I recently found myself challenged by a little phrase from a book “The Antiquities of the Jews,” written by a certain Josephus, apparently around the same time as when most of the New Testament books were written.
Josephus makes this comment regarding Moses’s approach to legislation:
“The reader is therefore to know, that Moses deemed it exceeding necessary, that he who would conduct his own life well, and give laws to others, in the first place should consider the Divine nature; and, upon the contemplation of God's operations, should thereby imitate the best of all patterns, so far as it is possible for human nature to do, and to endeavor to follow after it.”
The concept of imitating God is not a new one to us. Paul calls us to this in the book of Corinthians:
1Co 11:1 Imitate me, then, just as I imitate Christ.
However, what did strike me here, was the concept of first contemplating, and then imitating. The contemplation part is often where we are negligent and consequently the imitation tends to be rather sub-standard. When beginning to contemplate this, I realized that I had always had a bit of a presupposition that if God were to be in my shoes, facing any of my troubles, He would simply speak, and the trouble would disappear. However, as I really started contemplating God’s actions throughout the Word, I realized that He very often did not act like that. In fact, this scripture gives us a bit of a glimpse of how God seems to prefer to act:
Psalms 107:5 Their souls became feeble for need of food and drink.
6 Then they sent up their cry to the Lord in their sorrow, and he gave them salvation out of all their troubles;
7 Guiding them in the right way, so that they might come into the town of their resting-place.
When God gave them salvation, it was not simply through performing a miracle. Sometimes the breaks that verses create in scripture, can cause us to lose track of the unity of thought. Remember that they had no punctuation and no verses in the original scriptures. So I would like to link verse 6 and 7 like this:
“… and he gave them salvation out of all their troubles, guiding them in the right way, so that they might come to the town of their resting place.”
He guided them from the place where they were, performing miracles along the way, but still expecting of them to walk and obey. It was not just the salvation, but the process of guiding together with His supernatural activity, which enabled them to eventually reach the town of their resting place, and in the process, becoming the people that He wanted them to be. In the same way, when we are in a difficult situation, and we start exercising faith that God should get us out of there, we can expect to receive guidance, and when obeying, we will find ourselves moving away from where we are, toward our resting place. In this process, He is very often changing us more than what He is changing our environment. We often find our resting place not in the external changes in our environments, but in the internal changes that He brings about in our hearts.
Whilst thinking about these two concepts together, I realized that this is only one example of a similar pattern that is repeated over and over in the Word. God instructs, expects obedience, and then assists us along the way. There are times when He simply intervenes and does the entire job – but the general pattern is that He uses the problems and difficulties lying before us, to teach us some life skills – but more importantly, to create an opportunity for Him and me to work together.
So I’ve started thinking about this in the context of work. If God were running a restaurant, what would He do? And then I realized, He would give instruction. He would then assist people in carrying out those instructions, encouraging them along the way. How many times do we read scriptures like “be bold” and “do not be discouraged” and “fear not” etc? These are all words of encouragement that God speaks liberally as we try to fight the battle that lies before us. The same way that God is working in my life, is likely to be the way He would want to be working through Me in the lives of others.
May we all be encouraged to take a minute or two every now and again throughout the day, and contemplate, thinking really deeply and prayerfully, asking ourselves: “What would God do here?”
You might be surprised at the answers you start discovering within your heart.
Psalms 144:1 A Psalm. Of David. Praise be to the God of my strength, teaching my hands the use of the sword, and my fingers the art of fighting
Love
Ashton
