Sun.’s Devo - A Vessel For God to Work Through

Read: Exodus 5:22-7:24; Matthew 18:23-19:12; Psalm 23:1-6; Proverbs 5:22-23
I love Moses’ honesty with the Lord. He is mad because he did exactly what God told him and didn’t get the result he was expecting. When you obey the Lord, you do expect the outcome to be favorable, but God’s ways are not our ways. Every person we ask God to heal, might not get healed, and every person we ask God to save, might not get saved. But God is not asking us to do his part; he is asking us to do ours.
God didn’t get mad at Moses for his honesty, he let Moses in on the bigger plan. He explained how he revealed himself to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty, but not as Jehovah. Jehovah means Eternal, self-Existent. He covenanted with them to give them the land of Canaan and it was now time to break the bondage of Egypt and go to their land. He made it very clear that He was going to do this. All Moses had to do was what he told him to do; God would do the rest.
Moses left his meeting with God reassured until he met with the Israelites who couldn’t hear because they couldn’t get past their discouragement and their cruel bondage. Discouragement and abuse leaves you weak and hopeless. It is hard to rise out of it, but with the Lord nothing is impossible.
Without a following, God told Moses and Aaron to go the Pharaoh to tell him to let the children of Israel go. God told him again that He was going to do it. God told him that He was going to lead them out and that He was going to harden Pharaoh’s heart, and that he was going to bring down judgments on Egypt. The only thing Moses had to do was what God told him to do. Sounds easy, but it wasn’t.
Aaron did his first miracle with the rod and the Egyptians were ready with their sorceries. Aaron’s rod swallowed up the Egyptians rods which was a picture of everything God was going to do to the Egyptians. They were about to be swallowed up by the Lord. Aaron finally stretched his rod out over the Nile and it turned to blood. I think it is amusing that Egypt’s sorcerers could do the same, but no one could turn that blood back to water. God let them wallow in this plague for a while.
In Matthew, Jesus gives us an illustration of mercy and forgiveness. The man who owed the most was forgiven but he couldn’t forgive one who owed him a little. God is the one who forgives us of all our sin, so we must forgive the things done against us by others. If we don’t, we will spend eternity in torture.
The Pharisees asked Jesus about divorce. He explained the spiritual side of union. His plan was that they marry and become one and no one would be able to split them apart. But because of the hardness of man’s heart, God gave Moses a law allowing people to divorce. They must have a written contract of divorce. If they didn’t have that then when they remarried they were committing adultery because they were still married to the first wife. We condemn people wrongly for divorcing. There are always two sides to a divorce. God divorced his people Israel and didn’t lose his position or power. We should give divorced people the same honor. Jesus explained that people should not divorce unless one of them have broken their original contract. We have all divorced the law to marry grace. Romans 7 talks about that. The way of the kingdom is not judgment but love and forgiveness.
Lord, help us to walk in love and forgiveness. May we be the vessel for you to move through.