All in Purity
It all began in the garden, didn’t it? It certainly would have been God’s desire that we be holy as He is. After all He created man in his own image (Genesis 1:27), and holiness is the essence of His being. Makes me wonder how different things could have been.
In my search for the fear of the LORD this year I am certainly in need of both wisdom and understanding. See how key knowledge of the Holy One is. I need to know God, not just know about God. The Hebrew for knowledge, yada, is experiential knowledge, not merely head knowledge.
Names in biblical times were important. “I AM WHO I AM” proclaims the “eternity and self-existence of God”*. Plain and simple, that is who He is. The name by which He is to be known forever is ‘The LORD’, translated Yahweh. The Israelites considered Yahweh too holy to speak or write out in full.** At least they started out with reverence and awe.
The Old Testament patriarchs and prophets were no strangers to godly fear. Take Isaiah’s cry for example: “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty” (Isaiah 6:5).
Suppose I decided to go bowling with a friend who wanted to play the game without the gutter guards. If you knew how bad of a bowler I am, you’d know I’d start sweating! Do you know the first thing that would start going through my mind?
Some days it seems everything goes… wrong.
Does this ever happen to you?
No matter what I try, nothing works out right.
Recently on a day like that, Jesus brought this Scripture to my attention:
Suppose I decided to go bowling with a friend who wanted to play the game without the gutter guards. If you knew how bad of a bowler I am, you’d know I’d start sweating! Do you know the first thing that would start going through my mind? “Whatever you do, DON’T go in the gutter!”
