Max Lucado Daily: GABRIEL’S PROPHECY FULFILLED - September 20, 2024
The angel Gabriel gave three prophecies to Daniel. Look at the second one. He said, “A command will come to rebuild Jerusalem. The time from this command until the appointed leader comes will be forty-nine years and four hundred thirty-four years” (Daniel 9:25 NCV). The Hebrew term for “appointed leader” means Messiah…Jesus Christ. The angel mentioned two blocks of time, for a total of 483 years.
Nehemiah was a high-ranking exiled Jewish ruler. He made a request to Artaxerxes to rebuild Jerusalem, and the king agreed. According to the Hebrew calendar, the 483rd year occurred during the Passover of AD 33, on April 6 – the very year and day that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. Our Savior fulfilled Gabriel’s prophecy. What a testimony to the authority of the Bible!
What Happens Next
2 Peter 1
I, Simon Peter, am a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ. I write this to you whose experience with God is as life-changing as ours, all due to our God’s straight dealing and the intervention of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ. Grace and peace to you many times over as you deepen in your experience with God and Jesus, our Master.
Don’t Put It Off
3–4 Everything that goes into a life of pleasing God has been miraculously given to us by getting to know, personally and intimately, the One who invited us to God. The best invitation we ever received! We were also given absolutely terrific promises to pass on to you—your tickets to participation in the life of God after you turned your back on a world corrupted by lust.
5–9 So don’t lose a minute in building on what you’ve been given, complementing your basic faith with good character, spiritual understanding, alert discipline, passionate patience, reverent wonder, warm friendliness, and generous love, each dimension fitting into and developing the others. With these qualities active and growing in your lives, no grass will grow under your feet, no day will pass without its reward as you mature in your experience of our Master Jesus. Without these qualities you can’t see what’s right before you, oblivious that your old sinful life has been wiped off the books.
10–11 So, friends, confirm God’s invitation to you, his choice of you. Don’t put it off; do it now. Do this, and you’ll have your life on a firm footing, the streets paved and the way wide open into the eternal kingdom of our Master and Savior, Jesus Christ.
The One Light in a Dark Time
12–15 Because the stakes are so high, even though you’re up-to-date on all this truth and practice it inside and out, I’m not going to let up for a minute in calling you to attention before it. This is the post to which I’ve been assigned—keeping you alert with frequent reminders—and I’m sticking to it as long as I live. I know that I’m to die soon; the Master has made that quite clear to me. And so I am especially eager that you have all this down in black and white so that after I die, you’ll have it for ready reference.
16–18 We weren’t, you know, just wishing on a star when we laid the facts out before you regarding the powerful return of our Master, Jesus Christ. We were there for the preview! We saw it with our own eyes: Jesus resplendent with light from God the Father as the voice of Majestic Glory spoke: “This is my Son, marked by my love, focus of all my delight.” We were there on the holy mountain with him. We heard the voice out of heaven with our very own ears.
19–21 We couldn’t be more sure of what we saw and heard—God’s glory, God’s voice. The prophetic Word was confirmed to us. You’ll do well to keep focusing on it. It’s the one light you have in a dark time as you wait for daybreak and the rising of the Morning Star in your hearts. The main thing to keep in mind here is that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of private opinion. And why? Because it’s not something concocted in the human heart. Prophecy resulted when the Holy Spirit prompted men and women to speak God’s Word.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Friday, September 20, 2024
Today's Scripture
Nahum 1:1-8, 15
God Is Serious Business
1 1 A report on the problem of Nineveh, the way God gave Nahum of Elkosh to see it:
2–6 God is serious business.
He won’t be trifled with.
He avenges his foes.
He stands up against his enemies, fierce and raging.
But God doesn’t lose his temper.
He’s powerful, but it’s a patient power.
Still, no one gets by with anything.
Sooner or later, everyone pays.
Tornadoes and hurricanes
are the wake of his passage,
Storm clouds are the dust
he shakes off his feet.
He yells at the sea: It dries up.
All the rivers run dry.
The Bashan and Carmel mountains shrivel,
the Lebanon orchards shrivel.
Mountains quake in their roots,
hills dissolve into mud flats.
Earth shakes in fear of God.
The whole world’s in a panic.
Who can face such towering anger?
Who can stand up to this fierce rage?
His anger spills out like a river of lava,
his fury shatters boulders.
7–10 God is good,
a hiding place in tough times.
He recognizes and welcomes
anyone looking for help,
No matter how desperate the trouble.
But cozy islands of escape
He wipes right off the map.
No one gets away from God.
Look! Striding across the mountains—
a messenger bringing the latest good news: peace!
A holiday, Judah! Celebrate!
Worship and recommit to God!
No more worries about this enemy.
This one is history. Close the books.
Insight
Despite the gloomy and apocalyptic nature of Nahum’s message, God had offered immense grace to evil Nineveh. About a century earlier, He’d sent His reluctant prophet Jonah to warn Nineveh that they’d be “overthrown” (Jonah 3:4). The city repented, and God relented from destroying it (vv. 5-10). However, history shows how they relapsed into their old ways, their appalling cruelty earning them multiple enemies. This time their judgment would be final. In 612 bc, the city was overrun by the Medes and Babylonians. Today Nineveh is mostly a ruin located near the Iraqi city of Mosul.
By: Tim Gustafson
God’s Justice and Grace
The Lord is slow to anger but great in power; the Lord will not leave the guilty unpunished. Nahum 1:3
English Romantic painter John Martin (1789–1854) is known for his apocalyptic landscapes depicting the destruction of civilizations. In these fantastic scenes, humans are overwhelmed by the magnitude of the destruction and powerless against the approaching doom. One painting, The Fall of Nineveh, depicts people fleeing the coming destruction of mounting waves under dark rolling clouds.
More than two thousand years before Martin’s painting, the prophet Nahum prophesied against Nineveh foretelling its judgment. The prophet used images of mountains quaking, hills melting, and the earth trembling (Nahum 1:5) to symbolize God’s wrath on those who’d oppressed others for their own gain. However, God’s response to sin is not without grace. While Nahum reminds his listeners of God’s power, he notes that He is “slow to anger” (v. 3) and “cares for those who trust in him” (v. 7).
Descriptions of judgment are hard to read, but a world where evil isn’t confronted would be a terrible one. Thankfully the prophet doesn’t end on that note. He reminds us that God desires a good and just world: “Look, there on the mountains, the feet of one who brings good news, who proclaims peace!” (v. 15). That good news is Jesus, who suffered the consequences of sin so we can have peace with God (Romans 5:1, 6). By: Matt Lucas
Reflect & Pray
How do you want God to defend the oppressed? How might your understanding of His wrath against injustice prompt you to speak up for the oppressed?
Father, I pray for those around the world who suffer unjustly.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Friday, September 20, 2024
The Divine Rule of Life
Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. — Matthew 5:48
In Matthew 5, our Lord calls on us to be generous in our behavior with everyone we meet. Be careful of allowing yourself to be led by your natural affinities in your spiritual life. Everyone has natural affinities—everyone likes some people and dislikes others—but we must never let these likes and dislikes rule in our Christian life. If we “walk in the light, as he is in the light” (1 John 1:7), God will give us communion with people for whom we have no affinity.
The example Jesus holds up for us in Matthew 5:48 isn’t of a good person, or even of a good Christian, but of God himself. When Jesus says, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect,” he means that we must show to others what God has shown to us. In our lives, God will give us many opportunities to prove whether we are perfect as he is perfect. He will ask us to deliberately identify ourselves with his interests in other people.
“Love each other as I have loved you” (John 15:12). The expression of Christian character isn’t good-doing; it’s God-likeness. If the Spirit of God has transformed you on the inside, then on the outside you will display divine characteristics, not human characteristics. God’s life in us expresses itself as God’s life, not as human life trying to be godly. The secret of being Christian is that the supernatural is made natural in us by the grace of God. We experience this in the regular, busy moments of our lives, not in times of quiet communion. When we come into contact with people or circumstances that should throw us off-balance, we find to our amazement that we have the power to keep wonderfully poised in the center of it all.
Ecclesiastes 4-6; 2 Corinthians 12
WISDOM FROM OSWALD
The sympathy which is reverent with what it cannot understand is worth its weight in gold.
Baffled to Fight Better, 69 L
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Friday, September 20, 2024
What no Religion Can Do For You - #9835
Jennifer and Courtney were three-year-old twins. And they were excited about preschool. In fact, they were so excited they got up in the middle of the night in their Omaha, Nebraska home and walked out of the house to make the six-block walk to school. Well all this while, their parents were sound asleep. You say, "Oh, isn't that cute?" No! See, snow was everywhere that night and the temperature was nine below zero. The girls were reported missing at 4:04 a.m. after family members awoke to find this light on and the door open.
Two police officers started driving the route to school, hoping that they'd find the girls before it was too late. At one point, their squad car was stopped by the ice on a steep hill which they decided to investigate. And there they found these little footprints, and finally they found barefoot Courtney wearing an open coat and kneeling beside her sister Jennifer, who was face down in the snow wearing socks but no coat. Even though Jennifer was near death when they found her, both the girls miraculously survived. If someone hadn't come looking for them though, they would have died.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "What No Religion Can Do For You."
Two little girls were lost and dying, and they wouldn't have made it back home themselves. Their only hope was for someone to look for them and find them. It's always that way for someone who's lost, including you and me. See, lost is actually a word in the Bible that's used to describe our spiritual condition. It's because, as the Bible says, "Each of us has wandered away from God like sheep."
We're created to have our life revolve around our Creator. But we've all decided to have it revolve around ourselves instead. And that wandering has taken us away from the home we were made for - a personal love relationship with the God who made us. We're lost. We're away and ultimately dying. If you're honest with yourself right now, maybe the word lost pretty much describes how you're feeling.
Our word for today from the Word of God, Luke 19:10, is awfully good news. Speaking of Jesus it says, "The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost." Jesus is God come looking for you; a lost child that He loves very much. Notice He did exactly what those police officers did for those lost little girls - seeking/saving. Those girls had nothing to do with their own rescue. Their only hope was a rescuer coming for them and saving them. That's like you and me.
Here's the simple fact: you cannot find God. God has to find you, and that's pretty radical. It means that all our religious efforts to get to God, whatever your religion, all our self-improvement will not get us home to a God whose standard is perfection. A lost child doesn't find himself. He or she gets found by the rescuer. All our spirituality, all our ceremonies, all our services, all our attempts to complete ourselves by finding God through spiritual searching or exercises still leave us lost.
According to the Bible, we are that little girl, hopelessly lost, face down in the snow about to die spiritually. And Jesus is that policeman coming to where we are to rescue us. But this rescue involves eternal death, the price tag for our sin. This rescue cost the Rescuer his life, as Jesus died on that cross, taking all the punishment and the hell that you and I deserve. And the Rescuer comes right now to where you are to bring you home from your "lostness."
Your role is to put yourself totally in the hands of Jesus, the only one who can bring you back. You're finally home when you tell Jesus you're putting your total trust in Him to be your Rescuer from your sin.
Today would be the day to do that and our website can help you make sure you belong to Him. Go there today. It's ANewStory.com.
You'll never find your Creator. You're lost, but He has found you at the cost of His life. Now, let Him bring you home before it's too late.