There is a Truth

this one will be shorter, promise.  the first part ended up kinda ridiculously long, but i hope you read it all.

so we know a bit more about ourselves now.  that we have a body, a soul, and a spirit.  lets take a look at who we were, and along with that, how God does work.

once again i encourage you to grab your Bible.

John 1:1-2
^”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.”  skip a few verses to 14 “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

Just so we’re clear, the Word is Jesus, and he was right there with God in the beginning. Now lets go to the beginning.

Genesis 1:1
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters”

So the Holy Spirit is there over the earth, not doing anything, just waiting. waiting for what?

cont. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”

The Holy Spirit was waiting for the command from God to act and make whatever universal/molecular/physical changes happen that needed to happen for light to be. You can understand how the three parts of God work here like this:

God the father conceives the thought, the idea of what He wants. The Word, Jesus, the Son, speaks the command. The Holy Spirit accomplishes the work. pretty nifty.  Since the Holy Spirit, the Counselor, the Comforter, is the only part of the trinity that is always directly with us (John 16:7 “but I tell you the truth: it is for you good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.”) it might be good to take note of how He operates. He acts on the words spoken by God.

This is why God cannot lie. It is something he can’t do, because if he were to speak it, it would become true. If God were to look at the grass of the Earth and say it was orange, then the Holy Spirit would act and all the grass would become orange.

Now let’s see how one man changed many generations by his faith, and how.

Abram was promised something pretty great.  to be the father of many nations. Only there was a problem. His wife was unable to have children and had been that way since her youth. It was going to take a miracle, and Abram needed faith to make it happen.  Here’s how God got it done.

From Genesis 15:

Abram had no sons to be his heir, just a servant named Eliezer who would inherit everything once Abram died. God told Abram (verse 4) “This man will not be your heir, but a son coming from your own body will be your heir.” Then God did something important. He gave Abram a visual aid in seeing the promise, “Look up at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can count them… So shall your offspring be.”  and earlier in Gen 13:16 God had already said “I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted.”

So whether by night or day, Abram had something to remind him of God’s promise. The dust of the earth and the stars of the sky. God gave him hope.

Hebrews 11:1(KJV) “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”

it took me a while before this verse sunk in. faith consists of hope. hope is what faith is made of. if you don’t have a hope that something is true or real, how can you have faith in it? God gave Abram hope, to bring faith.

God also did something else with Abram. He changed his name.

Gen 17:5 “No longer will you be called Abram; your name will be Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations.”  (and of course the name Abraham means “father of many”)

There goes God again saying things are true that don’t look true in the fact of the moment, but because God spoke it, it was true.

Now imagine you’re the newly named Abraham. You’re good farming buddy, Barry, strolls by your land one day as you’re just coming out of your tent in the morning. Barry sees you and greets you with a “Mornin’ Abram.” and then you have to tell him that you’re not going by Abram anymore, that you’re name is now Abraham. Now Barry has known you for a long time, and he knows what that name means, so being the good friend that he is, he takes a look around you. then another glance around and back to you. and he looks again at the open space around you where there are certainly no tents with sons in them, and then back to you. and he stares at you (you’re at least 99 years old by the way(read all chapter 17)). “you sure about that?” he chimes in.

and you have to explain to him that God changed your name and gave you a promise. he also changed your wife Sarai, to Sarah, which means princess. not queen, which would seem more elderly(though Sarah was now 90) but she was to view herself as a youthful, beautiful princess.

so God did some interesting things here.

He gave Abram a visual reminder of God’s promise so he could keep it on his mind. something to look at and hope for so that it would bring faith.

He changed Abram’s and Sarai’s names to reflect the truth He had in store for them. They now needed to speak the truth of God’s promise daily. They were to put God’s word in their own mouth.

more on this next time.  it’s taken me too long to write this out and i’d like to keep posts from getting too long.

:)