GOD’S WORD FOR OCTOBER 31 ~ ~ Ecclesiastes 3:11 ~ ~ “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.”
From the book, We Shall See God – and the chapter, Obtaining Promises, part two—Randy Alcorn
ALCORN:
What God made us to desire, and therefore what we DO desire (if we’re saved) if only we recognize it, is exactly what He promises to those who follow Jesus Christ: a resurrected life in a resurrected body, with the resurrected Christ on a resurrected earth. Desiring something doesn’t make it true or false. But because the God who put desires in us determined to correspond them to His plans, they do in fact find their fulfillment in the very things God has promised us.
Paul doesn’t just say that if there’s no heaven, the Christian life is futile. He says that if there’s not resurrection of the dead, the hope of Christianity is an illusion, and we’re to be pitied for placing our faith in Christ (1Corinthians 15:17-19).
(In other words) Ultimately, there is no heaven for human spirits unless heaven is also for human bodies.
Our deep longing for a resurrected life is not based on wishful thinking. Rather, it is a longing placed in our hearts by God Himself, precisely because He intends for us to be raised to new life on the new earth. It is God who “set eternity in the human heart.” (Ecclesiastes 3:11) it is God who designed us to live on earth and to desire not only spiritual fulfillment but also the earthly life. And it is our bodily resurrection that will allow us to return to an earthly life – this time freed from sin and the curse. “If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here!” (2 cor 5:17) That’s a promise!!!
If we are tempted to doubt such a promise, Spurgeon asks a question as pertinent to us as it was to his audience in 1862: “how dare you doubt it? Where did you get your arrogance from? How can you speak so exceeding proudly as thus to think of God and say of Him, that He has promised what He cannot or will not perform?” (how can you think that you are worthy to judge Almighty God?))
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James 4:16-17 ~ ~ But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.
For it is God which works in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.
“Without faith it is impossible to please God.”
Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ:
Proverbs 3:5-7
Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.
In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.
Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the Lord, and depart from evil.
A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment.
O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that you should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?