We Are Known, Understood, Appreciated and Loved By God

This morning I am going to be looking at a theme that came up in conversation yesterday with my sweetheart.  We were talking about how in scripture it says our days are numbered (known), and as we talked an analogy popped into my head that we both found very useful.  First the scriptures that we will use are from Job 14:5 and Psalm 139.

Job 14:5 NIV: "A person's days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed."

Psalm 139:16 NIV: "Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be."

Now to fully understand the analogy I will share, we must have a view of eternity and time.  Time is linear, it has a beginning and an end.  In grade school we used to draw time-lines, and place important dates on them.  Eternity is not linear, it is.  God lives in eternity, outside of time, and from His vantage point He can see everything on the time-line.  With this view of both, we can some-what grasp this concept.  

The way I described this whole bit to my honey was that our life is like a book.  God exists outside of time, and He has read the book of our life already.  He has read it completely, and from His vantage point, he can turn to any page and see how our life plays out, He can read the first page, the last page, or any other page. Thus, when He describes our days as determined, numbered or ordained, He is speaking from His perspective.

David writes the following in the beginning of Psalm 139, and with this view of time and eternity it makes sense - Psalm 139:1-6 NIV:

[1] "You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. 

[2] You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. 

[3] You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. 

[4] Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely. 

[5] You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me. 

[6] Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain."

Imagine this as God having already having read David's book of his life, these statements would all be true, and they are true for us as well.

Where we get messed up is in our ideas around free will, and question how we can have free will if all our days are already written.  Again, if we think of eternity and time appropriately, free-will is not negated.  We are still bound in time, essentially writing the book of our life as we go, but from God's vantage point outside of time, He still sees it all.  We can choose to engage God in our lives, for He certainly created us, but in giving us free-will, He allows us to choose as to whether we involve Him further in our lives or not, but that doesn't change His eternal vantage point.

A few other things that the Lord showed me via this analogy are that the application of His Blood, which brings forgiveness as it is applied to our lives when we proclaim Him our Lord, and receive salvation, is like a redacted document.  For those who have never seen a redacted document, there are whole sections of the document that are blacked out, in some cases just a few words, in other cases whole paragraphs and even pages and no longer readable. When we receive His salvation His Blood wipes away all our sin, as if it never happened.  In this case the Blood of Christ, applied to the book of our life, effectively erases those  sins out of our life and returns the page, where they had been written, to white. Isaiah describes it along these lines - Isaiah 1:18 NIV:  “Come now, let us settle the matter,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool."

Another idea that made perfect sense was the idea that God can speak prophetically into our lives, and that is essentially Him telling us what we are like, later in the book of our life.  Think of your life at present, you are writing page 124, and God looks at page 247 and then whispers into your ear what you are like on page 247.   That is essentially what He does when He releases a prophetic word or promise into your life, He tells you what He sees when He reads further ahead.  

One of my favorite books is the Hobbit, and imagine if Bilbo had someone step into that story and tell him that he was going to have great courage, enough to stand face to face to a dragon, but that he received that information early on in the story.  Bilbo would have changed his own perspective of himself, and might have changed how he acted.   In the same way, God's prophetic words are meant to give us some of His perspective, and help us to change our idea of who are, and who we become.  Even better, in our lives, we can actually ask God for daily help and direction, from His vantage point in eternity! 

Where my mind starts to lose it is when I consider that God's eternal perspective allows Him to have the same view of everyone on the earth, both now and that has ever lived.  He is intimately aware of each of us, of our current situation, our futures and our pasts.  He also is aware of how our lives interact with each other, and even of the potential choices we can make in our lives, and ramifications of those choices!  As David said, "such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain!"

Finally, as I was thinking about a title for this journal/blog entry I felt like the Lord said, "I have read the book of Your life, I know everything about you. I love who you are and I love who you will become!  I love being part of your life!"  I guess I could say I am known, understood, appreciated and loved, by God! 

That is certainly enough encouragement for me today!  Thank You Lord!