Promised land

I have been asked to be a deacon on more than one occasion. Unlike so many things in the Bible, the requirements to become a deacon are actually clearly spelled out in black and white. One of them is that if you have been divorced you do not qualify to become a deacon.

I will have been married forty years this December, but in my youth I was briefly married for eleven months to another woman and then got divorced. Various well intentioned people that have wanted me to have this opportunity have tried to tell me that my first marriage doesn’t really count, and that my current wife is the wife that God intended for me to be with all of my life. I agree that Teresa is the wife that God chose for me and blessed me with; however that does not change the fact that I cannot serve as a deacon, because no matter how one dices it, I have been divorced and the Bible states that if someone has been divorced they cannot serve as a deacon.

Bummer

That is very disappointing to me because I would love to serve God as a deacon. I was thinking this morning how disappointed Moses must have been, when after risking his life to defy Pharaoh and free the Jews from slavery and lead them all over the desert for forty years, he was not allowed to enter the Promised Land. In spite of all the good, obedient, and faithful things that he had done, he disobeyed God and instead of speaking to a rock to make it bring forth water, he struck it with his staff to do so. His punishment seems disproportionately harsh to me because after all that had transpired he was not allowed to enter into the Promised Land.

Bummer

King David loved God with all of his heart and served Him well and yet after a lifetime of loving and serving God and writing much of Psalms, when King David wanted to build God’s holy temple in Jerusalem to honor and glorify God he was denied that honor because he had “blood on his hands” from the many wars that he had engaged in while defending Israel. I suppose that building God’s temple was just too holy of a task for a man with blood on his hands, (no matter how noble the cause), so instead David’s son King Solomon got that honor.

Bummer

I think it’s good to be reminded that we serve a HOLY God whose logic is not the same as the world’s. What may seem to be disproportionate punishment to us is proportionate and entirely fair according to God’s law.

What we sometimes forget is that God’s laws are the only ones that really matter, (sorry about that Barrack). The Bible states that God’s laws do not change and that He is the same today as He was yesterday and will be a thousand years from now. That is one of the things that I love most about Him. Unlike our lying politicians whose convictions change with every poll, he stays true to course. Things that may now seem insignificant to this modern, “anything goes” world are an abomination to God and there will be a day of reckoning for it.

Society may condone the gay agenda, abortion, pornography, giving condoms to first grade school children, legalizing drugs, lying, etc. but rest assured it is an abomination to God. He condemns sin and there are consequences both in this life and the afterlife. If we want to enjoy life in this world and the next, we must obey Him. If instead we follow our own fleshly lusts, pain will accompany it. Guess what? It’s impossible to follow our Holy sacred, consecrated, hallowed, blessed, divine, righteous, pure, virtuous, pious, and faithful God’s laws 100% of the time.

We should try though, knowing that the closer that we come to doing so, the more we will enjoy life on this earth. As for the next life, thank God for Jesus, who can and did live a life without sin 100% of the time. He sacrificed His holy live for ours and interceded for all who choose to follow Him. Without Him our holy God could never tolerate our sins or allow us to be in His holy presence regardless of how trivial we might think our indiscretions might be.

If you think your little white lies don’t really matter to God, remember Moses never entered the Promised Land and know that without Jesus neither will you

Ephesians 2:8
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.