The Bevans

Prepare The Way For The Lord!

In his book Passion For Jesus, Mike Bickle asks the following question:

It is with our majestic God, then, that we begin:

Our God is a totally AWESOME God! Overwhelming in His Mighty Power! Breathtakingly Glorious in His Splendour! Completely Perfect in His Matchless Purity! Unsurpassed in the passionate depth of His Mercy and Love! There is no other like the Lord — Majestic in Holiness, Awesome in Glory! If we try to describe the Infinite, Eternal, Transcendent, Sovereign, Omnipotent God as He Truly Is, we soon run out of superlatives for He is the Indescribable One, Magnificent beyond the farthest stretches of our imagination. Even the greatest of our songs and hymns of worship fall far short of what is required.

Our God is greater than the greatest rulers who have ever lived! More Powerful than the most impressive armies that ever marched to war! More Mighty than the devastation of a nuclear explosion! Stronger than the destructive force of the fiercest hurricane! More Powerful than the most violent earthquake! Triumphantly victorious over the power of death, from Abel’s murder to the wars, famines and plagues of the present day! Mightier than the thunder of the great waters, Mightier than the breakers of the sea — the Lord on High is Mighty! How Awesome is the Lord Most High, the Great King over all the earth!

We have a God who, in the beginning, created the whole of the universe out of absolutely nothing, who flung every one of the trillions and trillions of stars into space, placing them in beautiful galaxies thousands of light-years across. It was our God who designed the intricate structure of the cosmos, the way the elementary particles combine to make the elements, and how they in turn join together to produce every type of matter. It was He who constructed a world in which there was light and darkness, warmth and cold, air and water. And here He placed a quite extraordinary variety of living creatures and — the pinnacle of His creation — human beings, made in His Own image. This is our God! His own hands stretched out the heavens; He marshalled their starry hosts. It is He who made the earth to be inhabited and created mankind upon it. He is the Lord, and there is no other!

Our God is the One who performs great wonders. He divided the Red Sea so that His people could pass through on dry ground with a wall of water on either side. He was present with His people in the wilderness as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. He came down upon Mount Sinai in His Glory in a dense cloud, in thunder and lightning, with a loud trumpet blast, with smoke and a consuming fire, and with a violent shaking of the earth. This is our God. He performed miraculous signs and wonders in Egypt and has continued them to this day, both in Israel and among all mankind!

And then on one glorious day yet to come, when the dead have been raised, Our God will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. He will roar from Zion and thunder from Jerusalem; the earth and the sky will tremble. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and so will the earth. And He will create a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness and peace. Every knee shall bow before Him, every tongue confess that He is Lord. This is our God!

This portrait of God presents a problem for many of us. We can’t really relate to it. We live in a society of the mundane and the trivial, that has, for the most part, forgotten how to be awe-struck, forgotten how to truly wonder. There is little encouragement for us to consider and marvel at the heavens, "the work of the Lord’s fingers, the moon and the stars, which He has set in place" — if we can even see them beyond the streetlights! We are taught from early on that it isn’t really ‘cool’ to get too excited about anything. We live in a culture that no longer has any true heroes to admire and relegates accounts of great exploits to the fictional categories of myth and legend. We are a cynical, ‘knowing’ people, happier to explain (or even explain away) the mighty acts of God than to let God thoroughly transform us through them. Our society encourages us to believe that the spiritual world is unreal, or if real, pretty much irrelevant to the practical matters of everyday living. And our education system is, in practice, based on the totally false premise that you can have the best education possible while remaining ignorant of God and His ways.

As a result, however hard we may try to avoid being conformed to the pattern of this world, many of us find it hard to see God as more ‘real’, more significant and substantial, than the ordinary things of our everyday lives. To most people God is an inference, a cloudy vagueness, not a Reality whom we can know. But the truth is that the fact of God the Great I AM should completely and radically alter the way we go about living. How we understand God, what picture we have of who He is and what He is like, will significantly affect our behaviour. Our experience of God, and our on-going relationship with Him will, to a large extent, determine how we live and how much we will be being transformed into His likeness.

Sadly, many of us have a very superficial view of God. Some years ago, A. W. Tozer penned the following words:

Tozer recognised that the low view many of us entertain of God "the high and lofty One" was the primary cause of much, if not all, of the church’s weakness and lack of influence. Jim Packer has written similarly:

We do well to compare our perception of God with the Scriptural accounts. When the Israelite army faced the Philistine champion Goliath, they all ran from him in great fear because they left God out of the equation. But David just laughed at Goliath, recognising his weakness before the might of the Lord of the heavenly hosts: "Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God? You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will hand you over to me … and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel.", he declared. Would our understanding and experience of God cause us to behave like this, expecting the Lord Almighty to act, or would we be more like the frightened soldiers, theoretically acknowledging the Lord as God but behaving as if He was impotent?

The fact is that whatever our Christian tradition, it is probably the case that our concept of God is too ‘small’, and that as a result we limit His ability to work in us and to bless others through our lives. We will need to let God out of the box of our limited understanding and imagination if we are to become all that He wants us to be. We will need to let God be GOD! For the most part, those outside the church see little in us that would attract them to the message of the gospel. Unless the true nature of our Great God is clearly reflected in the way we live, we can’t expect to have any significant impact in the world.

How, then should the ‘bigness’ of God affect our lives? What is our reaction and response to the ‘awesomeness’ of God? When the Israelites saw the great power the Lord displayed against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord and put their trust in Him. Later, when the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, "Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die." Moses said to the people, "Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning." Again, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the Testimony in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, his face was radiant, and they were afraid to come near him.

Fear was, and still is, the natural response of mortal man when God chooses to reveal Himself in His Majesty. When Daniel had a vision of a Man whose face was like lightning, whose eyes were like flaming torches, whose arms and legs were like the gleam of burnished bronze, and whose voice was like the sound of a multitude, he described his experience in this way: "I, Daniel, was the only one who saw the vision; the men with me did not see it, but such terror overwhelmed them that they fled and hid themselves. So I was left alone, gazing at this great vision; I had no strength left, my face turned deathly pale and I was helpless. Then I heard Him speaking, and after He had spoken, I stood up trembling." Five hundred years later, an angel of the Lord appeared to some shepherds in the fields near Bethlehem, and the Glory of the Lord shone around them — and they were terrified! Fear was also the reaction when the might and glory of God was revealed in Jesus’ ministry. Jesus, woken from sleep in the midst of a violent storm on the Sea of Galilee, yells into the screaming wind and waves, "Quiet! Be still!", and suddenly there is complete calm. The disciples were terrified. Even the apostle John, who had been Jesus’ closest friend when He was on earth, "fell at His feet as though dead" when he had a brief glimpse of the Lord in all His awesome majesty and glory.

Few of us have experienced God in all His fearful Power and Might, and it is perhaps for this reason that the Old Covenant refrain to "Fear the Lord!" communicates so little to us. We need to be reminded that the Lord our God is a consuming fire, a jealous God. God is great, mighty and formidable. In our generation, sadly many of us have domesticated God by focussing so much on His grace and mercy that we have lost sight of who He really is. We think we can ‘play games’ with Him. But as C. S. Lewis would have said, He is not a tame Lion! We should stand before Him in both love and fear for He extends mercy to those who fear Him, from generation to generation. Blessed are all who fear the Lord!

We should fear God — and fear nothing else. But, so often, like the Israelite soldiers before Goliath, we have things backwards, being more concerned about how others treat us or what might happen to us, more afraid about losing our reputation or comfort or health or wealth — things we don’t need to worry about — than about giving God His rightful place in our lives. As Jesus said, "I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear Him who, after the killing of the body, has power to throw you into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear Him. Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows."

At the dedication of the first temple in Jerusalem in 958 B.C., when Solomon had finished praying, fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the Glory of the Lord filled the temple. The priests could not enter the temple of the Lord because the Glory of the Lord filled it. When all the Israelites saw the fire coming down and the Glory of the Lord above the temple, they knelt on the pavement with their faces to the ground, and they worshipped and gave thanks to the Lord, saying, "He is good; His love endures forever." Then the king and all the people offered sacrifices before the Lord. And King Solomon offered a sacrifice of twenty-two thousand head of cattle and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep and goats!

What does our worship look like in comparison? What should our response to the God of Glory be? In the Hebrew mind, there was clearly a connection seen between fearing God and worshipping Him. The Old Covenant commanded, "Fear the Lord your God, and serve Him only.", a decree that Jesus quoted in the wilderness as "Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only." And at the end of time, the angel will call, "Fear God and give Him glory, because the hour of His judgement has come. Worship Him who made the heavens, the earth, the sea and the springs of water."

But, what should our worship look like? We are not called to sacrifice a hundred thousand animals, though surely our tribute should be no less extravagant. No, God desires something else. As David prayed, "O Lord, You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise." A broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart — this is our proper response before the Lord Almighty. Are we willing to be truly broken before Him? It has been said that worship should be spelt s u r r e n d e r. Are we willing to surrender all to Him?

God demands total obedience, but we are a proud and arrogant people. We think we know better than Him and pick and choose which of His commands to obey and which to ignore. We think we can select which parts of our lives to let the Lord control and which to retain control of ourselves. We believe we have the right to choose how to live our own lives, but it is the Lord who is God, not us! We live in a society in which we are taught to question and challenge authority, rather than submit to it. We feel free to disobey the law of the land if it suits us (for example, by breaking the speed limit). And our attitudes to human authority affect our attitude to the King of kings. We may weaken and trivialise His demands on us, but surely our presumption will be our downfall — for God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble; He sweeps away the proud, but lifts up the humble. Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand. Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and do not be stiff-necked any longer. For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, Mighty and Awesome. For, absolutely, with a Master’s right, Christ claims our hearts, our lips, our time. Are we willing, as the people of God, to let the Lord take His rightful place in our lives?

The following questions and exercises are to help you to respond to what the Lord has been saying to you through what you have read. They can be used in any way you like, either individually, or for discussion in a small group or between friends.

1. Do you find it hard to believe that the Lord God is more substantial than the world around us which will one day pass away? Spend time pondering some of the descriptions of His breathtaking Majesty in the Scriptures and let the Awesome Reality of God change the way you see your life and the world around you.
2. Read one of the Scriptural accounts of God revealing Himself to His people in Power and Might. Imagine being present; how do you feel? If you were to have such an experience, what effect do you think it would have on your life?
3. If we could see how much You’re worth,
   Your Power, Your Might, Your endless Love,
   Then surely we would never cease to praise.

Spend time considering some aspect of the work of God in creation and then express your thoughts and feelings in worship and adoration.

4. How do you feel about a God who demands total control of every part of your life? Does part of you rebel against the idea? In what ways do you ‘play games’ with God, resisting His Lordship? Are you willing to let Him have His rightful place? Use the words of Psalm 19 to help you offer yourself to Him afresh to do with you whatever He wills.

Chapter 2: Love Beyond Measure

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