DEDICATION TO CHRIST - Part 1

The Passover celebration took the minds of the Hebrew people back to the time when they were captives in Egypt, and were spared from suffering God’s judgment upon their oppressors.

God has his own ways of dealing with things. Ways that we will never fully understand. Nor do we have to understand them. Nor are we called to understand them.

You can trust God without understanding Him. Remember that, because it will help you. The devil will try to make you forget it. The devil will try to distract you with “understanding.” A desire to know more about God than He has revealed. More about God than is our business to know.

But remember the words of Solomon in Proverbs chapter 3: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding.” That verse will help you greatly. It can be a life verse, one that you should commit to memory. Meditate upon it, because these are words of wisdom from a book of wisdom.

Trusting in the Lord is trusting in Jesus Christ. Solomon could not have understood that at the time, but we know it. We live on this side of Calvary. God has revealed Himself fully through the person of Jesus Christ.

We know so much more about God than Solomon or David or any of the faithful people of the Old Testament did. And we should appreciate that. We should appreciate the full revelation that we have in Jesus.

The Hebrews put the blood of a sacrificed lamb on their doorposts as a sign that God  would “pass over” their houses. This was during the time when God was destroying all the firstborn Egyptian male children to force Pharaoh to let His people go (Exodus 12:12-17).

Stories like these—and they are true, historically accurate stories—are beloved, it seems, by those who would mock the Word of God. They say that God, especially the “God of the Old Testament”—as if there is a difference between the “God of the Old Testament” and the “God of the New Testament”—was cruel.

“Look at this,” they will say. “God sent the angel of death to destroy innocent little children.”

If that is your attitude, you are very mistaken, and you have a very warped view of the matter. You do not know enough about God, the situation in Egypt, or spiritual matters in general, to question anything God has ever done. You would be better off to focus on your own death. And the fact that you will deal with God now or later.

But you should also remember that God created those children. Do you think that you have more compassion or concern for people who lived centuries ago—people that you did not and do not even know—than the God who created them?

Mankind is extremely arrogant. All of us are either that way now or we used to be that way. But we can stop being that way. We can humble ourselves before God, and admit that we know nothing and He knows everything. Compared to Him, we are totally ignorant.

Has it ever occurred to you to blame sin? To blame Pharaoh? Even knowing as little as we know about the situation, that should be the obvious, immediate reaction. At least read the story. And after you have read the story, realize that you are not in any position to sit in judgment upon God.

I am not here as God’s defense attorney. God answers to no one. But when you are tempted by the devil to think negatively about God, it is best to stop that immediately. God has proven His love and concern for everyone in more ways than we can possibly imagine, much less list.

And if you continue to mock God, rather than turn to salvation through Christ, there may come a day when you wish you could trade places with those Egyptian children.

This life is not all there is. Eternity is what we need to be concerned with.

Dewayne Dunaway