Look to the Lord.
Our Heavenly Father, we lift up our eyes to You this morning with thanksgiving. We thank You, Lord, that all things that are good come from You. And, Lord, we look up to You that You might send down good things to us this morning.
We thank You for Your Word. We thank You for the history of Your people, through which we can see Who You are, how You love, and how You act. Lord, we pray, open our eyes to see just Who You are and what You are doing—not just in our midst, but in the things that we talk about today.
Lord, we are grateful for Your Word. We are grateful for the Holy Spirit, Who is able to make it alive to us. And, Lord, we are praying this: it is not the words, it is not the exactness; it is the life that is in the Word that we want to lay hold of. We want to lay hold of You. You are in Your Word.
Lord, open the Book to us, we pray, this morning, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
All right. I am supposed to clean my glasses.
Last time I was up here, I told you that I had been, for some reason, just stuck on the exile. I do not know why. There is not really a lot about the exile itself, but it has made me think: “Lord, what were You doing during this time? Why did it happen?”
So, I opened last time by saying that I had been considering the exile of the Jews from Judah to Babylon, and I had three questions:
Last time, we covered why they were exiled, so I do not have to talk about that again. Today, I want to look at the time they spent in exile.
Like I said, there is not a lot in the Bible about that period. We have two prophets during that time from whom we can gather what was happening: Daniel and Ezekiel. Then we have a lot about their coming out of exile in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, and in the prophets Zechariah, Haggai, and Malachi. But about that very time—those seventy years—we do not have a lot.
In looking at this time of exile, there are two things I considered. Number one, you have to look at the children of the exile. There were those who were there during the exile—Daniel and Ezekiel—and you have to gather something from that.
Also Ezra, because Ezra was born in Persia or Babylon during the exile, and he came back later. He was one of the children who came back, but he was a child of the exile. He was born in exile.
The other thing is to look at history. Though the Word does not have a lot of history about this time, I started looking up the history of the Jews. I read a couple of books—not entirely, okay—but I was looking at books about Jewish history.
One was Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews. He was a secular historian. Another was A History of the Jewish People. So, gathering from those things, I looked at what was happening during this time.
Just to begin, the exile came in three shifts. There was one in 606 or 605 BC. That was when Daniel, and I think the biggest group of exiles, went.
Then, about ten years later, in 597 or 596 BC, there was another deportation, when Jehoiachin was taken captive, along with Ezekiel. Then there was the final one in 586 BC, which coincided with the destruction of the temple and the city of Jerusalem.
The whole thing went in levels. You would think Israel would have been ready to repent and everything. During the time of exile, there was a time of repentance, but it is interesting.
First of all, this exile was not like the slavery in Egypt. It was not as though they were all forced into labor with sledgehammers, breaking rocks, and things like that. A lot of these people, especially in the first couple of departures from Jerusalem, were higher-class people.
Even Jeremiah said, “When you go there, build houses, have your fields, and do these things.” So it was not as though they were at hard labor in some penal colony. Some were brought into cities. Craftsmen helped build things.
Remember Daniel. They took a number of the good, intellectual, good-looking young people. They wanted to raise them up to serve in the court, the government, and the bureaucracy of the Babylonians.
I think because of that, when you look at the prophet Ezekiel, especially within the first twenty-five chapters or so, you see the attitude of the people in exile. They were still opposed to it. “We are getting out of here. God cannot do this to us. We are His people.”
It is kind of like saying, “I am an American. You cannot do this to me. You do not know who I am.” There was still this obstinacy.
There was obstinacy because of false prophets in the land, and because of messages that were going back and forth to Babylon. That is why Jeremiah wrote the letter in Jeremiah 29: “Look, I am going to tell you, this is not going to be a cakewalk for you. There is some deep stuff that has to be dealt with, and you are going to be there for a long time.”
“You might as well build houses, marry, and do these things, because you are going to be here for a while.”
That just did not sink in until the temple was destroyed and the city was razed. Then it was as though the door closed. All of a sudden it was, “What do we do now? Are we ever coming back?”
We might think of this whole period as a period of darkness. It was not.
Elisabeth Elliot once wrote a book called That Slow and Certain Light. It was about guidance. I never read the book, but I loved the title. That slow and certain light.
In a way, I wonder if that is what children in the womb are looking for: that slow and certain light. “Oh, there is the opening. I can get out.”
We just sang a Christmas carol by Wesley. The gospel is in so many Christmas carols—not Christmas songs, but Christmas carols. If you read some of them, there is so much gospel in them.
In the one we sang, it says:
Born to free the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.
In a way, this was Israel’s second birth. This was them being in the womb. Something new was happening.
There is a verse in Isaiah—one of my favorite chapters and favorite verses—Isaiah 43. Toward the end of the chapter, I think this goes with this period of time.
Starting in Isaiah 43:16, it says:
Thus saith the Lord, Who maketh a way in the sea,
And a path in the mighty waters;
Who bringeth forth the chariot and horse,
The army and the power;
They shall lie down together, they shall not rise;
They are extinct, they are quenched as a wick.
Remember ye not the former things,
Neither consider the things of old.
Behold, I will do a new thing;
Now shall it spring forth; shall ye not know it?
I will even make a way in the wilderness,
And rivers in the desert.
The beasts of the field shall honor Me,
The jackals and the ostriches;
Because I give waters in the wilderness,
And rivers in the desert,
To give drink to My people, My chosen.
This is a very good word. When Isaiah gave this, he was predicting what was going to happen. He had told Hezekiah that those to whom he showed his treasures would come in and raze the place.
Then the latter part of Isaiah, especially chapters 40 through 48, is about bringing them back. God is saying, “What I am doing, I am doing as My work.” In Isaiah 45, He even mentions Cyrus: “I have called Cyrus. He is My servant.”
So there is a slow and certain light. Things begin to dawn on them. I think that is the story of our Christian life. We have a burst of sunlight when we are saved. We live in that light for a while, then things dim, but there is something that will not let us go.
There is something that will not let us go. We have talked about “once caught, forever.” There is something that has caught us, and there is a light always ahead of us saying, “I am drawing you forward. I am drawing you forward. I am drawing you forward.”
I think this is what happened during the exile. The temple was gone. Last time I said they were brought from the familiar to the unfamiliar.
When Jerusalem fell, Psalm 137 speaks of how this struck the people:
By the rivers of Babylon,
There we sat down, yea, we wept,
When we remembered Zion.
Upon the willows in the midst thereof
We hanged up our harps.
Then they said, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem.” In other words, there was such remembrance. “Come, sing us one of the songs of Zion.” How can we sing when joy is gone?
It really hit them in that way. And there was repentance. I do not want to hammer repentance, but they repented. That is wonderful. You repent; you do not grovel.
You do not grovel. God does not like grovelers. He is not out to make you grovel. You repent; He restores. You repent; He revives. You repent; He makes new.
Again, they went from the familiar to the unfamiliar. They lost almost everything that was familiar to them as God’s people.
Most of the important symbols of Judaism, which spoke of their favored status with God, were gone. The temple was destroyed. The Ark was gone. These were symbols of His presence, and they were gone.
The altar was destroyed; therefore, the sacrifices ceased. No sacrifices. The feasts ceased. They did not come to Jerusalem for those three times. Those were gone.
Their king—no more. And if they had no king, where was the kingdom? The kingdom was gone. Everything that was familiar to them was gone.
Now they were aliens in a strange land—aliens in a land without a familiar culture, without a familiar language, and with unfamiliar gods. The whole thing was foreign.
Babylon was ready and willing to incorporate them into itself. That was where the Lord sent them. He said, in effect, “I am going to send you to a place that is so foreign from who you are, and that wants so much to envelop you into itself. That is where I am sending you.”
But it is not that they lost everything, because two things went into exile with these captives. They were very, very important.
I do not want to say that we are merely being given a history lesson. We also have to ask: how do these things apply to us in the time in which we are living? We are in a similar situation as Christians.
We are in a place that is ready to usurp us, bring us right into itself, and hold us captive forever. That is what the enemy wants. That is what the world wants. They want us.
But two things went into exile with the captives. I should not even say “things.” One was God.
The other was the Torah, along with some other writings that would later be recognized as Scripture. They could not carry the Ark into exile, but it is amazing that they carried the Torah.
That is one of the main things I want to talk about. But first of all, God went with them. That is probably one of the most important things—actually, it is the most important thing: the realization that God was with them.
When those doors closed, when the temple was razed, it was like, “We sat and wept for Zion.” Where was their hope? Zion was gone. The place where God dwelt was gone.
It was almost not, “Where is God?” but, “What are we to do?”
God had called two notable prophets in Babylon. I want to make a point: they were not prophets who came from Jerusalem and traveled up to Babylon saying, “Okay, here we have the Word of the Lord.” There were two who were already in Babylon.
Daniel and Ezekiel received their calls as prophets while they were in Babylon. This is important to know. Who called them? It was God.
If God called them in Babylon, where was God? He was there with them.
Sometimes, when we go into deep darkness, into our captivities, to understand and see that God is with us in our captivity can be a very liberating thing, a very uplifting thing.
When we go into places of darkness, how quickly we close out all hope of being saved. “Who is going to help me? God is so far away from me. How can I ever get back to Him?”
That was my experience after reading The Normal Christian Life. I said, “Oh God, look at me, where I am. I have never done anything for You.” And He spoke in my heart and said, “You cannot get any closer to Me than you are now.”
For me, that was because I was in Christ. But the whole idea is this: wherever we are, God is. Yes, He is everywhere, but personally speaking, He is there. He is right there.
I think for many of us, He is there waiting for us just to say, “I am at the end. I cannot do any more. I am lost.”
When we come to that place, we see what is expressed in Ezekiel 37, in the valley of dry bones:
These bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say,
Our bones are dried up,
And our hope is lost;
We are clean cut off.
Wow. Some of us have been there. Some of us have been there in our own lives, in our own peril. We cannot see how we can get ahead of it. “I will never get ahead of it. Lord, just go on without me.”
That is what the Lord waits for: for us to get to that point, to look to no other to be our savior. “Oh, if only some good times happened to me, I could get out of this.”
I am reading Robinson Crusoe. It is an old book. His father tells him, “You do not want to go, boy, because danger awaits you.” But he says, “I still want to go.”
He goes out, and there is a storm. He is frightened to death and says, “Oh, I should have listened to my father.” They get out of the storm, and he is ready to go home. But after a couple of days of peaceful sailing, what happens? “Yeah, I want to be a sailor.”
Then he is captured by pirates. “Oh, why did I ever do this?” But when he gets out of that, it is again, “I want to be a sailor.”
We are the same way, are we not? “If I can only get above it, if I can only get to this place, that is what is going to save me.” It is not. None of those things save you.
Only God saves. That is Jesus, right? The Lord says, “Only God saves.”
With Daniel, when he gave the first interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, he declared that God is greater than all nations. They may do this and that, but in the end, God has them in His hands.
He lifts some up. He brings them down. But they are all in His hands. They may have been gone from the land, but God still existed. God never changes Who He is.
We might think He is just our God. No, He is not just our God; He is God. He is God over all. He is God forever. Nothing changes that.
All of a sudden, there was a reawakening to Who God is.
Remember, in Genesis 17, God revealed Himself to Abraham and said, “I am El Shaddai. I am God Almighty.” In Isaiah 40 through 48, how often is God saying, “An idol is nothing. I am God. I bring things up; I put things down.”
“I can tell you what is going to happen before it happens because I am behind it.” That is why He brings up Cyrus. “I know these things. I do these things. This is Who I am. I am powerful. I am a mighty King.”
All of a sudden, there is a reminder of Who He is in Daniel: that He is in control and that He has you in His hand.
In Ezekiel, there is the valley of dead bones. You come to the place of saying, “There is nothing. I am dead.”
That is what is so wonderful about the Lord: He waits until you are dead. I think of Lazarus. He did not go as soon as Lazarus died. He waited four days. He let them know Lazarus was good and dead.
Then, when He came, remember what He said to Mary: “If you believe, you will see the glory of God.”
That is the thing here. With God, it is not just that God is. All of a sudden, faith in Him arises. The Word is spoken: “This is Who God is.” Then faith rises in us because it responds to God’s Word to us.
And because faith arises, there is hope. Ezekiel 36 and 37 speak of this hope. “Can these bones live?” “I do not know, Lord. You know.” “Speak to the bones.”
How often has that been the case in church history? We see dead Christianity, and the Lord speaks to the bones and raises them up again to new life. He does not merely revive them; He raises them up and clothes them with sinews and flesh.
It is like being clothed with the new man. The old man has to be good and dead, because we so often want to live by that old man. But God is able to resurrect.
He does it for His own name’s sake. He does not do it merely because He feels sorry for you. He does pity you, but that is not why He moves. He does it for Himself.
Why did He send the Lord Jesus for us? For Himself. What He made for Himself was taken from Him, and He wanted it back. He made us for Himself.
I think if we can lay hold of that—that He made us for Himself—it leads to the second thing I want to say.
The Torah went with them: the Word of God.
Paul Johnson, the secular historian, wrote that it was during this period of exile that the exiles learned how to be Jews. Is that not interesting? They were Jews, but they learned how to be Jews.
Not all Israel is Israel, you know. What did they do? They had lost all the outward symbols. With those symbols gone, they turned to their writings, their laws, and their records from the past.
Where did they go for help? Where did they go for hope? They turned to the Torah.
They also had other writings. Daniel refers to the writings of Jeremiah and recognizes that the seventy years were nearly complete, and so he began to pray. They had Isaiah. They had the Torah—the five books. They probably had psalms, Proverbs, and writings such as Job.
Out of this time, because they had those writings, there was a turning: “We want to know who we are.”
Out of that arose a school of scribes. I do not even want to call it a class. Whole families began to become scribes. There was the Ben Asher family of scribes and the Ben Naphtali school of scribes.
A scribe is not just one who copies. They are not merely copyists. They write, they copy, and they learn. They are learners.
They are writing and learning, writing and learning. As they learn, they begin to interpret things. God is opening the Word to them. This is where we get Ezra.
Through these writings, as they were copied and discussed, people began to gather together. This is where we think we have the beginnings of the synagogue.
Jews started to meet together, not merely because they were from Israel, but because they wanted to know who they were. They were banding together because what they had in common was not their trade or merely their nationality. They had God in common.
They wanted to know, “What does this mean?” They began gathering together to read the Scriptures and talk about the Scriptures.
If you go to a synagogue, it is not simply one person talking while everyone else listens. Someone begins to expound the Word, and another person may ask, “What about this?” Someone else in the congregation may answer.
Does that not sound somewhat like a meeting in 1 Corinthians 12? A prophet here, a prophet there—the same kind of thing. But the whole thing is the interest: “Who are we? Who am I as a Christian? What does it mean that I am a Christian?”
Through these things, they began to renew—or even be reawakened to—their special identity. Who were they? They had a special identity. No other nation was like that.
They were created by God. The nation of Israel was created by God. It was called into being by God when He called Abraham and said, “You are going to have a multitude.”
They wanted to know why they had been brought into existence. They wanted to know what God’s intentions were for them.
This was all written by a secular historian, but he realized that they were looking: “What are Your intentions for me? Why have You called me into being? Why have You redeemed me out of Egypt? What are You like?”
This Book is a history book, but not just for historical facts. What we see in this Book is God living and relating to man.
Why should you read the Bible? Because you want to see what God is like. You want to see Him alive. You want to see Him talking. You want to hear His thoughts. You want to see what He does. It is all in here.
So why have I been brought into existence? Or, for us, why have I been born again? Why has God given me a second birth?
It is so that God can manifest Himself through me. That is what man was originally supposed to do.
God created man so that He would manifest Himself to the rest of creation in a way that no other creature could, because He made man in His image—for communion, for service, and for relationship.
This is why I have been created: to be this kind of vessel through whom God chooses to reveal Himself.
We, the Jews, were brought into existence and redeemed. We, as Christians, have been brought into existence and born again so that God can manifest Himself through us—as a company, as a nation, as a race.
Is that not what Peter says? You are a nation. You are a race. A priesthood. Brothers and sisters, this is the eternal purpose of God for us: to manifest Him.
That is the eternal purpose. This is what God had in mind when He made man. This is what God had in mind when man fell and went his own way, when He raised up Israel, and when Israel fell.
This is what He meant when He sent Christ to earth. He did not send Christ to earth simply because Israel failed. He knew Israel would fail. He sent Christ to earth because it was in His plan from the beginning.
The whole thing was to create that new race in Christ who would manifest Him. That is what we see in the Lord Jesus. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. That is why He has called us.
The law was given to the Jews to manifest Who God is. Yes, He is holy. Yes, He is righteous. This is Who He is, and you can see it in the laws that He gives.
It is not merely, “Do not have idols.” It is how to live so that you manifest Who He is. “Do not kill one another. Do not steal from one another. Manifest Who I am.”
He is different. When we come to Ezra, then, Ezra was working as a scribe. Ezra 7 says that he was a scribe.
While he was doing the work of a scribe—copying and learning—incidentally, if you are studying the Bible, a good way to do it is to copy what you are studying. Copy the Word as you study, because it makes you think about what you are writing.
It moved Ezra to what Ezra 7:10 says: he set his heart to seek the law of the Lord, to do it, and to teach in Israel statutes and ordinances.
All that study in him was not just head knowledge. It had an effect on his heart. He said, “I want to know this law. I want to know what is behind it. I want to know the spirit of it. And I want to do it.”
You read Psalm 119, and that is the cry of the psalmist’s heart. He is reading the Word and saying, “Oh Lord, open it up more to me. I want to know it. I want to do it, because to me it is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.”
It is food to me. It is life. As I order my life according to what is in it, I find peace and joy, and I find that I am a blessing to others. Notice I did not say, “And I am blessed by it.”
Notice the order: to seek, to do, and to teach. We get a lot of teaching. Teaching the Word is a big thing for Protestant Christians, and we know a lot about teaching.
But let us look at the other two: to seek and to do.
To seek is not just to read, but to study. Study means to look.
I studied a bug the other day. Does that mean I pulled out a bunch of books and started reading about a bug? No. I looked at the bug and watched it for a while.
You start noticing things: how its legs move, its coloration, where its eyes are, all those kinds of things. That is study. You are looking at it. You are beholding it. You are asking, “What is really there? What is this about?”
Then you look for His commands. “Lord, are You speaking to me? Are You speaking to me to act?”
It is not, “Are You speaking to me so I have something to say?” You are speaking to me because You have something for me to do.
I do not want you to think I am putting you on a legalistic trip: “Oh, you have to obey all the commands,” and all that kind of stuff.
C. T. Studd, I think, was pacing in a room all night while staying in F. B. Meyer’s house. F. B. Meyer went up to him the next day and asked, “What were you doing?”
He said, “I was looking for which command the Lord wanted me to obey. I was up all night reading the Scriptures and saying, ‘Lord, is there something You want me to do?’”
I do not want to put you on a trip saying, “Well, you have to do this.” Let me explain it this way.
The Lord Jesus said in Matthew 6:33, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness.”
I think, for us, we look at Paul’s biggest revelatory epistles: Romans, Ephesians, and Colossians. They bring us up into the heavenlies, and we see the kingdom of God. We are thrilled with it.
But we tend to stop in the kingdom. We like living in the kingdom. We like thinking about the kingdom.
I remember one night when I lived with seven other Christian guys. We stayed up into the wee hours, thinking about the kingdom of God and talking about what the kingdom of God must be. We were thrilled with it.
But Paul begins those places in the heavenlies; he does not leave you in the heavenlies. When you get to Romans 12, all of a sudden you have practical things. “Now that you have seen this, this is how it should affect your life.”
Ephesians 4 through 6: “Now that you have seen this, this is how it affects your life.” Colossians 3: “Now that you have seen this, this is how it should affect your life.”
You cannot have just one of them. If you only have, “This is how it affects your life,” you have legalism. If you only have the other, you have a kind of Gnosticism: “I have this wonderful knowledge. I have the secrets of all these things.”
They were never meant to be apart. They are meant to be together. One may come first, but the other must follow. Must follow.
It is like the difference between reading Tozer’s The Knowledge of the Holy, which is about God and His attributes, and then reading J. C. Ryle’s Practical Religion. You put into practice what you know about God, and it has an effect on your life.
You see Who He is. How does that affect you?
For example, think of the parable about the man with the great debt. He says, “Give me more time,” and the lord forgave him. It should have had an effect on his life. He should not have throttled his debtor.
But when you actually see and are touched by what the Lord has done for you, it is not merely something you read. It is God touching your life. You are changed.
You have been touched. It is almost like you have been hit and have a spot where, every time you touch it, you still feel it. The same is true with the Lord. He touches us, and we know, “I have been touched.”
Sometimes we would like to go back and touch that place again, just to feel it again. Does that make me too weird?
We are not obeying the letter. This is very, very important. It is the Spirit Who seeks to turn that Word into life experience.
The new covenant is this: the Lord writes His law in our hearts. What does that mean? Is He in there with a little pen so that you can memorize it? No, it means this.
You are reading the Word, and you are taking it into your heart. It does not mean this happens every time you read the Word. But you are reading the Word, and then you come upon some circumstance in your life.
Something happens, and the Lord says, “You know, when you were reading that, let us apply it here.”
That is what our brother Lenny was talking about when he spoke about abiding. That is the experience. All of a sudden, the Lord says, “Let us apply this right at this circumstance, right now.”
Then you have to exercise faith in it. This is how the Lord writes. He writes it as you are doing His will. He writes it while you are doing that act He is asking you to do.
That is what makes the stylus cut into the clay. You are doing it. Otherwise, it is erasable. When the Lord writes something in your heart, it is forever. It is indelible.
That is what He wants: His indelible character seen through you.
He has given us His Word. He says, “Look at it. Eat it.”
Sometimes, as Isaiah says, it is sweet to the taste, but it upsets our stomach. That is the fight of the flesh, when we say, “Lord, I am just not ready for this.”
That is when it upsets our stomach. But when we step out and do the will of God as He shows us to do it, we find strength and joy in doing it.
“I have food to eat that ye know not of. My food is to do the will of Him that sent Me.” That is what Christ said, as the perfect Man in Whom the character of God was manifested.
We become more aware of who we are because we have His Word showing us who we are. Israel had its history saying, “This is why you were chosen. This is how you were chosen. This is what I want for you. This is My desire for you. This is My purpose for you.”
He says, “In order to walk in these things, look at Me. Look at Me as you see Me in the law.” Not merely the letter, because the letter leaves out the heart. Find out what this means: “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.”
That is what happened to the Pharisees.
As we become more and more aware of who we are, then we experience what Daniel experienced in Daniel 1. When they set before him the king’s table, with all its things, he said, “I do not want to defile myself.”
When you think of defiling yourself, you may think, “Well, I do not want to sin. I do not want to do this.” But that is the fruit that shows your defilement.
What leads to defilement? Disregarding what you are called to be.
That is what leads to defilement. I disregard who I am in Christ. I disregard who I am supposed to be—who He has made me to be, who He has called me to be—and I say, “I will do it my way.”
I disregard the fact that He has brought me here and blessed me in this way. “Surely I can have this.” It is not sure.
That is where we go back to the Lord and say, “Lord, can I? Can I do this? Is this okay for me?”
Think of what you are called to be. You are called to be a son of God.
Remember Israel: “Out of Egypt I called My son.” Out of the world, He calls His son. When we are born again, He is saying, “I called you out of the world. You are Mine.”
Finally, through His Word, there was a third thing gained. Again, this came from the secular historian.
He said that the Jews in Babylon, because of prophecies like those in Isaiah and Jeremiah, knew they would not be there forever. Jeremiah said seventy years.
They knew this was temporary and transitory. Their outlook was no longer, “I am here forever.” It became, “I am a sojourner. I am just passing through. There is an end to this.”
“When that end comes, I will be back in that glorious place where I am supposed to be.”
As my outlook becomes shaped by who I am and what I am made to be, all of a sudden I see that the things around me are temporary.
We fear a third world war. We fear the crumbling of the United States into chaos, perhaps into four or five nations. We fear the loss of our pension.
Let us be real about it. My brothers and sisters, this is not the final reality.
I know that is hard to fathom because we live in time. But the Lord is trying to bring us up into the eternal so that we can live in the temporal.
Do you understand? He wants us to see that He is in control of all things. He has it all. Live in the light of that so that you do not fear these other things.
These things are coming. I am not going to lie to you. I fear a collapse of the economy. I fear persecution.
But if that comes, I have found something through my own body. I will kind of close with this.
Years ago, before I joined the club of no-gallbladders, when you have gallstones, the pain from an attack can last for hours. And the way I think is, “Oh my gosh, I am dying.”
Through that, the Lord has brought me to a place of saying, “You know something, Lord? I am in Your hands. I am just in Your hands, and I am going to leave myself there.”
So whatever happens, it happens. They may say, “You have this. You have inoperable cancer. You have something else.” Lord, I am still in Your hands.
If You are going to take me, then I know You can still love me. I do not have to fear those things. I do not have to fear that You are doing this to punish me.
Perfect love casts out fear, right? But I know I am in Your hands.
That is the whole thing about the time of exile. These exiles found that they were in God’s hands.
Because of that, they had hope. They had hope that they would be returned to where they should be: in His presence.
This world is not my home. What is that old song?
This world is not my home,
I’m just a-passing through;
My treasures are laid up
Somewhere beyond the blue.
The angels beckon me
From heaven’s open door,
And I can’t feel at home
In