Apocalypse 1:8

What Does The Lord Do For Us?

By the Rev. Eric H. Carswell

Worthy is the Lamb who was slain
To receive power and riches and wisdom,
And strength and honor and glory and blessing!
Revelation 5:12

In chapter five of the book of Revelation, John describes a powerful
scene of rejoicing in heaven. He saw four wondrous beasts, twenty-four
elders, and thousands of thousands of angels giving praise to the Lord.
Their words represent an acknowledgment in heart and life that all
power, all wisdom, and that the tiniest event that happens is overseen
by His Divine Providence. It represents a deep gratitude for what the
Lord has done is and is doing.

How different are the words of Jacob as he left the land of Canaan. He
isn't at all sure the Lord will take care of him. He instead is making a
bargain. He will worship the Lord and give a tenth of his newly gained
wealth if the Lord will take care of him, and bring him back to his home
in peace. Concerning Jacob's vow, the Arcana Caelestia makes the
following observation:
"Making a vow" means wishing the Lord to provide. This is because
present within vows there is a desire and affection that what is wished
for may come about, thus that the Lord may provide it. Within them
something of a bargain is present, and at the same time on the person's
part something of a bounden duty to keep his side of it, should he obtain
his desire. This was the case with Jacob, in that Jehovah was to be his
God, and the stone which he placed as a pillar was to be God's house,
and he would devote a tenth of everything God had given him, if
Jehovah guarded Him on the road, gave him bread to eat and clothing
to wear, and he went back in peace to his father's house. From this it is
evident that the vows made in those times were particular agreements,
involving primarily people's acknowledgment of God as their God if He
provided them what they desired, and involving also their repayment to
Him with some gift if He did provide it. (Arcana Caelestia 3732:1)

Objectively, many people would say that Jacob's life was greatly
blessed. He had a large family. He was tremendously wealthy. His
favorite son provided for him and his family in Egypt during a terrible
famine. But when Pharaoh asked him near the end of his life how old he
was, his answer doesn't seem to indicate a sense of these blessings.
He told Pharaoh:
"The days of the years of my pilgrimage are one hundred and thirty
years; few and evil have been the days of the years of my life, and they
have not attained to the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the
days of their pilgrimage." Genesis 47:9

How could it be that all sorts of wonderful things happened to Jacob and
yet he feels like things haven't gone very well? Why do some people
feel grateful to the Lord for all He has done for them, some people grow
increasingly bitter over how their life has turned out, blaming their
problems on God, and many feel neither gratitude or bitterness and
don't particularly think about it. The issue of God's care or lack thereof
doesn't occur to them as being significant.

Given a choice, we would probably all prefer to feel gratitude. All the
angels feel this gratitude. But can very many of us say that we always or
almost always sense a deep gratefulness for the Lord's care of our
lives? It is a state that none of us could have from the beginning of our
adult life. The Lord has promised us that while we may enter adult life
with the factual knowledge of what the Lord has done and is doing for
us, there will be important areas of life in which we will not and indeed
cannot see His care as we begin our adult path to heaven.

Starting from our early childhood, each of us experienced many different
events and learned many different lessons from what happened in our
lives. For some of us, the primary direction of our thoughts led toward
feeling and thinking that if there is a problem, it is up to us to solve it.
For this group the regular pattern of thought is: "If I try harder, I can
make things work out right." For another group of us the primary
direction of our thoughts led toward feeling and thinking that if there is a
problem, the Lord or someone else is at fault. For this group it is easy to
shrug when a problem arises or to get impatient or angry that someone
else hasn't fixed it. Neither of these perspectives leads to the gratitude
expressed by the angels. Both of them, by themselves can lead to
frustration and discouragement because we cannot make life work all by
ourselves, and it will not work if we expect others, including the Lord, to
do it us without significant effort on our part.

If Jacob's words represent a person who will withhold allegiance to the
Lord until He has proved Himself, this proof will never come. The Lord
does not have as His primary concern that the external events of our
natural lives work out the way that we naturally wish they would. If we
are keeping score on this plane of life we may be very discouraged.
People can react remarkably differently to the events of their lives.
Imagine a man who has participated in a church congregation
essentially all of his life, who daily read from the Word, but who faced a
major health problem in his fifties. What if this man's reaction included a
deep bitterness that the Lord had failed him. Contrast this state of mind
with that of a woman in her sixties who had a multitude of health
problems and was in nearly constant dull pain, but who was filled with
joy and gratefulness for the blessings of her life. Why does the first
person react negatively and the second so positively. As the saying
goes, why do some people see the glass half full and some see it half
empty?

For a person to see what the Lord has done and is doing, that person
has to come to care about the things that the Lord cares about. If we
judge the Lord on criteria that He doesn't particularly put much stock in,
it isn't surprising that we will sense that He isn't doing enough or is
being inconsistent in His efforts.

There is a humorous story about our perspective and the Lord's that has
a man asking God, "What is a million of our years like to You." God
replied, "Like a second of your time." The man then said, "And what is a
million of our dollars like to You." God replied, "It is like a penny of your
money." The man asked, "Could You possibly give me one of your
pennies?" And God said, "Sure, in a second."

How do we come to care about the things the Lord cares about? There
is only one way. That is to receive the benefits of spiritual rebirth or
regeneration. Without this fundamental change in the values that we
enter adult life with we will never be able to see the Lord as being
worthy "To receive power and riches and wisdom, And strength and
honor and glory and blessing!"

If Jacob's vow represent a person's commitment to accept the Lord's
commandments and His call to the life of repentance and charity in the
hope that this acceptance will bring blessings, it will indeed be fulfilled.
The leap of faith that every person has to take is to believe that
following the Lord will bring blessings before the person really knows
what these blessings will be. Each person needs to be willing to do what
is good and think what is right and to shun what is evil and false, even
when part of their mind strongly questions whether this will lead to
happiness and fulfillment. This part of our mind believes in many false
definitions about happiness, responsibility, and what is right and wrong.
This part of our mind arises from our natural heredity to love self and the
world more than the Lord and our neighbor. Until this natural heredity is
conquered, we will never really see the Lord and never appreciate His
work.

The Lord has been very clear about what it takes to conquer our natural
heredity. He assures us that it will take conscious effort and attention. It
will require us to use the truth we initially learn to change fundamental
habits in our thoughts, speech, and action. It will require prayer. It will
require us to acknowledge to ourselves that we absolutely cannot be
happy without the Lord's help. It will require us to acknowledge to
ourselves that unless we consciously make the effort, as though by
ourselves, to flee from evils in the Lord's name, we cannot be happy.
Forming new habits isn't easy. Have you ever tried to show someone a
new way to do a familiar action or process. It can be something as
simple as teaching a young person a better way to make a basketball
shot or trying to convince someone that she should work at learning to
type without looking at her fingers. It can be as complicated as helping
someone recognize that his fundamental pattern of fathering needs to
change. At first the new method will feel uncomfortable, foreign, and
even though it will be fundamentally more effective in the long run, it
may actually be much less effective when a person is first practicing it.
The same can be true for our efforts to shun evils.

The Lord tells us:"Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone
hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with
him, and he with Me." (Revelation 3:20) Many more times than we can
possibly imagine each day, He knocks at the door of our mind trying to
bring to our attention what we need to change in our lives, what we
could do, what is evil and false, and what is good and true. He has
promised that a part of our mind absolutely will not believe what He has
to say. It will resist any thought of change and argue that change will
cause more trouble than good or just not make any difference.
The Lord absolutely promises heavenly happiness for those who follow
what He teaches. He promises "Ask, and it will be given to you; seek,
and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who
asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be
opened." (Matthew 7:7-8). It has been observed that if it could be
proven that wearing a little blue dot on the back of your hand
guaranteed a happier, healthier, more productive life, we would all be
wearing blue dots on the back of our hand. The Lord promises that if we
are willing to humble ourselves enough to recognize our need for His
help, His wisdom, and if we are willing to do our part to follow Him, we
will experience a profound change in our lives. We will gradually come
to see the world very differently from how we had previously seen it.
What we care about in our own lives and in the lives of those around us
will become significantly different and the peace of mind we experience,
no matter what natural events occur in our lives or those around us, we
will feel grateful for what the Lord has done and is doing for us. This is a
sure promise yet many do not heed it.

We don't have to earn the Lord's care. He constantly works to lead us to
a better life. It is His free gift, a gift from a loving Father. And He knows
that we need to freely receive this gift if we are ever going to experience
true happiness. May each of us have times when we sense in heart and
mind that we are wonderfully well cared for. And when we don't sense
this care, may we work to hold onto the thought that it is occurring and
that our conscious effort to repent and receive the blessings of
regeneration is required before we will see His care for what it truly is.
May we more and more come to the state of mind of those who John
saw praising the Lord. May we come to echo their words in heart, mind,
and life.

Worthy is the Lamb who was slain
To receive power and riches and wisdom,
And strength and honor and glory and blessing!
Revelation 5:12

AMEN.

Lessons: Genesis 28:20-22, Revelation 1:8, 3:20, 5:11-13