Beholding the Repeated Interventions of God

As many of you know, 10 days ago Lisa was in the ER with breathing difficulties and they did a chest CT that had previously been scheduled as an outpatient test to be done a few days later. She had a very scary allergic reaction to the contrast used in the CT. As her airway was closing off, I alerted a nurse who responded within seconds with two others plus the doctor. With quick intervention Lisa did keep breathing, but later commented on how the outcome could have been so much worse if she had been in the clinic for the test rather than the ER. We were praying throughout the experience but did not realize that this was how God would intervene, in possibly saving her life.
 
Today we will behold the repeated interventions of God. Some we can recognize in the immediate, micro level, like Lisa did in the ER. We can also stand in awe of God’s overall involvement in the entire sweep of history, assured that each individual story adds up to his story. What is God up to? How is he involved? What are his eternal purposes? One of the challenges of seeking a big picture view like this is that we realize very quickly that it is indeed very big. I feel like we are looking over a huge forest that stretches to the horizon in all directions. The risk is that we could walk down into it, examine a few trees, and come back out thinking that we have understood the essence of the whole. I would like somehow to describe the trees and the forest, conscious of how impossible this task actually is.

This message is in effect the flip-side of John’s last week – and deeply intertwined. The story of man’s brokenness is also the story of God’s faithfulness. Our failings are his opportunities; his grace comes into focus in the context of our sin. We are not deists. God’s involvement with the world did not end with creation. He has stayed intimately involved, saying as he does in Isaiah 65:
 
“I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me;
    I was found by those who did not seek me.
To a nation that did not call on my name,
    I said, ‘Here am I, here am I.’
All day long I have held out my hands
    to an obstinate people,
who walk in ways not good,
    pursuing their own imaginations—
a people who continually provoke me
    to my very face. – Isaiah 56:1-3
 
Before we launch into this I would mention again that the concept of beholding in the title of this series means more than just looking at something. It involves paying attention and thinking about something in a deep enough way for it to impact who we are. I came across a bestselling book called Beholding and Becoming: The Art of Everyday Worship. The author proposes that we can become what we behold, a construction first mentioned by the British poet William Blake. We become what we behold along the lines of 2 Corinthians 3:18: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” That’s how the ESV puts it. When we behold the glory of the Lord, we can not only reflect that glory, but we can be transformed into his image. In a negative sense as well, if we focus too much on evil, if we spend our time beholding idols or people and systems that reject God we can be pulled away from the glory of his presence and be subtly transformed into worldly ways of thinking.
 
Satan’s temptation of Eve and then Adam in the Garden of Eden was to first of all get them to doubt what God had said (“Did God really say?”) and then to get them to think that they would be better off in control of their own lives, eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and deciding for themselves what was right and wrong. They would pursue their own imaginations, as it said in our Isaiah passage, and continually provoke God to his very face. However, even as God pronounced judgement on them for their sin, he offered hope and a way for reconciliation. He still holds out his hands all day long to obstinate people, offering forgiveness and salvation.
 
So from the Garden of Eden on, the Bible is the story of God’s repeated interventions in the face of human waywardness and outright rebellion. Last week John mentioned the first murder, committed by Cain against his brother Abel. God responded in cursing Cain, but also in placing a mark on him to prevent anyone from killing him. We know that on the one hand God is completely holy and just, therefore he must punish sin. But on the other hand he is completely loving and gracious, so he has always held out the hope of undeserved forgiveness and redemption. Thus he showed mercy to Cain the murderer.
 
Sin has been passed from one generation to another, and there will always be those who reject God and his ways. God has set the standard for human behavior. This has been another of his interventions, as in giving the law to Moses and in Jesus setting the bar even higher in the Sermon on the Mount. From the very beginning, God gave people a sense of right and wrong. Many chose to turn away from him and go their own way, but no matter how rebellious and evil people on earth have become, God through his grace has always preserved a remnant who respond in faith and acknowledge him as Lord. We see this in the story of Noah. By the time we come to Genesis 6, the world has largely turned away from God:
 
The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord. – Genesis 6:5-8
 
I am sure Noah was not perfect. But he had faith, and he was willing to obey God. So God destroyed plenty of sinful people in the flood – and all of them deserved it – but he saved Noah and his family, offering hope for the future. So we see the intervention of God here to judge sin and his intervention to preserve faith. Through history, faith has been like a light shining in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it. God has always preserved a remnant of faithful people. Paul comments on this in Romans 11, highlighting the story of Elijah:
 
God did not reject his people, whom he foreknew. Don’t you know what Scripture says in the passage about Elijah—how he appealed to God against Israel: “Lord, they have killed your prophets and torn down your altars; I am the only one left, and they are trying to kill me”? And what was God’s answer to him? “I have reserved for myself seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal.’ So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace. – Romans 11:2-5
 
Elijah thought that he was the last remaining follower of God – and that he was about to be killed too. But God had 7000 faithful followers in Israel, people who by his grace were holding on to faith during dark times. God has intervened time and again to preserve faith on the earth. More recently, we might think of the monks during the Dark Ages faithfully copying the scriptures by hand so that the word of God would not be lost. And even in our own time, the COVID pandemic has shaken the faith of many people and called into question some longstanding religious institutions. It was very challenging when churches were not allowed to meet in person. As a result some people have given up going to church entirely. In 2020, Gallup polls tracking Americans’ membership in house of worship dropped below 50 percent for the first time ever. This is part of a much longer-term decline, apparently accelerated by COVID.
 
Jesus asked in Luke 18, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” I think we can answer that with a confident yes. Churches as institutions might be continue to decline, evil may appear more and more ingrained in our society, and challenges to faith may become more and more intense. But I believe that there will always be “seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” However, Jesus did give this warning about the end times in Matthew 24:
 
At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come. – Matthew 24:10-14
 
It is sobering to think that the love of most will grow cold. But we can take heart from two encouraging implications here: that there will be those who stand firm to the end and are saved, and that the gospel will be preached to the whole world.
 
Let’s rewind to Genesis and a couple of more examples of God’s intervention after Noah. First, there was the Tower of Babel in chapter 11 where God confused the language of the whole earth to break the pride and power of people who thought they could build a tower that could reach to heaven. But then we come to the story of Abraham and an even more significant intervention. In calling Abraham (or Abram as he called then) God was not primarily concerned with judging sin or even preserving faith. The climax of God’s promise to Abram was that “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”
 
God set apart the Jews to bless the whole earth. They have not always done a very good job of it. But they were the means by which Jesus came, God’s greatest intervention of all time. I’ll not be saying too much about the story of Jesus – that’s the topic for next time – but he was the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham.
 
And God continues to stretch out his hands to his chosen people, the Jews. God has kept preserving them, even after the time of Christ, saving them from several efforts to wipe them out, including most famously the Holocaust of World War II. Against all odds, Jews have been able to return to the land of Israel, and we believe that God still has purposes that he wants to fulfill in and through them. As believers in Jesus, God has adopted us into the family of Abraham and wants to use us as well to bless the whole earth.
 
Once God chose Abraham, most of the rest of the Old Testament narrative focuses on God’s interaction with him and his descendants. Many of God’s interventions with Israel were to provide for his people in practical ways. There are way too many instances of this to list them all. Take the life of Joseph as an example. God protected and cared for him so that in turn he would be able to keep his extended family from starving in the time of famine. The Egyptians were blessed with life-sustaining food in this process, too. This is the kind of practical need that God provides for over and over.
 
God used people like Joseph to help others in need, and obviously he continues to do that to the present day. We can think of so many ways that advances in science and medicine and technology have provided practical benefits to people. When God uses medicine to heal someone it is just as much a gift of his grace as a direct, miraculous intervention. We may see people trying to take credit for what humankind has accomplished, but God is the one who provided intelligence, creativity, and resources to make it happen.
 
God can certainly work through human efforts and institutions, but these need to be redeemed to be useful to him. So many inventions have had negative effects equal or exceeding their positive ones. Considering the internet, for example, connecting people around the world in a way that could hardly have been dreamed of one hundred years ago. It has allowed people to access the gospel message in places where an in-person witness is essentially impossible. However, it has also facilitated such ills as malware, bullying on social media, the proliferation of fake news, access to pornography, gaming addictions, and heavy-handed surveillance, to name just a few. It boggles my mind to think that some people put their hope in technology eventually solving all of humankind’s problems. It certainly seems to be creating just as many new ones.
 
While I am writing this, Lisa has Handel’s Messiah playing in the background. It speaks so clearly to God’s reaction to human hubris in the words of Psalm 2:
 
Why do the nations so furiously rage together, and why do the people imagine a vain thing?
The kings of the earth rise up, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord, and against His anointed.
Let us break their bonds asunder, and cast away their yokes from us.
He that dwelleth in Heav'n shall laugh them to scorn;
The Lord shall have them in derision. – Psalm 2:1-4
 
People will get nowhere on their own, but God can certainly work through scientific advances that he has provided for them to achieve. However, we do see plenty of miracles throughout the Bible, too – times in the Old Testament, for example, when God acted directly to provide for people – all the way from the fig leaf garments for Adam and Eve, to manna in the wilderness, to healing for Naaman's leprosy, to Daniel’s deliverance from the lions, to a vine to shade Jonah from the sun. And then in the New Testament we have all the miracles of Jesus and those of his followers, empowered by the Holy Spirit. God has continuously intervened in the flow of history to provide for physical needs, such as food, healing, rest, deliverance, and security, and also for less tangible needs such as comfort, peace, hope, courage, and power over evil forces. The apostle Paul had experience God’s provision in all of these areas, so he could confidently tell believers in Philippi, “My God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus.”
 
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told his disciples to ask, seek, and knock in order to receive what they needed from God. In prayer we invite God to intervene in our lives, and the discipline of prayer helps to align our will with what God wants for us and for the world. There is no use praying for problems unless we are at the same time offering ourselves to God to be part of the answer. Prayer is primarily a means for us to deepen our relationship with God, not to get what we want from him. He already knows what we need and wants to give it to us. There are so many assurances of this throughout Scripture, such as the well-known Jeremiah 29:11: “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.” He is able to reveal those plans to us and direct our steps as we trust in him. A similar verse is Psalm 32:8: “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my loving eye on you.” God intervenes, therefore, to tell us what to do, to give us direction, if we are willing to submit to him.
 
It can be easy to doubt that God’s intentions are always for our good, to prosper us and not to harm us, when times are tough and God is not intervening as we would like him to. Sometimes prayers seem to get no answer at all. That’s when we need to persevere in our faith that God is good and loving, that he sees and understands us, but that he may have purposes that he is working out that we cannot see at the moment. We need to trust him with the inexplicable, knowing that someday it will be made clear. As it says in this well-known passage from Romans 8:
 
But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified. – Romans 8:25-30
 
We need to trust that God will work every circumstance for our good, if we love him and are called according to his purpose. And that purpose is laid out in the verses following: to be conformed to the image of his Son. That can be a painful process. As it says in Hebrews 2:
 
In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. – Hebrews 2:10
 
If Jesus himself was shaped by suffering, we cannot really expect that God will not use that in our lives as well. As CS Lewis put it so succinctly:
 
We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.
 
At times, God’s interventions do involve suffering – and as limited human beings we can have a hard time accepting that. However, as it said in that passage from Romans 8, the Spirit helps us in our weakness and intercedes for us in accordance to the will of God.
 
Zooming back out to the macro level, let’s consider again what God’s purposes are in his interventions on a global level. The reason we need to keep coming back to this is that when we consider our purpose as individuals we need to make sure that that aligns with what God wants to accomplish on a larger scale. Every day each one of us is making decisions about where we are going to focus our time and efforts and resources, and we need to make sure that we are guided by God’s overall intentions.
 
In this season of Advent, leading up to Christmas, we wait in expectation, not just for the celebration of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, but also for his second coming. We are told in several places in the New Testament to be prepared for the Day of the Lord, which could come at any time. This will mark God’s final intervention on the earth as we know it, followed by his establishing a new heaven and new earth, as described in Revelation 21. When Jesus left the earth after his resurrection he promised to return, and in 2 Peter 3 we read

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. – 2 Peter 3:9
 
This is the key to what God wants to accomplish in the current age: he wants everyone on earth to come to repentance – which means that they will be saved through faith in Jesus, accepting his forgiveness for their sins. This has always been the purpose of his repeated interventions, even before the time of Christ. He has wanted everyone to be saved by faith rather than in trying to be good. God has revealed himself throughout history, even in creation. As it says in Romans 1,
 
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. – Romans 1:20-21
 
It is amazing to read about the number of isolated tribes who have a traditional name for the one true God, even if they don’t know how to properly relate to him. Some of you may be familiar with the book, Eternity in Their Hearts, by Don Richardson, who has studied hundreds of cultures around the world and found much evidence of what he calls “redemptive analogies,” aspects of the culture and belief system that have prepared the people group for receiving the gospel of Jesus. One tribe that he worked with directly had the concept of a “peace child” who could bring reconciliation between warring groups. Jesus could be explained as a Peace Child sent by God to reconcile people to himself.
 
Another tribe in Southeast Asia had an ancient belief that a white person would come someday, bringing a book that would explain how they could know the true God. This meant that when western missionaries arrived the people were very receptive to the gospel message. I guess I mention these examples as an indication of how God has intervened in the world in ways outside of the mainstream Biblical narrative or western experience. We should pray that Jesus continues to reveal himself in miraculous ways to people who have never met a believer – and this does happen in dreams and visions, especially in the Muslim world.
 
However, this should not be seen as a replacement for our participation in the Great Commission that Jesus gave, where he commanded his followers to go into all the world and make disciples. We need to align ourselves with God’s purpose to call all people to himself, whatever that means in terms of his individual calling for each of us. And some people are called simply to pray – to ask God to intervene according to his will. We live in a world that desperately needs a Savior.

In summary, then, we’ve seen that God has repeated intervened to counter the effects of human sinfulness in the tragic flow of history that we heard about last time. In review, we’ve seen that the purpose of these interventions is
 
1.    To reveal his glory, which is transformative for those who behold it.
2.    To set standards for human behavior and to establish his law.
3.    To judge sin and execute his justice.
4.    To offer mercy and grace, also according to his nature, culminating in the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.
5.    To preserve faith, in light of the world turning away from him.
6.    To provide for the practical needs of people, in every area of life.
7.    To give direction to those who are willing to submit to him.
8.    To conform his followers into the image of Jesus, often through suffering.
9.    To lead everyone everywhere to repentance and salvation by faith in Jesus.
 
You could probably come up with many more. This topic could be a whole series of sermons. Even doing our best we can only comprehend a tiny part of what God is up to. But knowing what we do is enough for us to align our lives with his purpose to use us as his people to bless the whole earth. May he give us the eyes of faith to recognize (to behold) where he is at work and to discern how we should be a part of what he is doing.