The Bible is an amazing book (actually 66 books!) of the LORD’s revelation of Himself, and what we are like too! It’s much too easy to read that complexity casually and totally misunderstand what’s being said.
For example, we saw on Sunday morning from Ezra ch 9 that a casual reader could believe that scripture rails against ethnically mixed-marriage – yet read in its proper context the concern is not racism but syncretism: the mixing of religions.
All of us are prone to follow the desires of our hearts and play to the dominant audience in our experience. The problem is when those desires and that audience pull us away from the LORD to worship other things.
The fact is that the LORD – the only God that there is – consistently and amazingly gives us His grace. The sad part, as Ezra 9 describes, is that His people very frequently ignore and trash that grace!
Ezra had it right in ch 9 vs 6 “…our sins are higher than our heads and our guilt has reached the heavens.”
We might want to object that we don’t all do such things all the time. Maybe not, but all of us do such things a lot and when one of us scores such an own-goal, all of us suffer. A major point of fellowship is to encourage one another to keep on keeping on seeking the LORD above all.
It is true that “…because (of our guilt) none of us can stand in your presence”(Ezra 9:15).
Yet even as he prayed that confession, the evening sacrifice was being offered. It pointed to Jesus. The fact is that Jesus can stand in the LORD’s presence – and we can encourage one another to trust Him!
Spencer Shaw