It is written…

Since we have been in South Africa, I have done my writing at my father’s beautiful imbuia desk which I inherited some years ago.

As a child, there was always a mystique about it. It was a sacrosanct space, dedicated to the disciplines of sermonizing and pastoring; only he knew what was in the drawers, only he organized the objects on top and memory’s eye still sees his Sheaffer fountain pen lying there, ready for action because inspiration, even from the Holy Spirit, needs to be captured before it flies away!

I confess to an ongoing love affair with fountain pens. My collection is small, but each pen is precious. Here is a Mont Blanc Meisterstuck, a gift to Best Beloved from Reinhard Bonnke about 35 years ago, but he only likes to write with a roller ball, so it has been a cherished pen of mine for a long time now and I like to keep it nearby so that nothing is lost to the quirky tricks of aging memory. 😊

When I look into the Word I see that God loves to write as well, but his ‘pen’ of choice is his own finger. Can you sense the grace behind the divine finger inscribing the law for his chosen people on those tablets of stone? In his love, he first rescued them from slavery, then offered them a way to live that would set them apart as his, but their rebellion was greater than their need of him and they brought judgment on themselves. Praise God for the New Covenant grace that promised the day would come when he would once again write his law but this time it would be into our very human hearts.

How about the terror that must have roared through Belshazzar’s mind when, after his big show-off party using the captured sacred artifacts from Israel’s temple, a disembodied hand appeared, writing his downfall on his own wall? I gratefully remember the occasion when the Spirit of God showed me that spiritually I was a lightweight despite my upbringing. Then – oh what grace! –  the weight of that precious broken body on the cross was placed opposite me on the scales of my life and balance was restored – forever!

It is true that Jesus never wrote a book, yet, as we choose every day to live as disciples of  the Living Word himself, “we clearly are epistles of Christ, …, written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart.”

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