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When the Heart Wants Too Much of a Good Thing

The golden calf is what happens when we let our hearts control our lives
The Golden Calf by Esteban March

When Israel left Egypt, they had nothing of their own. Though they carried (and misused) much wealth, everything they had was theirs solely through the action of God. He rescued them from Egypt and enabled them to plunder the wealth of their former masters on the way out. He destroyed the Egyptian charioteers, provided them with food and water, and even protected their clothing.

Their response to God’s generosity was less than inspiring. They complained and pined for the days of their suffering. They set up an idol at the very foot of God’s mountain while His presence thundered from the peak.

God had every right to destroy them and start over with Moses, yet He relented. He spared the vast majority of Israel and kept His promise to dwell among them.

He could have taken back all the things He had given them and sent them back to Egypt. No one would have blamed Him. But He didn’t do that either. Instead, He promised to remain with them, to guide them to the Promised Land, and to drive out their enemies before them.

These promises didn’t come without some demands. Here are the things that God demanded in return:

  1. Make no covenant with pagans. Destroy their altars and sacred places. Don’t bow down to false gods.
  2. Keep the seventh day Sabbath, the Passover, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the early and latter Feasts of Firstfruits.

In other words, remain faithful and have regular parties in honor of the great things God has done and will do on behalf of his people. What a cruel taskmaster God is! His standards are just too high!

That’s sarcasm, folks.

God’s mercy is infinite. Despite our repeated failings in even the smallest things, He still loves us and wants to do great things for those who love Him in return.

After the incident of the golden calf, the Israelites were acutely aware of their vulnerability and God’s kindness to them. When God gave Moses the order to begin building the wilderness Tabernacle, He also told him to take up a collection for the required materials. The people’s response was overwhelming. Six times in Exodus 35-36, Scripture tells us that everyone whose heart and spirit moved them brought material for the work: precious metals, stones, fabrics, wood, skins, time, and labor.

In fact, they brought so much stuff that the workmen had to ask Moses to stop them.

But wait! The people were only bringing what was on their heart to bring. Why didn’t they let the people bring it all and then find some other worthwhile use for the excess? It could have been given to the poor or used to make the Tabernacle into something even grander than originally planned. What’s wrong with giving more than asked?

In most things, there’s nothing wrong with giving more than asked. If a homeless person asks for a dollar, there’s nothing wrong with buying him a whole meal or giving him a coat. If a friend asks you for a loan, it’s not wrong to give him a gift instead. If God asks for a golden box, there’s nothing wrong with making Him a golden calf too. Right?

More sarcasm.

These gifts weren’t for a homeless person or a friend asking for a loan. This was the Tabernacle which would be used to worship God in the ways that God prescribed. He is very particular about how He is to be worshipped. The problem with people is that their hearts often prompt them to do things they just shouldn’t do. When they made the calf, they called it YHWH who brought them out of Egypt, but they knew full well that no bovine had rescued them from Egypt. They made the calf as some kind of focal point for their adoration of God, a replacement for Moses and the pillar of fire. Whatever their justification for that infraction might have been, I think we can be certain that they were following their hearts. Those who participated in that idolatry believed that they were doing right.

The heart is a great thing. When it is conformed to God’s will, it can be a great tool for good, but when it isn’t, it can be just as great a tool for evil, all with the best of intentions.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can understand it?” -Jeremiah 17:9

God understands it. He knows what’s in our hearts, and that is why He gave us rules to constrain it. His Law is no more of a burden than a Keep Out sign at a toxic waste dump. God’s commandments are for our own protection and well-being. Do you want to stay out of spiritual trouble? Then stay within His Law.

There’s nothing wrong with listening to your heart when it leads you in the right direction. A heart that’s pleasing to God can be a beautiful thing, but when it leads you to stray outside of the lines that God has drawn, it can bring unending heartache. How do you know when your heart is leading you astray? Well, there’s this book, you see….

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Family Prayers from Proverbs Released Today!

Family Prayers from Proverbs ISBN 1508551855
Family Prayers from Proverbs by Jay Carper. ISBN 1508551855

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Growing Godly Children. Building a Stronger Future.

Brenham, TX – March 5 – In this time of shifting moral standards parents often feel helpless against unhealthy influences on television, on the Internet, and in pop culture. They need more effective tools to teach their children time-honored principles of wisdom and godly behavior. Brenham resident Jay Carper has created a small book to help meet that need.

Carper’s Family Prayers from Proverbs for Wisdom, Wealth, & Wellness is a family prayer book based on the Book of Proverbs. He distilled each chapter of Proverbs into a short set of three to four prayers designed to draw every member of the family into meditation on the meaning of Solomon’s writings and how they apply to everyday life.

Family Prayers from Proverbs will help parents counteract the influence of the world on their children’s minds and spirits and make wise choices instinctive. Using this prayer guide in your family devotionals will have a lasting impact resulting in a stronger work ethic, healthier relationships, and a better future.

The book is available through online booksellers or by contacting the author at [email protected]. You can also ask your local bookstore to carry Family Prayers from Proverbs on their shelves.

About the Author: Jay Carper lives with his wife and son in Brenham, Texas, where they are part of a small community of Torah-observant believers. His parents have been involved in ministry with the Assemblies of God and other organizations since before he was old enough to know it, and he inherited their love of the Bible and its Author. He believes that a person can only obtain eternal salvation through faith in the grace of God which was made manifest in the death and resurrection of Jesus. While searching for a deeper understanding of God’s love for His people, Jay began exploring God’s Law and the Hebraic roots of the Christian faith in the 1990s and has been an active participant in Torah-observant congregations since 2001.

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Title: Family Prayers from Proverbs
Subtitle: for Wisdom, Wealth, & Wellness
Author: Jay Carper
ISBN: 1508551855
EAN13: 9781508551850
List price: $9.98

Check out my growing playlist of short videos on the Proverbs in my  Youtube channel.

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Beauty in the Eyes of God

One artist's idea of what the High Priest's uniform would have looked like. Source unknown.
One artist’s idea of what the High Priest’s uniform would have looked like. Source unknown.

God loves beauty. Gold, silver, jewels, fine craftsmanship…The wilderness Tabernacle was embroidered and bedecked with the best that those humble, recently freed slaves had to offer. (Perhaps I should say with the best that they had liberated from their former masters.)

Consider the uniform of the high priest. For his outer layer, he wore a gold crown, shoulder pieces of carved onyx, a gold breast plate covered in jewels and attached to a multicolored, embroidered tunic with gold chains. Beneath that he wore a blue robe fringed with golden bells and little, cloth pomegranates. If all of this wasn’t flashy and extravagant enough, would that you could see what he wore next to his skin!

Plain, white linen. That’s it. Simple, clean, and beautiful.

The high priest wasn’t elected. He didn’t run for office or volunteer. Out of all of Moses’ cousins, some of whom wanted the job badly, God picked Aaron for his purity of heart and attitude of service. Hebrews 5:1-2 says that the high priest wasn’t a proud man. Although his successors weren’t always like him, Aaron was a kind and merciful man of the people. Like Moses, he was a simple man who would have been as happy ministering to slaves as leading the worship of an entire nation, and this is what God found most beautiful about the man he chose to be high priest.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they say, but what if the one looking on can see past everything you’ve built up on the outside to fool the world? God knows you, and your gold and jewels can’t fool Him.

God loves finery, but what He loves most of all is an obedient & merciful heart.

Is there someone you know (or knew) who exemplified this spiritual ideal of inner purity?

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Building Stronger Families Through Prayer

The family that prays together, stays together
THE LORD’S PRAYER by navalatanjjnn

The people of God are at war.

For decades, those who fear God and place their faith in Him have been under a concerted attack from multiple fronts. Islam is infecting the world with its violence and hatred. Feminists and homosexuals deny reality and attack anyone who exhibits the slightest common sense or ability to perceive the terrible effects that their philosophies have on families, communities, and individuals. Moral relativists celebrate every perverse and destructive behavior, while decrying all moral standards as oppressive. Lawyers, marketers, and politicians corrupt the truth and build careers on finding new ways to manipulate people into making counterproductive decisions. The list goes on, but by far the most effective attacker is the one we have been battling for millennia: our own evil inclination.

Read more at Amazon…

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The Wind Won’t Hold Forever

God makes it easy to disbelieve if you are determined.
Pharaoh’s chariots drowned by the Red Sea

It was just a wind that blew a dry channel through the Red Sea, an algae bloom that turned the Nile red, and a superficial, if bloody, wound that allowed Yeshua to come out of the grave again. He wasn’t really dead after all, you see.

Men have invented uncountable reasons why what God said is true isn’t really. If people held the rest of recorded history to the same standards to which they hold the Bible, then we’d have to put Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and King Alfred in the same category as rainbow unicorns.

God makes it easy to disbelieve if you want to. If you are really determined, sometimes He’ll even help you along like Pharaoh chasing the Hebrews between the walls of water against all good sense. Egypt was devastated by one miraculous plague after another, a massive storm had just blown a hole through the Red Sea, and a pillar of fire had kept his chariots from advancing on the Hebrew camp, and still he went on. What was he thinking?

We all see the Truth eventually, of course, but if you wait for Him to force it on you, it’s usually too late. The wind will have died and the water will already be closing.

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All in God’s Time

I tweet to 4-5 of my Twitter followers every morning for warm fuzzies. I call these my “blessing tweets.” It’s a way for me to acknowledge people I’m connected to and let them know that I appreciate them. I don’t have a plan as to which followers are included on any particular tweet, and I schedule them about a month in advance, so I have no way to tell what might be going on in people’s lives on the day of the tweet.

One morning, my blessing tweet essentially said, “May God make good things come your way,” addressed to four people. What I didn’t know was that the mother of one of those four people would pass away the night before the tweet would be posted. He replied to me,

“I just wanted to thank you for tagging me in a post today. Last night my mother went to be with the Lord, and this was a real pick me up.”

I had nothing to do with the timing of this tweet. It was God, and God alone, who determined that it would be sent today. There’s more going on in spiritual dimensions than we can ever know, and God’s timing is rarely ours. It’s why faith in the face of adversity is so important. God always has a plan. It’s our job to keep pushing ahead, and, no matter how bad our situation looks, we have to trust that He knows what He’s doing and that “all things work together for good to those who love God.”

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God Knows Why You Suffer

Why would a just God allow all the suffering in the world?

A girl is born in a strange land where her parents were exiled following a brutal war that left most of her extended family dead or enslaved. While still a teenager, she is taken away to become the trophy slave-wife of a wealthy foreigner. She soon finds herself in a position to change the course of an empire and to save millions of her people.

A great empire in another era suffers wave after wave of horrific natural disasters. A prophet tells the emperor that if he would only repent of a particularly grievous sin, his people would be spared. The emperor is a proud man and refuses to budge. Millions are impoverished, tens of thousands die by starvation or disease, and the government is in shambles. At any moment in the process the emperor could have repented or the people might have overthrown him and begged God for mercy, but pride is a powerful master.

A child is born blind and his parents die when he is still young. He lives for many years begging alms and often going hungry. One day the Son of God finds him and heals him before a throng of witnesses. He sees for the first time in his life and spends the remainder of his time on earth preaching the gospel, bringing joy and meaning to countless lives.

We often hear doubters ask “If God cares so much, why is there so much suffering in the world?” To the simple minded, it sounds like proof positive that God either doesn’t care or doesn’t exist, but the world is an extraordinarily complex system. There are at least as many reasons why a person might suffer as there are people. One person suffers because he made a bad mistake, another suffers because there is an important lesson he needs to learn, or a wrong he needs to right. Perhaps there is some benefit to come that will overshadow all his pain.

It is even true that we need struggle to grow and thrive. As individuals, nations, and even as a species, we must have a certain amount of pain to drive us to achieve anything worthwhile. Great ideas and great art, usually only come after great struggles. Can you imagine the shallow, narcissistic philosophies of a people who have no serious challenges to overcome? You don’t need to imagine it; you have only to turn on the television.

We cannot possibly fathom all of the connections between people and problems. The only thing we can be certain of is that only the Creator can possibly know the full truth and that the scales will always balance at the end.

God knows each and every one of us. He knows what we need to live and what we need in order to achieve the greatness He sees within us. Don’t hide from pain. Study God’s Word so that you can know love and justice when you see it. Put your trust in Him, knowing that His purposes are everything, while yours are nothing. Then face your challenges head on. Fight injustice, fight cruelty without fear, because when you do what’s right and trust God for the outcome, He will be with you.

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Judge Every Religion by its Fruit

 

Islam is the enemy of the Freedom of the Press.
Your freedom to write, speak, or draw a cartoon is dependent on your right to shoot back, not with words, but with bullets.

Charlie Hebdo has probably printed a great deal of things I wouldn’t like. I don’t appreciate insults directed at Jesus or any of the prophets and great men of Christianity or Judaism. I’ve blocked a few Tweeters for insisting that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. I’ve unfriended a few people on Facebook for continually insulting me and my beliefs. Awfully unfriendly of me, don’t you think?

But I’ve never killed anyone for an insult.

The standard of proportionate punishment has been fixed in Judeo-Christian jurisprudence since before there were any Jews or Christians. “An eye for an eye” means don’t exact a penalty beyond what is reasonable for the crime. In this case, no crime has even been committed except for the killing 12 people for an insult.

I firmly believe that every religion and ideology can be judged by the behavior of its most zealous adherents. Christians, Hindus, Jews, etc., have all done terrible things, but those are historical aberrations. The most zealous Hindus starve themselves to death. I wouldn’t call that admirable, but at least they aren’t trying to starve everyone else. The most zealous Christians typically do not go about bombing pagans and selling captured women as slaves. Instead, they die for their faith, go to prison, and preach on the street corners. Christendom has brought more freedom, more technological advancement, and more domestic peace than any other religion in the world.

Islam, on the other hand, produces more pirates, suicide bombers, rape, and slavery than any other religion, and this behavior is not a recent development. America has been fighting Muslim terrorists since the late 18th century, and the rest of Europe has been fighting them since long before the Crusades. This isn’t to say that all Muslims are bad people. They clearly aren’t. However, they are just as clearly trapped in a vile religion that foments hatred. No Christian or free nation that allows unchecked Muslim immigration can survive long without severe violence. Islam must be quarantined or eradicated for the self defense of the rest of the planet.

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George Washington’s Prayer

This is an excerpt from George Washington’s personal prayer book.

Almighty God, and most merciful father, who didst command the children of Israel to offer a daily sacrifice to thee, that thereby they might glorify and praise thee for thy protection both night and day, receive, O Lord, my morning sacrifice which I now offer up to thee; I yield thee humble and hearty thanks that thou has preserved me from the danger of the night past, and brought me to the light of the day, and the comforts thereof, a day which is consecrated to thine own service and for thine own honor. Let my heart, therefore, Gracious God, be so affected with the glory and majesty of it, that I may not do mine own works, but wait on thee, and discharge those weighty duties thou requirest of me, and since thou art a God of pure eyes, and wilt be sanctified in all who draw near unto thee, who doest not regard the sacrifice of fools, nor hear sinners who tread in thy courts, pardon, I beseech thee, my sins, remove them from thy presence, as far as the east is from the west, and accept of me for the merits of thy son Jesus Christ, that when I come into thy temple, and compass thine altar, my prayers may come before thee as incense; and as thou wouldst hear me calling upon thee in my prayers, so give me grace to hear thee calling on me in thy word, that it may be wisdom, righteousness, reconciliation and peace to the saving of the soul in the day of the Lord Jesus. Grant that I may hear it with reverence, receive it with meekness, mingle it with faith, and that it may accomplish in me, Gracious God, the good work for which thou has sent it. Bless my family, kindred, friends and country, be our God & guide this day and for ever for his sake, who lay down in the Grave and arose again for us, Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.*

-George Washington

* William J. Johnson, George Washington, The Christian (New York: The Abingdon Press, 1919).