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For I know the plans I have for you,declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Jer 29:11 |
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| Archived Manna: | |
Dear
Friend,
If you do not already have a habit of gathering daily manna the first thing in the morning (we can look at the example given to us in Exodus 16 and find the pattern for make it a habit. Establish your life and your schedule to allow you the necessary time to do your daily collection first thing every morning to give you the strength to make it through the day. And remember that today’s manna will not be sufficient for tomorrow; tomorrow’s manna must be collected tomorrow morning. Friday, August 6, 2021
Today's Passage : Today's Passage :Crime and Punishment Bible Verse:Ecclesiastes 8:6-11 (NKJV) "If no one knows what will happen, who can tell him when it will happen? To every purpose there is a time and a judgment, so the misery of man is great: He doesn't know what will happen, for who can tell him when it will occur? There is no man with power over the spirit so that he can retain the spirit; neither has he power in the day of death. And there is no discharge from this war; neither will wickedness deliver those that are given to it. All this have I seen, and applied my mind to every work that is done under the sun: there comes a time when one man rules over another to his own hurt. And so I saw the wicked buried, who had come and gone from the place of the holy, and they were forgotten in the city where they had so done: this, too, is vanity. But because sentence against evil works is not executed quickly, the hearts of men are set to do evil." Message:
This poetic and philosophical passage from Ecclesiastes, the great book of wisdom, treats two similar themes. The first describes the misery that people suffer from not knowing when they will suffer or when they will die. Nobody knows what will befall him, or when. We go to the doctor and find out that we have a disease we didn’t ever expect; a man or woman is walking and is attacked by a criminal. These things happen unexpectedly. And you can’t opt out. There is no “honorable discharge” from the vicissitudes of life.
The punishments, the rewards, all that we believe to be the outcome of our activities is “vanity”, a major theme of Ecclesiastes. People slip into evil, because their punishment is slow to come; and so they live for a short while, under the illusion that they have gotten something good by doing something bad. Even when we do good works, the feeling of satisfaction we get is vanity — personal satisfaction that will soon be gone, forgotten by others, in a year, or a decade, or a hundred thousand years.
Sarajevo Haggadah|illuminated haggadah
Like the punishment for crime that is so often slow to come, God’s day of judgment is unpredictable. And so we fool ourselves into believing that there will be no consequences. But the day of judgment will come, when our faith and steadfastness will bring us the ultimate reward, and the evil we have committed will be judged.
The implicit message is that we must do good works out of love for God, and to His glory, rather than for the temporary pride of doing good; and we must not think our evil acts are forgotten, if no punishment follows them. The earthly result of our actions is vanity, fleeting in time.
The money we stole, our pride at forcing someone to do something, a street named after a venal politician: these will become dust. Likewise, the temple we erected to the glory of God or the hungry man we fed, are acts that disappear from the earth. So we must not fret, if the good we do seems to be forgotten and unknown on earth, that the dollar we give a hungry man on the street is consumed and gone, anonymous and unknown. For as Christ tells us, we lay up treasure in heaven, where deeds done for the glory of God are remembered forever. We will come before Christ at the time of His choosing, and He will judge us for our actions and, hopefully, forgive us for our sins by His grace.
Meditation : Prayer : May the word I have read, Lord, be planted deeply in my mind and heart. Help me not to walk away and forget it, but to meditate on it and obey it and so build my life on the rock of your truth.....Amen |
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