In last week’s podcast, we mentioned two Mr. Gerald Weston articles, and we just realized we forgot to post links! So, here they are, the first of which might already be in your home!
We hope you’ll consider clicking through. Both make for excellent pre-Spring Holy Days reading.
We’re back after the Feast of Tabernacles and Last Great Day! We thought we’d be easy on ourselves and devote this podcast episode to chatting about experiences and lessons from our Feast. We hope you enjoy the conversation!
P.S. Just realized that we accidentally skipped Episode 29. Oops! Heh… Uh… Maybe we’ll record that next time and pretend we did it before this one. Stay tuned!
… And we’re back!
Whoever you are and wherever you’ve been, we hope you had an outstanding Feast of Tabernacles and Last Great Day this year. We hope you “caught the vision” and deepened your appreciation for the amazing plan that God will soon bring to fulfillment. The understanding of God’s Holy Days is a blessing that so very few in human history have been given, and the more we value it, the better we grasp the “big picture” of Christ’s return and the soon-coming eternal Kingdom of God.
But whoever you are, when you’re young, even the “small picture” seems enormous. Learning to drive a car is terrifying when you’ve previously only driven—and crashed—a Mario Kart. Getting married is mind-breakingly immense when the whole of your existence has been not married. Let’s be realistic here: Young adults doing their best to meaningfully visualize eternity will probably be about as successful as preschoolers trying to ponder the theory of relativity, and I say that as a young adult.
God reminds us to “seek first” His kingdom (Matthew 6:33), and He does that because, let’s face it, we’re going to forget. This might apply even more when you’re young, because as a teenager or young adult, it’s difficult to focus your life on the Kingdom of God while also… you know, managing all the really important earthly milestones young people naturally have to deal with. Because you have to finish school. You have to get a job. You’d really, really like to marry someone and have children, and then you have to make sure you don’t neglect that spouse or those children. And in the midst of all of this, you have to remember how temporary everything is—even though right now it’s legitimately important—so you have to keep talking to God. You have to keep pondering His ways and commands. You have to keep fasting, you have to keep spending time with the Bible, you have to keep examining yourself.
That really is a big picture, and it’s legitimately difficult to keep up with everything. But it’s also a tiny picture—because it’s only about you. While you’re trying really hard not to make a physical mess of your life, and doing your best not to make a spiritual mess of it either, it can be all too easy to miss the fact that you’re just one person. Yes, God cares so very deeply about you, and you should never, ever forget that—but even your eternity is just one eternity.
You know what’s bigger than an eternity? Read the title again.
According to that nifty little internet we’re all using these days, it’s estimated that around 100 billion people have lived on Earth up to this point. And hey, you’re one of them! Congratulations. That means the Kingdom of God is 0.000000001 percent about you. That’s how big a part of the picture your one eternity is.
As we’re annually reminded on the Last Great Day, the world needs God’s Kingdom. It’s about so much more than your personal salvation or mine, and it’s even about so much more than the collective saints of God being transformed in the first resurrection. It’s about rescuing everyone in the entire history of the world. It’s about redeeming not just our time, but the whole of time itself. It’s about one hundred billion eternities.
That’s a big picture. And if our first thought of God’s Kingdom is usually “Oh boy, I sure hope I make it there,” we’re forgetting 99.999999999 percent of that picture.
We should never stop striving to enter God’s Family, because that’s literally the entire point of human existence (Ecclesiastes 12:13), but when we’re trying to think of the big picture, let’s at least remind ourselves that the vast majority of that picture isn’t about us—and let’s thank God for the fact that, regardless of any one of us, His Kingdom will come, creating an unfathomably joyful universe of one hundred billion eternities.
We hope your Days of Unleavened Bread have been wonderfully flat, tasty, and spiritually profitable! This episode of the podcast has us meditating on the question of why God might have included a second high day at the end of the Days of Unleavened Bread and some (not all!) of the lessons He might want us to take from the events of that amazing Exodus event, thousands of years ago, connected to this day. We pray it’s profitable for you! (We refer briefly to the previous podcast about Passover thoughts concerning youth in the Church. That’s available here.)
Editor’s Note: My apologies! Mr. Ryan Dawson submitted this earlier during the Holy Day season—an excellent meditation prompted by Marvel Entertainment’s current flirtation with the gods of Egypt and the fact that we’re observing a time when God demonstrated His superiority over those very gods. Still, the Days of Unleavened Bread aren’t over yet! And hopefully you will find this explanation of the revealed reality behind fiction to be helpful. Enjoy the rest of your days of not-fluffy-at-all bread!
It’s that time of year when we consider the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. We think about the plagues that God poured out—and, if we remember that these plagues were real, we are thankful that we did not get to see them. Sometimes we can fall into the trap of thinking about the Exodus as a story rather than as history, but this was a real event in God’s plan that brought the world’s biggest superpower to its knees. Let’s take a look at the final plague that put fear into those who occupied the land of Canaan—the plague that made the world marvel at the one true God.
Read moreWith the Days of Unleavened Bread right around the corner, it seems a good time to bring out this short story. During the Days of Unleavened Bread many years ago when I was pastoring congregations in Missouri, I had a trip out of town for a ministerial visit that saw me leaving rather hastily and not taking anything to eat with me, though the trip would end up keeping me out until far past dinner time. So, that night I eventually visited the drive-thru of a popular fast food joint to grab some cornflour (and unleavened) “hard shell” tacos. (I won’t mention the name of the place, but it rhymed with Spock Hotel…) I used the drive-thru because I didn’t want to lose any time on the road.
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Tomorrow’s World