Daily Devotionals

Devotional: March 24th

For Reading and Meditation:
     Isaiah 42:10-17

We are ready now to close in on our subject and contemplate as far as we are able the nature and character of the God we worship. Most of what we know about God is from His self-revelation in the Scriptures. We know something about Him as we look out through the lattice of nature, but because the world of nature has been affected by the Fall we cannot expect to find a clear revelation of Him there. Scripture, however, is different. The Bible (I believe) has been supernaturally protected from the effects and influences of sin, and in its pages we have a clear revelation of who God is and what He is like. This is why all human ideas about God, His will and His work, both traditional and contemporary, must be ruthlessly brought in line with what Scripture says. Those who think they can get a clear picture of God apart from Scripture are misguided and deceived. A young Christian once said to me: "I don't need to read the Bible to know God; I simply sit and meditate on Him and He reveals Himself to me." He thought he could know God in this way but he was mistaken. When we try to know God or understand Him through the medium of our own conceptions, then our conceptions are the medium. The Bible is God's revelation of Himself, and unless our thoughts are guided and constantly corrected by God's thoughts we will soon go off at tangents. We need to remember that idolatry - which really is forming unbiblical notions of God and thus worshipping unrealities - is the sin that is most frequently denounced in Scripture.

O God, help me understand more than ever that it is the entrance of Your Word that gives light, and the neglecting of Your Word that gives darkness. May I take Your light as my light, and thus walk through life with a sure and steady tread. Amen.

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