When some of us look about the world we live in and see the death, destruction, sickness, and oppression, we may feel discouraged and sad. You have probably heard of or even thought yourself that the “world is going to hell in a hand-basket”. Some ill-informed individuals tend to blame God for all the bad things in their lives and the world around them. This is because they lean on their own understanding (what Proverbs 3:5 tells us not to do.) One of the beliefs being that God being the good God that He is would never allow anything bad to happen.
Psalms 115:16 reconfirms that God has given us the world to look after. Why do we then blame God for the way the world is? Think twice when you next say to yourself “It’s OK, God’s in Control”. If you mean “God’s in control of everything” let us take one example: The world. If He IS in control, then the state of this world would be an insult to Him since the Word of God says in James 1:17:
‘Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.’
No, the Believer has dominion over this earth IN CHRIST JESUS. Let’s get up off our pews and chairs and head outdoors and make a difference, Amen? Let’s not rest on our laurels and wait for God to heal, God to decide to fix the world. One day perhaps those of us will wake up, smell the coffee, and figure that it is INDEED up to us to change this world as CO LABORERS with God Himself! God doesn’t do it all Himself, and neither do we, we do it with Him TOGETHER. He waits for us to agree to be used by Him.
While we did not deserve it, and He didn’t have to, out of His grace He sent His only begotten Son Jesus to die and be resurrected for us, to give us the opportunity to reconcile and make it right with God after the events of the garden of Eden in Gen 3:6.
Since Genesis 3:6, man, together with the world that God gave him dominion over, has fallen. Since man had dominion, and he fell, so did the world. We can never overestimate the significance of that event in history.
But a bigger event than that has taken place in history, and it’s not the birth of Christ, but the resurrection of Christ. If Jesus had been born but had never died and raised from the dead, we would still be headed, quite deservedly, to hell, where we belong. How wrong is the world to blame God for all things bad when they were the very cause of it, influenced by the original sinner, Lucifer the devil Satan and the swath of fallen angels following on behind him. All with the mission of keeping God’s creation cut off from Him with blindness to the Truth of the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ.
Satan and his evil companions continue to their utmost to keep the precious souls of this world blinded to the truth. In this next verse, the ‘god’ of this world referenced in the text is Satan. Note the lower case ‘g’. He will never be deserving of anything bigger.
2 Cor 4:4: in whose case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
This is why it is so critical for believers to do what Jesus commanded them to do in Matthew 28:18-20:
And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. 19 [e]Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you [f]always, even to the end of the age.”
In the video linked to this post, a Christian was preaching the Good News to those people lining up for the Las Vegas concert. Some of these people unknowingly would end up being injured or killed that night. Today may be the last chance for someone to hear about Jesus. You have the Word living in you. Let’s not keep it to ourselves.
Have a blessed Christmas,
Pastor Marc
