God Forgives and Loves People

Our Love for God

God Commands Our Love, Respect, and Obedience:
Love and Worship God

Numbers 14:13-23 The Message

13-16 But Moses said to God, “The Egyptians are going to hear about this! You delivered this people from Egypt with a great show of strength, and now this? The Egyptians will tell everyone. They’ve already heard that you are God, that you are on the side of this people, that you are present among them, that they see you with their own eyes in your Cloud that hovers over them, in the Pillar of Cloud that leads them by day and the Pillar of Fire at night. If you kill this entire people in one stroke, all the nations that have heard what has been going on will say, ‘Since God couldn't get these people into the land which he had promised to give them, he slaughtered them out in the wilderness.’
17 “Now, please, let the power of the Master expand, enlarge itself greatly, along the lines you have laid out earlier when you said,
18 God, slow to get angry and huge in loyal love,
        forgiving iniquity and rebellion and sin;
    Still, never just whitewashing sin.
        But extending the fallout of parents’ sins to
children into the third,
        even the fourth generation.
19 “Please forgive the wrongdoing of this people out of the extravagance of your loyal love just as all along, from the time they left Egypt, you have been forgiving this people.”
20-23 God said, “I forgive them, honoring your words. But as I live and as the Glory of God fills the whole Earth—not a single person of those who saw my Glory, saw the miracle signs I did in Egypt and the wilderness, and who have tested me over and over and over again, turning a deaf ear to me—not one of them will set eyes on the land I so solemnly promised to their ancestors. No one who has treated me with such repeated contempt will see it.

For Reflection

People in contempt of God cannot see God's hand at work in God's creation.  They cannot comprehend the power of forgiveness and love. They are blind to their inability to accomplish resolutions by themselves and are bound to the wrong-headed idea of self-determination.

But, those who revere God see things differently.  They can look beyond the temporal circumstance and into the whole network of God's creation to find the goodness and grace of the universe and their part in it.

Pray

Pray about all things so that you can develop your relationship with the Living God.  Pray so that you can invite the Holy Spirit into your soul.  Pray soo that you can strive to be equivalent in form to Christ.  Pray so that you can rest in the Lord.

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