No Greater Love Than His
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  • application of body of Christ #3
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  • Melchizedek Gen. 14:18-20
  • Melchizedek #2
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  • Mark of the Covenant

Lord of Heaven and Earth

3/23/2023

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​Lord of Heaven and Earth
 Genesis 14:18-22   The introduction of Melchizedek King of Salem, the priest of The Most High Good.  Vs 19 He blessed Abraham, the receiver of the Promise as, “Blessed be Abram OF THE MOST HIGH GOD, POSSESSOR OF HEAVEN AND EARTH.  BLESSED BE THE MOST HIGH GOD.”

This is the “shadowy” introduction to our Great High Priest, the Heavenly Eternal Melchizedek, the Eternal Son of God Most High, the One by Whom God Most High created the worlds, the Only One Who could restore the Work of God’s Hands to the place of bringing Pleasure unto Him. (Heb. 1:2, 10-12, 2:5-10; Rev.4:11) .

The Levitical priests “were ordained for men in things pertaining to God that they may offer gifts and sacrifices to God”, this to maintain communication with the God of Heaven and earth, to be led and fed and protected in this world that was no longer in subjection to man.(Heb. 2:6-8)

In Rev. 4:11, the worshipful summation of John’s visionary visit to “throne room” of the Most High God, we read, “Thou art worthy O Lord, to receive Glory and Honor and Power: for Thou hast created all things, AND FOR THY PLEASURE THEY ARE AND WERE CREATED.”  This God is surrounded in John’s vision with Glorious Emblems of Covenant, Promise, and Purity.

That Personal Pleasure for which God wrought His creation of all things is no capricious fancy.  It flows out of His Eternal Will and Purpose to manifest His Glorious Goodness.  It takes on a “benevolent” meaning in Ephesians 1:5,9.   Here we find our God adopting children to Himself by Jesus Christ, “according to the GOOD PLEASURE OF HIS WILL.”  And in Vs 9, “He has made known unto us the mystery of His Will, according to HIS GOOD PLEASURE which He purposed in Himself.” 
 
We conclude that all things, all of creation, all the earth, including the descriptive choir of Revelation 5:13-14 were and are created to bring Eternal Pleasure to the Most High God.  His Will and Purpose as revealed in Ephesians to adopt a Family for His Name (Eph. 3:14-15) is an integral part of His Creative Purpose and must not be separated from the earthly scope of His Pleasure in Rev. 4:11.  

Uniting this truth of God’s Pleasure in all of His Creation with Hebrews 1&2, this Creating Purpose takes on a “covenant tone”. This is the book of our High Priest, the Eternal Melchizedek, the Priest of the Covenant of Grace, Peace and Rest.  Note that He is introduced as, “by Whom also He made the worlds.”  Just as the Levitical priests were ordained for men in things “pertaining to God”, our Great High Priest  is introduced as the Creator of the worlds, implying that all of Creation “pertains”, belongs to God and His creative purpose for His Glory and therefore must have the ministry of the Eternal Melchizedek to “offer gifts and sacrifices” to restore it to that purpose of Glory!!!

Chapter 1 proceeds to introduce the Son’s Eternity against the backdrop of this fallen creation.  1:10 speaks of His laying the foundation of the earth and declaring the heavens as the “works of His Hands”. 1:11 says, “they shall perish”, necessitated by the ungodly lust of man for his own glory, robbing God of His Pleasure. “They shall wax old as a garment. Vs 12 And as a garment, you will fold them up”.  But notice a wonderful phrase, “BUT THEY SHALL BE CHANGED”.  This necessity for change for this earth is placed over against it’s Eternal Changeless Creator: “But Thou are the same, and Thy years fail not.”  For God’s Good Pleasure, a change must occur to this earth and everything in it, and the Changeless Creator is the only one adequate to bring that about.
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Our needy prayers, our opportunity to behold the Glory of God

2/24/2023

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Walking in the Light of our Lord Jesus Christ in a fallen world.   1 John 1

1/24/2023

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        In the first chapter of his first epistle, John gives us a "Hands-On" introduction to our Lord & Savior Jesus Christ, His purpose and work. The humanity of his Jesus is clearly declared in the verbs that he uses (heard, seen, looked upon, handled) to describe the Apostolic encounter and relationship with the One who was from the beginning.
        In verse 2, this One Who Is the Word of Life, he declares plainly to be the Eternal Life that was with the Father. In these two verses we have a most personal and intimate encounter with the God/Man Who Is the Sent One from the Father. (See John 5:22-24, 6:29)
        Verse three lays out John's reason for giving us this introduction to his Beloved Lord.  It is that we may have fellowship with the Apostles in a spiritually Hands-On way in order that we may have a spiritually Hands-On fellowship/relationship with the Heavenly Father and His Beloved Son, Jesus Christ. This is in keeping with John's record of our Lord's High Priestly prayer in John 17:20 where our Jesus prays for "them also which shall believe on Me through their (the Apostles) word." The power of the Gospel is in this historic Apostolic Witness, the Witness that we are called to spiritually encounter.  They did not speak of some myth!!
        It is intriguing that while John presents Jesus as the Eternal Life that is with the Father from the beginning, his focus is not primarily our eternal life in him. I believe that's to be understood in his words, but he seems to be emphasizing that our life in Christ is first of all to be one of fellowship with the Father and His Son. There is no indication of a "get out of hell free card"  salvation in John's thinking. This Eternal Life, this life in Christ Jesus, brings us into fellowship with the Most High God, and this is no mere nodding acquaintance of which he speaks..
        I have heard the cutesy description of fellowship as two fellows in one ship. That is dreadfully inadequate in John's context. The only validity to such a trite example might be seen if we see Christ Jesus as our Ark and us floundering, drowning,  trying to walk on water, and His mighty right hand drawing us to the safety of the Ark. Or perhaps we being in Christ Jesus and the waves of this world and the storms and lightning of our flesh threaten to sink us, and again our sweet Jesus calls our, “Peace be still”, and all is at rest.
        It is in this intimate, continual fellowship with our Savior who is Eternal Life, our Ark of Safety, that we find true Joy and that to the fullest.

Next time: the believers walk in fellowship with his Lord through this defiled and fallen world.  1 John 1:5-2:2
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Christ our Daily Food   John 4:32-34

1/12/2023

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        The food, the spiritual nourishment of our Lord of which He speaks, that which exceeded His natural hunger, was His delight to do His Father's Will (Ps. 40:6-8).  And He is the Embodiment of the Father's Will and Testament (Eph. 1:3-10), the Father's Word made flesh (John 1:14), that Prophet of which Moses spoke (Deut. 18:15-19; John 6:14, 7:40), not given from Sinai, but from Heaven, His Father's Throne(Isa 66:1).
Our Jesus declares himself to be our necessary food.(John 6:27, 47-58) He is speaking of the necessary food that is the essential nourishment of Eternal Life! His body and blood is so vital, that in verse 53 He says, " I say unto you except you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, you have no life in you."
        The physical elements of His commanded feast (Mt. 26:28; 1 Cor. 11:25) are to draw us to the continual reminder of the spiritual meal that we must feast upon, His Perfect Body and Blood, prepared by the Father(Hebrews 10:5) that ALONE can sustain the Eternal Life freely given us upon belief in the Sent One, our Jesus(John 6:29). He is our Righteous Man, the One the Father requires, that wasn’t to be found throughout the Old Covenant (Isa. 59:16, 63:5, Ezek. 22:30).  Our Jesus ALONE could Do and Possess the Righteousness that is ALONE the Delight of  God (Ps.40:6-8) and Pleasure of the Father.(Mt. 3:16-17, 17:1-5) He is all that we could not be and has done all that we could not do!!!  And on top of that, He has paid the penalty required by the just Righteousness of God for all that we could not be or do (2 Cor. 5:21)
        By faith alone, we must feast upon the Lamb of God, our Passover Lamb, who ALONE provides the two-fold benefit that we must have. He has kept the death angel from our door,(Heb. 2:14-15) and He is our needed food for the treacherous journey through the wilderness of this fallen world(Gal.2:20). He ALONE can sustain us unto the Glorious inheritance(Eph. 1:17-21) of the Eternal Promised Land, of which Peter speaks of in 2 Peter 3:11-13, a new Heaven and a new Earth where Righteousness dwells. And that Righteousness which dwells there is the very Presence of our Righteous Loving Father and His Beloved Son by the Power and Love of His Glorious Spirit.
        But Wonder of wonders, by faith alone, we have access into that Glorious Holy of Holies right now. Hebrews chapter 10 presents to us the incredible truth that we are called to enter into the Holiest by the Blood of Jesus even now, by a New and Living Way which Jesus has consecrated for us through the veil that is to say His Flesh, (that is body the Father prepared for Him Vs 10:5), and having a High Priest(Heb. 7:24-25) over the House of God (Heb. 3:5, that is, all who have come to God through Him,) let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.”  
        And how do we feast continually upon this necessary food? Our Lord hasn't left us guessing, for he says in John 6: 35, " and Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that comes to Me shall never hunger and he that believes in Me shall never thirst."  Coming and believing is but the response of faith, faith alone that believes that this God/Man Christ Jesus was sent by God His Father as the Righteousness of God that ALONE satisfies the Father's Will in Heaven and upon the Earth. As a dear old saint once said, "Join anything of your own to Christ and you un-Christ him. God will look at nothing but Christ, and you must look at nothing else. He is the Savior, and there is none beside him. Look anywhere else and you are undone, and that eternally."
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​The Table of Joy and Thanksgiving

1/6/2023

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     The Lord did not leave it to the apostles to institute the Lord's supper after His departure. He rather regarded it as so important that by his own authority, while yet present, He instituted it in the most solemn manner on the night of His betrayal, immediately before going out to the garden. The bread and wine selected as emblems of His body and blood, were designed to impress upon His disciples (& us) with the persuasion, #1 that His body was the true Paschal sacrifice; #2 that His blood was the true sacrificial blood by which the New Covenant was constituted, more perfect by far than the Covenant at Sinai. The elements were signs of a reality, pledges in hand, that as surely as they took the sign into their hands, they by faith received the thing that was signified; for they were seals and pledges as well as signs. 
     The Covenant is founded simply on the bloodshed of One for many for the remission of sins, without any other element, whether in the form of supposed merit, or moral improvement, or services performed as the procuring cause. The cup of Thanksgiving was thus the evidence of our participation by faith in the blood of Christ and the bread that participation by faith in the body of Christ, as our only acceptance before God. The sacrament of the supper loudly proclaims this great truth to all time, and all ages must hear it. Till the Lord come, His atoning death must be proclaimed with festive Joy at this supper, as often as it is deemed proper to celebrate it. Of how  great importance must that truth be which Jesus so vividly portrayed, and the perpetual memory of which He has so carefully secured! This shows what a supreme place belongs to His atoning sacrifice. It is the principal thing of the Gospel; nay, it is the Gospel. Take it out of the Gospel and it ceases to be the Gospel. 

George Smeaton, from The Doctrine of the Atonement According to the Apostles.
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Christ our Righteousness

12/20/2022

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​     The God-man, Christ Jesus, united a sinless humanity to Himself, that by entering into every part of our obligation as creatures and sinners to the law of God, He might bring in an everlasting righteousness. Until the law received its satisfaction in this two-fold respect, that is by obedience to its requirements and penalty for breaching its commands, the Supreme Judge could take no one into His Favor. The humanity Christ wore was made by Him an instrument which He used for the great purpose of bringing in the Righteousness of God or, to put the matter in a personal and concrete form, Christ Himself is the Righteousness of God. The Son of God made flesh, obedient in life and death, is our righteousness before God. The entrance of Christ’s sinless humanity with the law in His Heart became the central point of all time, to which previous ages look forward, and after ages look back. 

George Smeaton: Christ’s Atonement According to the Apostles
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December 17th, 2022

12/17/2022

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Lost in the insanity of this Godless season is the real reason for gift giving.  I mean by that, every redeemed soul on the face of this earth should fall before the Most High God and to present our gifts of thanksgiving and worship to our God Who saw fit to unite our humanity to His Deity(Col. 1:13-22, 2:9-10) in the Perfect Body of His Beloved Son (Heb.10:5-10), that we might become, by faith in Him Whom HE has Sent(John 6:29), His Eternally Adopted children(Eph.1:3-10) . Our Jesus paid our death penalty for our mocking the Perfection and Righteousness of our God by our sin, by bearing our penalty in His perfect sinless body, dying in our place, taking our sin and guilt to the grave, and rising without it and ascending victorious to the place of all authority and power at the Father's Right Hand. And because of His delighted obedience in fulfilling His Father's Will, (Ps. 40:8), He has poured out His Spirit of Adoption into our hearts, by which we can cry, "Abba Father"(Gal. 4:3-7) with confidence and worship, no matter what this evil world may throw at us! Our Father which art in Heaven, hallowed by Thy Name!!!
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A God of Relationship

12/7/2022

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I am revisiting some of the original posts from 2011 from the Relational Theology section.  So little attention is given to our Glorious God's Triunity, I wish to refocus our thinking on this foundational truth.

A God of Relationship
All that the One God "does" in Eternity and time flows out of the Will of the Father (Ephesians 1:3-11), in and through the Delighted Obedience of the Son (Psalm 40:6-8, Hebrews 10:5-10, John 6:38), and by the Power of the Glorious Spirit (Genesis 1:2, Luke 1:35, John 3:5-8.  The Father is the Reservoir of Perfect Will out of which the revelatory obedience of the Son flows by the Power of the Spirit of His Glory.  John 1:18 states that "No one has seen God at any time.  The only begotten Son, Who IS IN the Bosom of the Father, He has declared Him."  You can't get any closer than "bosom relationship".  That speaks of oneness of heart, will and purpose.  John 15:26 speaks of the Spirit of God as "the Spirit of Truth who proceeds (continually) from the Father."  John 16:28 speaks of basically the same thing of the Son in His becoming a man like us,
"I came forth from the Father and have come into the world."  This is the starting point of all consideration of the God of heaven and earth.  He is the ONE GOD, Eternally Alive in three persons, always in union of one essence, but ever in distinct expression of Will, Obedient Declaration, and Glorious Power, never in isolation, always in Eternal Concert in the smallest expression as well as in the most glorious creation.  To see one member of the Godhead alone in any activity is to miss two thirds of the Glory of God, or more acurately, to miss the High and Holy God nearly altogether!   



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The Father’s Love to the Son

10/28/2022

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The Father’s Love to the Son

Matthew 3:17, 17:5; 2 Peter 1:17; John 17:24

The Father’s Love to the Son is the very foundation of the gospel.  The Father cannot be an enemy of Him Who is His very heart.  When the Son put on His people’s sin, He met the anger of an offended Judge, not the enmity of an offended Father.  Even when His God forsook Him, as He hung surrounded with the terrible garment of our sin, and His human soul wanted all sensible comfort, He was the Object, amid all His woe, on Whom Eternal Love was resting.  The great triumph of the cross is this, that He who hung there was more pleasing in His Father’s sight than even sin was hateful–that sin should be consumed, and yet the Love remain!!!  Had this love not been as full as ever, as high as ever–had there been an interruption of it but a moment–our salvation would be hopeless.  But while Christ took on Him what was due to us, He did not lose, He could not lose, what was Eternally His Own; the light of Everlasting Love did not forsake, and could not forsake the Temple where it dwelled.    George Smeaton (1814-1889)
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The Best Wine!!!

8/29/2022

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       I have been reading the four gospel accounts of our Lord's crucifixion this morning. There is an incredible amount of prophetic fulfillment and spiritual lessons there, that my pea brain can't begin to comprehend but a small portion of it. But I was captivated by the sponge of vinegar, actually cheap bitter wine, that was placed to our Lord's lips. And I was struck by the fact that the first miracle our Lord performed before the people was the turning water into wine at the wedding of Cana. And it was the best wine that the master of the feast had ever tasted. But here, at the most important Miracle that our Jesus ever performed, His victory over death and hell, He drank cheap bitter wine held up to His lips on a hyssop branch, the same branch used to apply the blood of the sacrifice under the law of the Old testament. The new wine in Christ's blood is the sweetest and best and completely efficacious. The bitter wine that this world can provide, even wrapped in the garb of the Old testament law, is bitter and our Lord drank every ounce of requirement that old bitter cup required. Beloved our faith is in the best wine of the feast. And we will one day drink it fully in celebration at the marriage feast of the Lamb who Was slain from before the foundation of the world.  Amen and Amen
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    While I have been a pastor and Christian bookstore owner for 30 years, my only credentials are that of an old saint who followed his signature with S.S., Sinner Saved!

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