Wednesday Good Evening!!! PLEASE give the Lord your undivided attention as you worship Him in song.
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Hope in God through what He’s made
Regardless of how God first caught our attention, be it:
• The splendor of the Creation itself
• A word from one of God’s children
• a passage from the Bible
• the inner awareness we are all born with that there is more going on behind the scene of life than we can figure out with our minds
• by a direct inward work of the Holy Spirit
…whatever we saw, bid us to come, and come we did!
Over the course of the last two weeks, we’ve discovered that there are 3 basic sources of Hope in relation to God.
God’s inspired, written word
The inward witness, leading, counsel and teaching of the Holy Spirit
What we have come to experience of God ourselves
But the most powerful of all is our experience and discovering God in what He has made, in the most ordinary of life experiences recorded in scripture and in the person, ministry and human interactions of Jesus – God incarnate is where you will be encouraged to turn to develop your Hope in God which your faith can support!
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Where Agur’s wisdom, Job’s correction & Paul’s letter to Rome intersect
This chapter is itself the 3rd major division within the greater book of Proverbs. It is written by Agur, a man unknown in scripture who like Balaam of Beor may very well have been a non-Israelite prophet of God.
Agur begins by a self-effacing statement regarding his own wisdom apart from God.
He then offers a list of five statements which are presented in a way which brings God’s correction and confrontation with Job irresistibly to mind.
This list includes the most clear and pointed reference to the incarnate Messiah in the entire book of Proverbs, calling Him the Holy One, speaking of Him as the son of God and asking who would ascend to bring Him down, or descent to bring Him back up. These words are also quoted by Paul in Romans 10 and his reference material may have been both Agur’s proverb and Moses’ statement in Deuteronomy 30:12–14.
The rest of this proverb uses God’s wisdom and ways seen in His creation to highlight things which are insatiable, mysterious, possess social order, wisdom and majesty.
All of this too is very similar to the confrontation of God with Job in Job 38-41.
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Hope: Setting the Lord ALWAYS before you
The only Biblical purpose for faith is to serve as a firm foundation for what we can rightly expect of God. So faith is the foundation of the House of Hope.
Because our hope MUST be founded upon Who God really is – His character, nature and intentions for us as those who bear His image – coming to know the Lord by way of experience is an indispensable necessity.
As such, the words of David ring true from Psalm 16:8 which say, “I have set the Lord continually before me; because He is at my right hand I will not be shaken.”
We used this as our text of focus this morning and considered its application to our growing understanding of Faith and Hope.
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Good thing Paul didn’t pursue his dreams!
This is the final chapter in the second division of the greater book of Proverbs, which is comprised of a collection of Solomon’s wise saying collected and compiled by the order of King Hezekiah many years after Solomon’s death.
Perhaps the most noteworthy verse in chapter 29 is verse 18 and we spend a fair amount of time with it.
Ironically, what makes this verse noteworthy is not due to any particularly outstanding truth it reveals, but because of how often it is misunderstood and mistaught in the church today as a justification for selfish pursuits and materialist lives.
To accomplish this amazing feat of diabolical twisting of the passage, Proverbs 29:18 is typically never quoted in its entirety. Additionally, it is artificially connected with partial and misquotes of Habakkuk 1:5 and 2:2.
If Paul had been raised under and followed the modern misteachings of this verse, prior to his Apostolic ministry, he would have gone to the Jews and the New Testament as we know it would not even exist.
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