“Turn to me and be saved,
all the ends of the earth!
For I am God, and there is no other.”
— Isaiah 45:22 (NRSV)
We, as a people, people designed
and created and maintained by God, continually run from God, until we realise
we need God, and then we seek—sometimes with all our
hearts—after the One who can save us for life: the only One.
We are wrecked without God.
In our idolatry, our worship of
things other than God, and so many things are these we cannot count them, we
ignore God. We despise grace. We cheapen it. We have the temerity to insult
Jesus, again and again, whether by arrogance or hypocrisy. No matter how pious
we get, we always have the potential for this propensity.
But throughout time and eternity
God speaks a consistent message. The Lord
says: “I am God; there is no other.” These are obviously red-lettered words; words akin to Jesus’
words; the words of Yahweh. These are words from the Author of Life. These are
the words of the One who will finish the physical life at the correct time, for
the majesty of Divine Glory.
Those who would earnestly seek God
will find the Author of their lives. For the One who
knows our lives from back to front, and every event before it happens, knows
our hearts on this matter: our seeking after the living God. God will know us
and we will know God, by the essence of our committed repentance, heartfelt and
true.
Acknowledging We Cannot Shift the
Inevitable
“To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear, that I am the
Lord,” says God.
Worship of anything other than God
is totally worthless, meaningless, and a blight on the incontrovertible truth.
Yet God knows our tendency to turn and face the world of folly. Such is God’s
acceptance of this fact—that we are inherently unfaithful—he caused a binding
and irrefutable redemption. He sent his Son, and we scourged him. As we scourge
God each day in our idolatry, Jesus was scourged. And, at our worship of Jesus,
accepting we are sinners with an ongoing problem, still God forgives us! God
understands us.
The inevitable fact stands.
A time is coming—if we could call
it a time—when all things, all knowledges, and all realities, will be brought
back comprehensively to God, in every sense of entirety.
God will be worshipped purely and
cleanly then. Then we will have the fullness of rest in our worship, to know,
via consistency and a wondrousness of unadulterated love, the Lord is One.
***
The Lord says: “I am God; there is no other.” What we do with this fact is up to us. But it
is the most important decision—to follow Jesus or not—we will ever make.
© 2012 S. J. Wickham.
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