We see God through the things He says and does. As people created in His image, we want to relate to Him through the ways we know Him about Him. His Word tells us that knowledge of His glory will one day cover the earth like the waters cover the seas (Hab 2:14). It’s God intention that He give us this knowledge. He daily gives us messages, or manna, to teach us His ways. This Word is revealed to our spirits by the Holy Spirit and causes the listener to know a little more about God each day.
Besides being instructed in God’s character, we are instructed in God’s ways. He involves us in works, which He has predestined for us to walk in (Eph 2:10). To find these works, we need to know where He wants us to go. We need signposts along the road to mark the validity of our way and tell us when to turn. God provides both instruction and direction in the messages He gives us daily. These prepare us to be more like His character, and to find the works we are to do in our lives. In order for us to know how to relate to God we study His Word. In order to know how to relate to the events in our lives, we study His Word also; His daily revealed Word.
God’s daily revealed Word prepares us. You might say that it is like the day of Preparation which the Hebrews observed before the Sabbath. It’s our Friday. In Hebrews 3 and 4 we read about the Sabbath rest which God appointed to His children. The admonition is, “Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion.” (Heb 3:15). His voice, and obedience to what He tells us, is the preparation for entering His rest.
God’s intention is to teach us His ways and His Character. He wants to bring us understanding, wisdom, and discernment from the everyday events in our lives. To gain understanding from an event, we need to know how to relate it to what God has already taught us. What we know is a frame of reference for what we are learning. In order for God, as our Father, to teach us discernment and understanding, He first must give us a framework, constructed of pieces of knowledge. All abstract concepts need a framework, a setting by which we gain understanding. And anything unknown remains abstract until we can know and utilize it.
Jesus pointed out to the Hebrew leaders of His day that they knew how to interpret the appearance of the sky in order to have understanding of the weather (Mt 16:2-4). But they did not know how to interpret the signs of the times; Jesus, their Messiah was in their midst. Why didn’t they know what His appearing meant? They had missed the messages, the Voice of God, which were the components of the framework God had been sending them.
The Jewish leaders had not been prepared during their day of preparation. This was evidenced when Jesus said that they were a “wicked and adulterous generation”. They did not have the preparation that their Father sent them; repentance. John went to this generation as a fore-runner to prepare the way of the Lord by bringing the message of repentance, and they had not truly heard him. So they had no understanding by which to interpret Jesus’ appearing.
Frameworks are built a component at a time. It is line upon line, and precept upon precept (Is 28:10). Each message, or lesson, builds with the others and they relate to each other. The result allows one to see how things in our lives correlate to His Word, and we gain understanding of the overall lesson God is trying to teach us.
Let us look at Isaiah 28 again. The prophet is telling the Israelites that they did not learn line upon line, precept upon precept. Therefore, God was going to speak to them “with foreign lips”, or in a way they did not understand. This happens to us as children in school. If we have not done our math homework, we find that we have little understanding of the next day’s lesson. We might say “It’s Greek to me”, or that it’s as if the teacher were speaking in another language.
In verse 12 of Isaiah 28 the Lord gives the Israelites the framework by which to understand their lesson. He tells them that they are in His resting place. The problem was that they did not listen. And the result was that God’s messages did not become a framework by which they could gain understanding; the messages therefore became a snare which captured them for judgment (vs 13). The Israelites had taken the message of being God’s chosen people as one of security, bringing a permanent position before God and man, and eternal life. Somehow, though, they had not understood justice and righteousness to be a part of this framework. The One God was bringing would institute these missing components. Jesus would put the pieces of the framework back together again.
If we look back at the passage in Matthew 16 we read Jesus’ warning that the Jewish leaders sought a sign. People who don’t do their homework are lost in a math class, and people who follow God can become lost if they do not obey the former lesson He has sent them by His Voice. Sometimes the lost ones even doubt that the Teacher knows what He is doing. Lost people need signs because they have no sense of direction. When Christians lose their sense of direction they’ve often missed what God has been saying “little-by-little” (see Is. 28). All those messages that would have formed a framework for their life were not listened to. Therefore they are not formed by the Word of God into His image, neither do they know how to relate to the circumstances of their lives.
These lost people tend to wait on other people to tell them what to do. Coincidences become signs, and they are tossed on the ocean of their lives behind every vessel that passes by. It doesn’t have to be this way. If a man would hold as valuable each Word God speaks to him and obey it, he would be prepared by the framework these words form. He would gain understanding of the times and appearance of things. He would “see” the works of the Father and know what to do. And He would understand that it is God’s nature to give him knowledge, therefore he can trust God to provide the knowledge he needs to walk through this life, doing the works he was predestined to do. It is God’s nature to prepare His people. This is our day of preparation, our Friday. If we listen and obey, we will walk in all His ways. Amen.
