THE GREATNESS OF GOD

8/31/2011 11:00:46 AM

SPIRITUAL DIARY

My Worship Time                                                                                                             Focus:  The greatness of God

Bible Reading & Meditation                                                                                         Reference:  Nehemiah 9:1-6

                Message of the verses:  “  1 ¶  Now on the twenty-fourth day of this month the sons of Israel assembled with fasting, in sackcloth and with dirt upon them. 2  The descendants of Israel separated themselves from all foreigners, and stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers. 3  While they stood in their place, they read from the book of the law of the LORD their God for a fourth of the day; and for another fourth they confessed and worshiped the LORD their God.

    “4 ¶  Now on the Levites’ platform stood Jeshua, Bani, Kadmiel, Shebaniah, Bunni, Sherebiah, Bani and Chenani, and they cried with a loud voice to the LORD their God. 5  Then the Levites, Jeshua, Kadmiel, Bani, Hashabneiah, Sherebiah, Hodiah, Shebaniah and Pethahiah, said, "Arise, bless the LORD your God forever and ever! O may Your glorious name be blessed And exalted above all blessing and praise! 6  "You alone are the LORD. You have made the heavens, The heaven of heavens with all their host, The earth and all that is on it, The seas and all that is in them. You give life to all of them And the heavenly host bows down before You.”

                I have to say that I have been looking forward to what is in this chapter since the beginning of my study of Nehemiah.  There are three great prayers recorded in three great books of the OT and all three of them are in the ninth chapters of these three great books.  Ezra, Nehemiah, and Daniel are all books that deal with the nation of Israel after it had been taken into captivity.  (I am speaking of Judah and the first captives were taken from there in 605 BC).  Daniel was among those who were taken in 605 BC and his prayer in the ninth chapter of Daniel was the first one to be written, then Ezra’s prayer and finally Nehemiah’s prayer.  When one looks at 2Chronicles 7:14 and then look at these three prayers they will see the prayers doing what that verse instructs them to do:  “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land (AV).”  In all three of these prayers we can find great confession of sin to the Lord and in all three of them there are many personal pronouns indicating that the authors were including themselves when confessing sins to the Lord.  I have thought about this for some time as to why they did this and one conclusion that I came to was that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.  One only has to look at verse two of this chapter to see that the people of Israel after “separating themselves from the foreigners stood and confessed their sins and the inequities of their fathers.”  They too realized that they had sinned and were in need of confession and repentance before the Lord.  All of this happened three days after the Feast of Tabernacles, which was a time of feasting and celebration to the Lord, so they went from feasting to fasting, from wearing festive clothes to wearing sackcloth and putting dirt upon themselves showing their need for confession.

                In today’s SD we find the first element of this, what is the longest prayer in the Bible, and that element is “The greatness of God,” which will be followed by “The goodness of God,” and then “The Grace of God.”  Dr. Warren Wiersbe entitles this chapter in his commentary on Nehemiah “Amazing Grace,” and indeed it is amazing grace that God has chosen to forgive all of my sins through the shed blood of Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary, and this can all be seen as to be true by the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ from the grave.

                I truly cannot imagine what happened in this chapter happening in 21^st century America.  These exiles from Israel stood for three hours listening to the Word of God being preached to them and then spent more time confessing their sins before the Lord.  If the preacher is a minute over in our services today people are upset and are ready to call a new Pastor to replace him.  Everyone seems to be in a hurry and yet where are they going and in this hurry what are they missing?  One of the old songs that used to be sung in churches was called “Take Time to be Holy.”  A few years back I began to unpack this song verse by verse to see how many Scripture verses that I could find to go along with this verse, and I found many.  A few years later during a prayer meeting at our church I began to share what I learned one verse at a time.  One of the conclusions that I came to after doing this was that the name of the song should be “It Takes Time to be Holy” and that is what is seen in this setting from Nehemiah in chapters eight and nine.  In heaven we will be spending all of our “time” with the Lord and so it is best to get to know Him while we are here on earth so it won’t be such a great shock when we get there for that is what these exiles were doing, for first came separation and then came confession. 

In their separation and confession they were showing the greatness of God.  In verse six we find another way of them showing the greatness of God and that is to speak of God’s greatness in creation, for when one takes the time to study how God created this world and all that we see they will be awestruck at His greatness.  I have just listened to twelve messages by John MacArthur on creation and am in the process of reading his book “Battle for the Beginning,” and some of the wonderful things that I have learned from the messages and the book have truly shown me in a new light how great God is.  These people knew this and that is why they spoke of God’s creation in this prayer. 

Another part of the greatness of God that is seen here is that Israel was worshiping the Lord through their actions and through them not being like the nations around them.  This is also seen in verse six.  True worship of the Lord involves many elements: “hearing the Scriptures, praising God, praying, confessing sin, and separating ourselves from that which displeases God.”  We have seen all of these in this paragraph.  When we worship the Lord it also involves the Word of God, for that is the only way that we can know the Lord.  A. W. Tozer, in his great book “The Knowledge of the Holy,” writes, “The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thought about God that are unworthy of Him.”  Dr. Wiersbe goes on to write “The better we know the Scriptures and respond to them, the better we will know God and become like Him.”  “In the Scriptures, God speaks to us; and in prayer and praise, we speak to Him,” see verse five of our text.

Now back to what  I started writing about a paragraph ago, and that is that the greatness of God is also seen in the fact that God is God alone as seen in verse 6a where it states “You are God alone.”  This is surely speaking of the fact that there are no other gods, and this means that idols were worthless and only got people into trouble.  All men have a vacuum, and will worship something even if it is an idol for we have already touched on the description of an idol with the quote from Tozer. 

The last way we see the greatness of God in this passage is found in the last part of verse six where we read “And the heavenly host bows down before You.”  This of course is speaking of the angels who worship and bow down to the Lord and we as forgiven people have more reasons to do this, yet do we do it.  The angels are God’s servants, but we are God’s children “1 ¶  See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him. 2  Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. 3  And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure (1John 3:1-3).

Spiritual meaning for my life today:  “How Great Thou Art – The Lyrics

O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder,
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

When through the woods, and forest glades I wander,
And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees.
When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur
And see the brook, and feel the gentle breeze.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

And when I think, that God, His Son not sparing;
Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in;
That on the Cross, my burden gladly bearing,
He bled and died to take away my sin.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
Then I shall bow, in humble adoration,
And then proclaim: "My God, how great Thou art!"

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!”

My Steps of Faith for Today:

1.       Think about the greatness of God.

2.       Continue to learn contentment.

8/31/2011 12:26:25 PM