Opus 2025-479: Gods Mailing Address

I was reading my daily dose of Psalms in chapter 134.  It was only a couple of verses long and I was a bit miffed at the brevity.  Then I took a look at that last verse,

Psalm 134:3 (KJV) The LORD that made heaven and earth bless thee out of Zion.

And I got to wondering about Zion.  It’s a common word in the Old Testament.  I haven’t checked to see how often it shows up in the new, but it is assumed that it refers to Jerusalem, possibly the temple, and I would say specifically it refers to the mercy seat above the tabernacle.  That seems to be the place where God has announced His presence will be focused on the Earth.

Does that mean that God is confined to one room on one hill in one city?  Preposterous.  This is the God who created the universe with a word.  Somehow I think we forget what a miracle it is that He is willing to touchdown briefly in a location for our benefit.

I have a friend who gets all upset when we spiritualize the Old Testament.  He wants everything to be totally literal.  For him this simply means that one spot and only relates to the Jews.  Excuse me, I tend to believe that the entire Bible is there to instruct us,

(2Ti 3:16 KJV)  All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:

So I’m going to take this and make Zion a figure of speech or an allegory for us today.  This is a reminder that God is going to bless us from His current mailing address.  I don’t know if you have been checking your political mailers lately, but I’ve gotten one from my state assembly woman and one from our state senator.  Each of them give me multiple ways to get in contact with them.  They give me an address in their capital office and one in their local office.  They include phone numbers.  I think the idea is that I can contact them at either one.

That’s the way it is with God.  Back in the day Zion may have been one spot.  Today Zion can be called upon from anywhere.  In fact, when we think about the fact that we have received the Holy Spirit and have been offered the filling of the Holy Spirit, I would suggest that perhaps Zion is as close as your heart.  Isn’t that great?  It doesn’t even require a postage stamp.  I was commenting recently to someone how it used to be.  You could worry about somebody taking your phone and making long-distance calls because the bill would be very high.  Remember when long-distance calls were very expensive?  On your new phone you can pretty much call anywhere and there’s no extra charge.

Welcome to the world of the New Testament.  And unlike our state senator, when I call Zion, I don’t get put on hold, I don’t get voicemail, I don’t get a secretary.  I get the party to whom I am addressing.

homo unius libri

Opus 2024-013: Solar Grace

As I sat in the dark, focusing on the glory of God, I paused to read a Psalm like I do every day. Today was Psalm 134.  In there I came across this verse,

Psalm 134:2 (KJV) Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, and bless the LORD.

My thinking immediately went to that word sanctuary and trying to place how that word could be used in a Psalm written before the temple was built.  The text does not say this Psalm was written by David, so we have no reason to believe it had to be written before the temple was built, but I still wanted to look into that.

So I looked into the meaning of the word sanctuary, and found out that actually a better translation would be holy place or sacred spot.  The word is translated holy much more often than it is translated sanctuary.  As an example, here is the first place the word appears in the Old Testament,

Exodus 3:5 (KJV) And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.

Our Hebrew word here is translated as “holy.  So you can see where I realize this could have been written before the temple.

As my mind continued down, it’s rabbit trail, which I believe is often guided by the Holy Spirit, I got to be thinking about how we use the word sanctuary.  For us as Protestants, and I believe even as Catholics, the sanctuary is that large room where people gather together to worship.  That led me to think about worship services, historically, and how the Catholic Church and later the liturgical churches would offer up the host as a part of what we call communion or the Eucharist.  The theology of this has gone through many steps, depending on your denomination, but in the Catholic Church, at least the idea was that you were offering up the body and blood of Jesus.  One protestant pastor, who was virulently anti-catholic, claimed this was a sacrilegious re-crucifying of Jesus, and keeping Him in perpetual agony.

I am not as anti Catholic.  My understanding is that they believe there is spiritual merit, or grace, given by taking of this host.  This turned my thinking to the meaning of grace.

Grace is a wonderful concept.  A beautiful word in the Bible, but I believe it is grossly misunderstood.  The popular definition of grace is unmerited favor.  I cannot accept that because it says Jesus grew in grace, and if it is unmerited, then Jesus was not God and the verse is nonsense.  In other words, walking with God and His grace is not a matter of Him giving us an unlimited credit card that we can us to charge anything we want.  It doesn’t even work with the idea of having a credit card where there’s a limit but if we apply we can raise the limit.  I got to thinking about modern technology.

Grace is like a modern electric commuter train that runs on electricity.  If you’ve been around them, you noticed that they have these arms that reach out and connect to the power line above them.  Thus they are constantly supplied with what they need at the moment.  They don’t have batteries to store it up.  They don’t have an electric tank.  They have a constant source of power.  If we ever get the technology, a better illustration might be having a solar panel on the top of a car that powers everything you need to do on a constant basis.

Of course solar batteries only work when the sun is up.  For your car, that would be a problem.  If we’re talking about spiritual power being radiated from the son of God, and it is no problem because God is always extending his power in his grace.

Spiritually we are there.  Technology is still trying to catch up.

homo unius libri