This morning I read a quote from the Sydney Morning Herald from a rally in support of the Muslim Burqa style of dress. The report stated that Islamic values are superior to “flawed” Western secular values. This immediately drew heated reaction and “debate” from a number of people who made somewhat moderated comments compared to a dialogue I had the displeasure to read just in the last couple of days about media coverage of the floods in Pakistan. The displeasure was due to the fact that the comments were made, in both cases, in Christian forums.
I need to say little more than that in both cases I heard a significant level of Islamaphobia and the connection between faith on Christ and “Western secular values”. In a way that is all the connection between this writing and the newspaper story, the fear of Islamication and the misplaced nexus between where we live and Him in whom we believe.
The main subject of this blog is God’s missionary Plan. From the days of Abram, God was spelling out His plan for reclaiming His Creation.
In Genesis 12:2 the record shows God saying “I will bless you and make your descendants into a great nation. You will become famous and be a blessing to others.” This is just after He tells Abram to leave and go to a foreign land and, at age 75, whilst still childless. Even before leaving the land his father had settled God was promising great things for this man who was to become the father of the Hebrew nation.
Almost 25 years later God introduces another change when He re-affirms the promise of before that, Abram now Abraham, would be the father of great nations and that all the peoples of the world would be blessed through him.
This blessing was to be in the form of a people would recognize that God’s blessing resided with the people of Israel and this would draw the people to honour the true God.
The problem that prevented God’s plan was the people of Israelite nation who managed to twist His program to make the blessing almost exclusively theirs, making it all but impossible for a believer to be accepted into their faith by the conditions placed upon them.
The story of Jonah is an example of the degree that a man of God would go to ensure the purity of the faith. God sends the prophet Jonah to Nineveh to warn of its impending doom, instead Jonah ran the other way. Being a man of integrity when a storm blows up that threatens to wreck the ship he is on he owns up and tells the sailors to chuck him into the sea so that the storm will subside. God has a giant fish ingest Jonah who, after a pity party prayer, is ejected from the fish and onto a beach, and again sent to Nineveh. They repented their wickedness, God didn’t destroy the city and Jonah got upset and said to God
“Our LORD, I knew from the very beginning that you wouldn't destroy Nineveh. ... and you don't like to punish anyone, not even foreigners.” Jonah 4:2
It is an attitude borne out by 2 Chronicles 7:14 which states, “If my own people will humbly pray and turn back to me and stop sinning, then I will answer them from heaven. I will forgive them and make their land fertile once again.”
So then this is the history of the people of Israel in God’s Missionary Plan up until the time of Jesus “God with us” Christ. I sense that this blog has a part two in it which will pick up the Christian mission history, and God’s mandate for us in the words of Christ Jesus and the Apostles.
I Hope you will come back for the challenge that God has laid out for us in Part 2.
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