Rest and Comfort in Christ

Dear Suzanne, Rebecca, Anna and Mikayla,


Then the LORD said to Noah, "Come into the ark, you and all your household, because I have seen that you are righteous before Me in this generation.

The gracious invitation of our Lord...come—the gracious gospel invitation: "Come into the ark of safety." The ark is a picture of Christ. The flood  depicts  judgment. The ark was the only way of salvation. When the flood came, only those who were inside were saved.  Those on the outside perished. Christ is our ark.  He is the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Him.  In Him is eternal life...outside of Him is eternal punishment and death.

Noah believed God.  He had manifested this belief before God and man by being obedient in the building of the ark and in the preaching of the message of the judgment to come. Noah had done all that God had commanded.  God invited him and his family to come in....the idea being that He would be in the ark with them and would keep them safe.


So those that entered, male and female of all flesh, went in as God had commanded him; and the LORD shut him in.

You know what...I love the mercy God showed Noah here and the mercy He shows us.  Our job is to be obedient and leave the results to Him. Scripture tells us that God shut the door.  He kept it open as long as possible but in the end it was God who shut the door. Noah was not given the responsibility of anyone's salvation.  While the door was open, Noah preached.  When it closed, Noah had the comfort of knowing he had been obedient.  The saving of souls is not in our hands.  The ark for Noah was the place of safety...of salvation.  For those that remained on the outside, however, it represented condemnation.  Once the door was shut, their doom was sealed.  There were no second chances.

Then God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the animals that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters subsided....


 In judgment God always remembers mercy.  David Guzik says this is an anthropomorphism (a non-literal picture of God in human terms we can understand).  God never forgot Noah, but at this point God again turned His active attention towards Noah.  

I liked what Matthew Henry says here:


"The whole race of mankind, except Noah and his family, were now dead, so that God's remembering Noah, was the return of his mercy to mankind, of whom he would not make a full end. The demands of Divine justice had been answered by the ruin of sinners. God sent his wind to dry the earth, and seal up his waters. The same hand that brings the desolation, must bring the deliverance; to that hand, therefore, we must ever look. When afflictions have done the work for which they are sent, whether killing work or curing work, they will be taken away. As the earth was not drowned in a day, so it was not dried in a day. God usually works deliverance for his people gradually, that the day of small things may not be despised, nor the day of great things despaired of."

Then the ark rested in the seventh month, the seventeenth day of the month, on the mountains of Ararat. 

The passover took place on the fourteenth day of the seventh month on the Jewish calendar....Jesus was in the tomb three days and three nights.  He rose from the dead on the seventeenth day of the seventh month on the Jewish calendar.  ...the same day the ark rested on Mount Ararat...only 4500 years earlier.   Jesus is our rest...He is our peace...He is our new beginning.  Such a beautiful picture of God's mercy, grace, love  and the sure and certain hope we have in Him.

Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”--Matthew 11:28-30

Love
Mom

Remember Your Resting Place

In those days and in that time,” says the LORD, “ The children of Israel shall come, They and the children of Judah together; With continual weeping they shall come, And seek the LORD their God. They shall ask the way to Zion, With their faces toward it, saying,‘ Come and let us join ourselves to the LORD  In a perpetual covenant  That will not be forgotten.’My people have been lost sheep. Their shepherds have led them astray; They have turned them away on the mountains. They have gone from mountain to hill; They have forgotten their resting place--Jeremiah 50:4-6

Dear Suzanne, Rebecca, Anna, and Mikayla,

Sometimes it is good to stop and remember.  Today as I read through Jeremiah 50 and 51 describing the judgment and destruction that God would bring upon Babylon, I stopped short at this verse and remembered where my resting place is.  My resting place is in God, my Savior.  He is my shelter.

As God speaks judgment against Babylon, He remembers His people.  His people who were in Babylon because of their sin of idolatry...their sin of forgetting Him.  Here He predicts blessing for them in verses 4-7 and then again in verses 17-34.  He will not forsake Israel...Restoration is coming...sin will be pardoned and they will return to their own land.  Destruction, however, awaits Babylon with no promise of restoration or rebuilding.  God used Babylon as His instrument of judgment to Judah and now it will experience the Lord's judgment. 

Verses 4 and 5 in this chapter of Jeremiah speak to the contrast between how God's people went into captivity...in pride and sin and how they returned.  We see them returning with tears of godly sorrow...unlike the worldly tears they shed as they went into captivity.  They would now seek after Him and not after idols. Hebrews 12 speaks of this as the peaceable fruit of righteousness.

Now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.

There is such evil out there today girls...I think of the Philadelphia and the slaughter of innocents for 30 years...I think to the link I just posted where planned parenthood is aiding in the trafficking of young girls for prostitution.  Our government is turning a blind eye...we are Babylon.  Judgment is coming...evil surrounds us.  Where do we find rest...


Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

Rest in Him...find peace in Him.

You are my hiding place; You shall preserve me from trouble; You shall surround me with songs of deliverance. Selah --Psalm 32:7



 He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. --Psalm 91:1



Love
Mom