep slumber. Jesus Christ’s fullness of the Spirit of God carried Him through this demonstration of the renewal of the covenant. His life itself was a careful preparation for the laying out of the sacrifice, but this time not with animals but with His own physical life. God Himself in the incarnation did not slumber or sleep, as Abraham did, as the covenant’s renewal was carried out, but He was a full participant, representing the commitment of BOTH parties to the covenant – that of God and that of man- as He walked the path Jesus Christ Himself had faithfully prepared according to His own Spirit’s instructions with eyes wide open, mind fully comprehending, heart fully committed in obedience, and body consecrated to the task.
So too, when we embrace the fullness of the Spirit of God ourselves, He will bear the full responsibility to carry us through whatever we experience in this life. That is God’s covenant, through Christ and it is sealed by His Holy Spirit, given to us to abide in us, as it now abides in all believers in Jesus Christ (who was the first and only Son of Man to bear the fullness of the Spirit of God from conception to this very moment in His resurrected and ascended life!
If we have been blind to the majesty and the depth of love God has for his creation, demonstrated in covenant with Abraham, and further demonstrated and fulfilled in Jesus Christ, and renewed individually with each one of us in our Baptism and celebrated with every sacrament of Communion, it is because, like Abraham, we have been in a deep slumber while God has been preparing and walking the path of covenant He has laid out to demonstrate to each of us His sacrificial love for us, too. Some of us will awaken to its reality as we recognize the means of covenant as introduced in the Old Testsment and the fulfillment of it in Christ Jesus. Others of us will not not awaken to it until we are carried through the berit’ ourselves by the power of His Holy Spirit, as Jesus Christ was.
Shall we, with eyes opened by the revelation of Jesus Christ’s Incarnation and His full sufficiency as the Lamb of God, begin to live the awakened life in joyful covenant with God and other awakened believers? Or will we continue to slumber as God prepares a beirit’ through which He will carry us because we ourselves have refused to accept the fullness of Jesus Christ’s incarnation and sufficient sacrifice? Or because others still slumber, will we accept the call to consecrate ourselves as living sacrifices of God’s covenant with us to be used to demonstrate His great love and the sufficiency of His grace to be our all in all in the midst of the fiery furnace that others’ eyes might be opened, as the centurion’s eyes were at the foot of the cross and as King Nebuchanezzer’s eye’s were in Babylon?
I don’t think God calls us alone individually to that last task. Just as the three faithful followers- Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego represented a faithful remnant committed to the covenant, they faced the test together, just as those of the true church do. And Christ has said “wherever 2 or 3 gather in My Name, (representing Me, bearing the standard of My covenant), I will be there…… for God’s glory, the church’s good, and others’ gain.
“Then Nebuchadnezzar said, “Praise be to the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who has sent his angel and rescued his servants! They trusted in him and defied the king’s command and were willing to give up their lives rather than serve or worship any god except their own God. Therefore I decree that the people of any nation or language who say anything against the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego be cut into pieces and their houses be turned into piles of rubble, for no other god can save in this way” (Daniel 3:28–29).