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Why God May Color Outside the Lines
The short answer to this is simply that God respects the lines that He draws,
but often He does not respect our interpretation of the lines He draws. And now
some Scripture:
Amos 9:11,12 (LXX) In that day I will raise up the tent of David that is fallen
and I will rebuild its fallen ruins and raise up its broken down parts and I
will rebuild it just as in the days of old in order that the remnant of men and
all the nations upon whom My name is called upon them may diligently seek (Me),
says the Lord who does these things.
II Samuel 6:17 (LXX) And they bring the ark of the Lord and set it in its place
in the middle of the tent which David had pitched for it.
John 9:39 And Jesus said: For judgment I have come into this world, so that
those who are not seeing may see and the ones who are seeing may become blind.
The commandment of God told the Israelites to not labor on the Sabbath. The
scribes and Pharisees took it upon themselves to define labor, assuming that
“one size fits all”, or if it was labor for one person in their eighties, it was
also labor for a person in their twenties, ignoring individual situations and
circumstances. Jesus would not be intimidated by their rules and regulations and
so He “colored outside their lines.” When David finally succeeded in bringing
the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem and not to Shiloh where the properly made
tabernacle, where Samuel the prophet had spent most of his childhood, still
stood, he put it in the middle of the tent he had pitched for it in Jerusalem.
The Bible makes no mention of there being a place isolated from the rest of the
inside of the tent for the ark, as was the case of the tent in Shiloh;
nevertheless David put it close to where he lived because he wanted it there.
This was definitely “coloring outside the lines” but the Bible does not record
that this act angered God. David’s heart was in the right place and God knew it.
Shiloh was about 20 miles from Jerusalem. Now through Amos God promises to
restore the fallen tabernacle of David. Amos lived and prophesied almost 200
years after the time of David, when the temple that Solomon, the son of David,
had built and was still standing, with the ark of the covenant inside the “holy
of holies” within the temple. That temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in
the fourth century B.C. It was rebuilt by the Jews who returned from their
Babylonian captivity and greatly renovated by Herod the Great, the one who tried
to kill Jesus by having all the babies in and near Bethlehem destroyed. The
Romans destroyed that temple in 70 A.D. and it has until today never been
rebuilt. But God is interested in restoring the tabernacle of David because in
the end “the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and
they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them.” (Revelation
21:3b) David was a man after God’s own heart; and he wanted God to dwell in a
tabernacle in Jerusalem. It is according to this pattern and not the pattern of
a temple of stone that God will one day tabernacle among men, in the new
Jerusalem.
Overall any honest look at the church as it now is in this world, is depressing.
For us it is hard to comprehend how what we now see of the church in general can
be transformed into a church with spot or wrinkle or any such thin, but holy and
blameless. (Ephesians 5:27) How in the world can that chasm be overcome? We know
that nothing is impossible for God, but this involves not only God, but people
also. At a meeting of about 200 people several years ago, Bill Johnson and
others from his church were praying for those with physical problems. There was
present a mother whose little boy had club feet. Webster says this is “a
congenital deformity of the foot, characterized by a misshapen or twisted, often
club like appearance; also called ‘talipes’. “ This little boy had sores on his
feet caused by his attempts to walk. They prayed for him and his mother then put
him on the floor for she had been holding him. Now his feet were flat on the
floor for the first time. As he touched some of his sore places, one of his
little friends told him to run. He did, running in circles around the people
there. He then came back to his mother and the lady (the pastor’s wife) who was
videotaping the proceedings asked him what had happened to him His answered,
“Jesus big, Jesus big!” He got it right. There is no limit to what God can do
through those who believe. God is not interested in what anyone says cannot be
done. Nothing is impossible for the one who believes. (Mark 10:27 & Matthew
17:20) In theology there are those who are called “cessationists.” This means
they believe that there were no more miracles after the last of the original
apostles had died off and if there are things today that seem to be miracles,
they are of the devil because God doesn’t do such things today. This line of
thinking, I believe, is very dangerous because it puts the person believing that
in grave danger of calling a work of God that is a miracle of the Holy Spirit a
work of the devil. Such a sin never has forgiveness, but is the eternal sin. God
will heal whomever, wherever He wants to and anyone believing He won’t do such
today had better do some redrawing of his lines.
John the baptizer’s message was “repent because the kingdom of heaven is at
hand.” (Matthew 3:2) Many people were traveling by foot for long distances to
hear him and to be baptized by him. But when John saw many of the Pharisees and
Saducees coming for baptism, in modern English he said to them: You bunch of
poisonous snakes, who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Unless you show
by your deeds that you have repented, I will not baptize you. This man was not
called to be a diplomat; his calling was to denounce sin wherever he saw it and
he was no respecter of persons. He told Herod he was committing adultery by
taking his brother’s wife to be his wife. Herod was afraid of him but his
brother’s wife was not which led to his martyrdom.. Sooner or later all true Old
Testament prophets in speaking God’s words to the people “colored outside the
lines” and many of them met the same fate as that of John the baptizer.
In college I had a precious Baptist brother in the faith and I often went to his
church. But during that time, (the early 1940’s) he was reading some publication
of his denomination and he paused one day and announced to me that his
denomination started in the upper room in Jerusalem. I realized he was stating
only what he had read and I thought it would be fruitless to argue with him so I
did not do so, but I thought to myself, I do not think so. However, if God
required maturity and perfection before He would use anyone, He would use no
individual or group and would only have angels to use. When God decided to use
Saul of Tarsus, He blinded him with light brighter than the noon day sun, cast
him onto the ground and spoke to him, identifying Himself as being Jesus whom he
was persecuting. Those with him heard the voice, but saw nothing. They led this
blinded man into Damascus and found lodging for him there. Saul had indeed seen
his life pass before him and he prayed and kept on praying for three days and
nights without food or water. He was at the end of his rope which is always a
good place to turn around. Then God sent a humble Christian believer, a brave
man named Ananias to him. He did not want to go, but he obeyed God. God sent him
because Saul was praying and God was listening. Saul faced the biggest
transition in his life. Webster says a transition is “a passing from one
condition, form, stage, activity, place, etc. to another.” Jesus once told a man
that he was not far from the kingdom of God. (Mark 12:34) I once had a flat tire
at about 10:00 P.M. when I was in sight of the town I then lived in. My day had
begun at about 4:00 A.M. and I had traveled on dirt roads both visiting,
teaching, preaching the whole day. Being close to my destination was not good
enough, nor was it an opting to either sleep in the car or walk to my house and
leave the car there to see about the next day as I had a young female Bible
School student with me. Changing a tire in the dark is not easy, but I was able
to do so and did that as I was then young. As a poet once said, “He gives grace
for every trial.” But God colored outside the lines of the young apostolic
church when He chose Saul of Tarsus, as I thought He did for me when I got that
flat tire near the end of a long hard day. I had preached several times that
day, but He said there is one more sermon for you to preach by what you do
before you rest and do it without a murmuring word.
Shat we sometimes fail to realize is that God draws lines and colors where He
wants to because He alone has the authority to do that. He understands what I
don’t understand, and He alone sees the heart of everyone perfectly and fully
knows what is best. Some say that God is weaving a giant tapestry with His
creation and that we can only see a tiny part of the whole and that from the
wrong side. But on the day of eternity, whenever that is, He will let us step
back and view the whole from the right side. There you will see your tiny part
of the whole, small indeed is your part of mine, but so is that of everyone
else, except Jesus who makes the whole thing possible. Then you or I will
understand why God would not permit us to do something we very much wanted to do
at some point in our lives or forced us into a situation we did not want to be
in.
The biggest transitions in life are our biological birth, spiritual birth by
faith in Jesus and being filled with the Holy Spirit which may occur at the same
time as was the case for Saul, our transition to either paradise or the nether
world when our time on earth is over and finally our entrance into either the
new Jerusalem or the lake of fire. There are other transitions but these stand
out in the light of eternity.
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