Category: theology

When something gets taken from us, God pays it back from His vast wealth. It doesn’t matter how it was lost. Whatever we lose, God can give back and restore a thousand times.

Even sickness, injury, or death of a loved one—God can heal any infirmity, any injury, and whether not or later, God is the resurrection.

God does not “replace” what we lose, he “repays”. The original is still gone. No one can replace a lost loved one, but God brings us new friends and family to fill the space left by whoever isn’t around anymore. Our new family members are just as filled with life and the need for our love as whomever we lost.

God told Israel through the prophet Joel, just before the punishment of Babylon’s invasion, that He would restore the crops that the locusts came and ate. After Job humbled himself before God, he received all his wealth back two fold and started a new family whom he loved very much.

Everyone experiences loss in this life sooner or later. No one dies without God’s approval. No harm comes to us without first passing through the approving, loving, guiding hands of our Father in Heaven.

Even before God takes something away from us—or allows it to be taken away—He already has His plan to restore it to us. Our role in repayment is to seek Him, to grow our hearts to be more loving, and to understand our humble circumstances, no matter who we are.

Jesus described God the Father as a keeper of a vineyard. Pruning is a painful part of healthy growth. Just as a seed must die before it can sprout, just as winter makes trees grow their roots deep in search of water, God takes things from us as part of His master plan for us to become mature and strong in wisdom, skill, knowledge, and love.

We don’t always live in seasons of loss. Sometimes God calls us to be His instrument through which He repays what was taken from someone else. Whatever season you are in, never focus the greatness of loss, rather fix your eyes on God who repays.

God does not allow any crime to go unpunished. In human terms, a crime may evade human systems of justice, but they do not evade God.

If we repent of sin, God will forgive us in our relationship with Him and in Eternity. This gives us a fresh start each day where God is concerned, which is liberating, empowering us to press forward. But, we still must do restitutions—work to clean up whatever mess we made in the natural universe during our life on Earth. It wouldn’t be loving toward others if we didn’t clean up the mess we repented of making.

More importantly, time wasted sinning is time better spent building up value that matters in the eyes of Heaven—things that God congratulates rather than forgives. If one’s life only surmounts to forgiven sin then one would enter Eternity with nothing.

These balance out in the end, including the vindictive need for punitive acts of justice and revenge. Someone who hurt you may repent, clean up his life, and start contributing to make life valuable for people—preventing others from the same destructive path. However and whenever God punishes others, we always find it just and beg for His mercy on them.

But, for the unrepentant—for the people who care nothing for others or for justice, who commit heinous crimes against humanity—their day in court with the Lord God Most High is indeed coming.

God punished Cain for murdering his brother, a curse and guilty conscience that followed him the rest of his life. The world, full of wickedness and murder, was drowned in the flood of Noah’s day. Babylon’s economy never regained its investment for the Tower unfinished. Egypt enslaved Israel and did not recover the bruises of a wrathful God. The defiant generation of Israel died in the desert. Satanic human-sacrificing cultists in Canaan were rightly slaughtered by Joshua’s army. Enemies of the judges suffered humiliating defeat as did Saul and his family.

When God wielded evil nations to punish Israel for sin, they too were decimated—Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome.

In the end, Revelation predicts indescribable vengeance on unimaginable wickedness because nothing escapes God’s vindication.

God chastens and chastises His children because He loves them. Like well groomed lawns and gardens are clipped and watered, God rears His children with boundaries, rules, rewards, and punishments.

Punishments make us cry, as do any hardships, deserved and unfair alike. If we cry from punishment guiding us to accept what we can’t control—including God’s decisions about how He wants us to live—then when the normal troubles and hardships of life come our way we won’t be disheartened.

Life has its challenges. The path requires effort to travel, overcome, finish a project, or dig through a mess to find gold—just the effort itself can lead us to tears.

If our parents punished us for being disobedient as children, we are not only obedient and self-disciplined to more formidably face our challenges; we won’t cry as much when tall challenges might otherwise wear us out.

God is the perfect parent, which means that He will spank us and put us on lockdown, of course to train us in self-control, but also to de-sissify us. His rules and desires on how we should live are, of course, incredibly brilliant, wonderful, ultra-desirable, and so good that no one could possibly have a better idea than His morals from above.

But, even the wisdom of God’s morals aside, just giving us pain to toughen us up is what any loving father should give.

The last thing a child needs is to get bit by a mosquito while crossing the street, lock up from the pain, and thus get run over by a car. Having thick skin is part of living a safe life. Good parents don’t pamper their children so much that the slightest hiccup leaves them emotionally undone.

Strength to bear hardship also means we’re strong enough to help others with their burdens. When someone near you has trouble, you may need to carry a double load; you may need to take a bullet or get whacked with a falling log to save someone. Your strong spine could save someone’s life.

Our own hardship is no license to “chasten” everyone around us. God Himself chastens His beloved because good fathers chasten their beloved children.

As Creator and Inventor of Everything, God is the Grand Architect and He never stops developing His Creation. God Almighty is also God the Developer.

God raises up and tears down however He wants, all according to His grand planning.

As an urban area sprawls, it needs different types of streets and passages for different population densities and to fit different levels of progress in technology. Before a people are able to generate electricity, they need the proper roads to move their materials, even in the construction process of building the wiring for electricity. Before underground piping can be made—still having only primitive tools—some form of sewer is needed to keep the city clean. Once pipes are in place, those old sewer trenches can serve other purposes.

Even an embryo starts as a cluster of cells which will eventually divide into specialized organs, tissues, and limbs. Scaffolding and molding go up early, but are taken down once the building is finished. In a sense, the building itself is mere scaffolding for project yet to come. Eventually, everything gets torn down; what doesn’t gets celebrated in a museum to remind us how young we are compared to the ongoing project of humanity.

Watching over and above all of this is God, who builds and plans components of human society that only He can engineer.

God shapes the courses of friendships and social habits. He raises up practices among His people, then he changes those practices to prepare for the newer, better things He has for us. In time, He will tear down those new practices as well.

As God constantly moves and shapes different organizations, kingdoms, cultures, and liturgies, He remains outside of them.

God will eventually tear down formerly useful structures, but nostalgia leads some people to cling to the past and its empty halls. We can become addicted and otherwise fixated on those temporary customs and practices themselves—often defending rigid institutions long after their usefulness has fulfilled its purposes. If we do not leave the condemned structure, it can be demolished with us still inside.

Never revere temporary infrastructure above the Eternal God who never stops tearing down and rebuilding upward.

A potter works the clay, watering it, molding it, and shaping it as fast as it will be shaped. Clay has a will of its own, but it cannot shape itself.

Once the potter has shaped and re-shaped the clay beyond what the clay is capable of, the clay will quit, no longer able to hold any form. Once the clay quits, it must be reconstituted—first dried and ground into powder, then hydrated with water and prepared once again for the wheel.

God is the Great Potter who sits at the wheel of Earth, spinning us in His hands. It was no coincidence that the artistic poet, God the Potter, made Man from the dust of the ground. Just like clay, we have a will that wrestles with our Potter’s Hands. When we don’t sit how God wants, he tears us down. If we fight Him too much, He grinds us into powder before hydrating us with water.

All of God’s work with humanity—collectively just as much as with each individual—molds and shapes us into a beautiful masterpiece. We do become grand and glorious over time—not due to any effort of our own, but only our effort to cooperate with the guiding hands of our Potter.

As we grow, study, learn, sharpen, exercise, strengthen, mature, and improve ourselves, God’s guidance oversees everything. If God cares which continent we live on, we will be on the continent of His choosing. If God decides that He will make you fall in love with music, you will be forever smitten, but it’s up to you to practice and pursue excellence. The same holds for every career and skill.

Throughout the Bible, God shapes people through their circumstances. Consider Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Ruth, David, Daniel, Esther, Jesus’s disciples, and the Apostles.

When he became prime minister, Winston Churchill said that all his, “past life had been but a preparation for this hour…” He had indeed been prepared by God the Potter, just as you have been prepared—and are still being prepared—to become whatever vessel God wants you for. Your role is to cooperate with the Great Potter’s Hands while they do the shaping.

Whatever sin a man has not dealt with in his life, he passes this on to his children at a basic level almost reaching DNA. Permanently and unable to be treated by psychotherapy—possibly personality disorders—these sins will forever persist through the entire lives of his children. The Bible calls this “sins of the fathers” and says they are “visited onto the sons to the third and fourth generation”.

Mothers do not pass on their unresolved sin issues this way, which is part of the counterintuitive strategy of God. Does it make a woman more or less powerful that she cannot injure her children this way? Jesus was sinless for this reason; he had no father, only a mother. So, he had no sin nature in his body, constantly fighting his will and tempting him to sin, even without devils bothering him.

Because of Jesus’s work on the Cross, these “sins of the fathers” can be removed, but only by “forgiving one’s father”. There is a time when everyone must come to grips with this truth: Your father messed up big time. He neglected his responsibilities as a father and as a human in general. You MUST forgive him—that means that you never expect him to apologize and you never seek any repayment or restitution from him at all. Whatever your father did to make your life hard, get the payback and punishment payment from Jesus.

Jesus will pay whatever you lost far more than your father could anyway.

It is that we not “excuse” or “try to understand” their difficulty. As we age we come to understand our parents more and more, but we must never “excuse” their mistakes. Parents are leaders and must have their lives in order before they get involved in romance. There is no excuse for them; parents must instead be forgiven.

“Forgiving” means waving all rights to collect on a debt owed, the opposite of “excusing”. Never confuse them. You won’t need to when you depend on God for whatever perfection we need from a parent. He has it. Accept not only God’s repayment, but also His perfection as a Father who will never let you down.