About a month ago I had my first peace of short fiction picked up for publication. It’s been a very exciting time for me with that. Not only because it’s my first piece to be published, but also one of the few works I’ve completed. Now I’ve been writing for a number of years; since my early high school days to say the least. I’ve worked on everything from autobiographies and devotional booklets to epic fantasy and space opera. I have the first chapter and outlines of books all over the place. Yet I could probably count everything I’ve completed on one hand, and in those, none more then a few thousand words long.
Isn’t it good to know that God never leaves a work unfinished? Gods will always complete what he starts. This in part is what Solomon is happy for in today’s reading; Ecclesiastes 3: 9-15. In many ways today’s passage looks like Chapter 2 verses 24-26, again Solomon says "that every man should eat and drink and enjoy the good of all his labor—it is the gift of God."
But he goes on from that thought with some thoughts on God. Verse 14 says;
"I know that whatever God does,
It shall be forever.
Nothing can be added to it,
And nothing taken from it.
God does it, that men should fear before Him."
Here Solomon adds some truths about God, that he hasn’t done prior to this in Ecclesiastes. He shares with us that everything God does is Eternal. It is complete nothing can be added to it, nothing can be taken away. What peace we can take in these verses. It brings me back to Philippians 1:6 "being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ". If God has truly started a work in you, it will be forever, he will complete these things. Life will hit us hard, sometimes we will stumble, sometimes we will fall, and sometimes we must continue to crawl towards our Lord. But he will give us the strength to do just that. He will not abandon us.
Verse 14 ends with the phrase that men should fear before him. Sometimes when we think of fear we get the idea of running scared, yet this speaks more of a healthy respect, to be in awe of the Lord if you like. A healthy fear of the Lord is a call of reverence and worship of our God. This view of God, sits against Solomon’s earlier of man, as pitiful and wholly inadequate apart from the Lord.
In today’s church we often leave out the fear of the Lord. God is reduced to someone’s "Daddy" or the more popular slogan where Christ is referred to as someone’s "Homeboy" God the all powerful creator of the Universe, who holds all things in his hands is more the your "Daddy". And Christ who came, bled, suffered, and died all well experiencing all trials and temptations and remaining sinless; who did this all so you may have eternal life, is more then your "homeboy".
I guess it’s probably time to get of my soapbox on that little issue. But let me offer you this action point today. Let us step back and get a healthy dose of "fear" of the Lord. Let us go to Him humbly and with respect and awe for who He is and what He has done. God loves us, and as we see again in verse 13 He wants us to enjoy those things He has given us, but let us remember apart from him we are nothing. Jesus Christ is so much more then you’re Homeboy. Your homeboy can’t save you; only Jesus can
