I was just playing that song, The Love of God, on my keyboard. I wish I could convey to all whom I ever meet just how great is the love of God for the human race, “for God so loved the human race that He gave His Only Begotten Son” to buy us back from Satan’s enslavement. He is not willing that ANY human being should perish and lose out on eternal life. He’s got a plan, and what a marvelous, carefully thought out plan it is. Abraham understood this plan. So did Moses – that is why Moses could so easily tell the Israeli armies to spare neither infant nor suckling when destroying the pagan cities that had spread across Canaan. No human being was to be spared. Because God had a plan – a plan Moses, the meekest man who had ever lived up to that point, a plan he understood. He knew that God planned a resurrection for all and would bring them back to life in a far better world, a world where Satan could deceive them no more. Living in poverty and squalor, a life of misery and pain, disease and premature death, these beloved creatures of the Most High God had their lives taken swiftly and, yes, mercifully. Because God had a plan. And Moses understood that plan. He knew that someday every last one of them will hear the same words Lazarus of old heard, “Come forth!” And they will arise from the dust and be given a long, long lifespan in God’s utopian kingdom and THEN offered the gift of God’s Holy Spirit and with it eternal life, immortality, life unending.
Moses is credited with writing one Psalm and one Psalm only – the 90th Psalm. In that Psalm Moses wrote: “You turn man to destruction, and say, ‘Return, ye children of men.'” (verse 3). Using the Israelite armies, God annihilated tens of thousands of pagan peoples, but Moses understood God’s plan was to bring them back to life again in a far different world than that which they had known. Continuing with this Psalm of Moses, we read: “For a thousand years in Your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.” (verse 4). Since, in death, there is no knowledge of passing time, no day and night, seasons and years, these pagan nations instantly die and instantly return to life regardless of how the living observe and reckon time! Continuing with verses 5 and 6, “Thou carry them away as with a flood; they are as asleep. In the morning they are like grass which grows up. In the morning it flourishes, and grows up; in the evening it is cut down, and withers.” Their time on earth is short and soon ended. But that is not the end of the story. They will someday come forth in a great resurrection, returning to physical life and given the opportunity to THEN join the great eternal family of God.
If preachers would just read the Hebrew prophets, believing what they read, they would know why scripture affirms God IS love! And they, too, would see what Moses saw and would glorify God for His great goodness, His fairness, and His awesome plan of the ages
Christ’s Faithful Servant (Galatians 1:10-12),
Donald Wiley