Trusting God or My System

Today I read Matthew 1-4 and part of chapter 4 in Integrity. There are several things that stood out this morning in my readings. First was the fulfillment of prophesy we see in the life of Christ. Matthew is very careful to document all the places that Jesus fulfilled prophesy about the Messiah. Looking at teach of those passages, I can see where people who studied prophesy must have been confused on how all of this would fit together and whether these passages really were a part of the Messiah coming or something else. Jesus was to be born in Bethlehem, called a Nazarene, children would be killed, etc. I don’t know a lot about Jewish writings on the Messiah, but I am sure they had sophisticated systems of thought on these prophetic passages that probably made a lot of sense with charts and drawings. Yet with all that study, wisdom and longing for the Messiah to appear, they missed him because everything did not fulfill their own expectations of how it should go down. They didn’t see the angle that the kingdom of God would be in their hearts and they certainly did not grasp the idea that the Messiah would be the ultimate sin offering that would complete and get rid of the sacrificial system that was in place at the time.

As I think about that in light of our own times I can’t help but think in many ways we are like the Jews in those days. We have our systems of end times prophesy complete with charts and verses to support our view. There are many different views out there all of which have some holes or things that just don’t quite click with sophisticated explanations for those holes. There are many who hold their views as the only correct view and even hint that those who do not agree are heretics at worst, deceived at best. Some are so certain of their system, that I wonder if they too will miss the things that God has laid out for the future and his reasons for putting those things in the scriptures. For too many we trust our view of future events and our ability to prepare for them more than we do God Himself. One of my favorite examples of this was the whole y2k event where people were afraid the computers wouldn’t be able to handle the change over to the year 2000 and we are so dependent on computers that it would shut everything down. Instead of trusting in the Lord, many Christians stockpiled gas and dried food to get ready for the event. Some even packed up and moved to remote locations where they could be self sufficient and live off the land. As I thought that through I realized that for many of us we are far more concerned about our well being than we are what God’s best is and it is in times that are trying that our true source of trust and dependency shows itself.

Lord, help me not to be so caught up in having the right answers or preserving what I have that I miss you in the midst of it all. I know that my very soul is in your hands so I pray that as hard times come I can live as if that is the case. Help my life to point others to you and trust that in the end knowing and trusting you have a plan is where I want my heart to rest. Amen.
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