In my quest to “proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness and
into his marvelous light,” it is settling into my heart to notice how these
excellencies are described in terms of God accomplishing great and wonderful things
he had purposed to do.[1]
As I begin my day considering these things
afresh, I now notice the vastness of God’s revelation about his excellencies. It
is like suddenly noticing a color of thread in a tapestry that has mesmerized
me for a long time, and yet that strand had never stood out so clearly as it
does today.
And now that this colorful thread stands
out, I suddenly see that it is woven through the whole picture from beginning to
end. I can’t help feeling excitement and anticipation to follow it through every
story and event of history’s tapestry in order to enjoy the reverence and awe
that is inescapable in love-relationship with the divine Father.
This focus on the excellencies of God makes
so much sense when we consider that he has promised so many things about the future.
How would we know to trust him? By proclaiming all the excellencies already
fulfilled in real life.
For example, the fact that God has already
called me out of darkness and into his marvelous light is a delightful reality
when considering that the darkness of our world increases every day. God has
promised such a glorious and wonderful home for me that even the sun will no
longer be required because God himself will be our light and Jesus Christ will
be the lamp that radiates the glory of the Father to us for all of eternity
(yes, that is in God’s Book).[2]
One of the golden threads of excellencies
that stood out very strongly to me today was the consideration of how God handled
Satan’s success at bringing sin and death into the world.[3]
If excellencies are supremely wonderful moral qualities that are able to
accomplish the purposes of the one who is most excellent, what would God do now
that Satan had destroyed the God-likeness of man?
What I mean is that, if God had determined
to make a creature in his own image and likeness, and Satan had just succeeded
at turning that creature into a sinful being, how is God seen as excellent and
worthy of praise?[4] If
the serpent had just succeeded and God’s work was thwarted, don’t we have an
insurmountable barrier to the praise of God’s excellencies?
Once again, we have this remarkable pattern
in God’s Book where he speaks in advance to tell us what he is going to do so
there is no doubt what his purpose really is, and then he leads us through history
in a detailed progression of his work to fulfill his purpose so we would know
that he always does what he says.
So, when we get to this place of
proclaiming the excellencies of the one who brought people like me out of
darkness and into his marvelous light, we have the most amazing of things. God
has obviously done something to fulfill what he set out to do in the creation
of man even though the red dragon had obviously done something to destroy God’s
work.[5]
What God said he would do to defeat the
devil’s work and gain the upper hand was first described like this:
“I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and
between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and
you shall bruise his heel.”[6]
When God says, “I will,” he means just that. God already had a plan that would
bring about Satan’s defeat through the offspring of the women the serpent had
just deceived. Satan would lose his authority to bring death to every sinner,
and this loss of authority would come through the suffering of the Son of God
on our behalf. It was the one thing that would work, and God already had this
victory up his sleeve, so to speak, before he began creation.
The point in this is simple: God would not
set out to do something that could be thwarted even by the most evil of angels accomplishing
the most evil of deeds. Father set out to have a creature in his own image and
likeness, and so it would be.
What does that have to do with an average
kind of guy in an ever-darkening world?
Simply this: that I have already
experienced the fulfillment of God’s plan to have a creature in his own image and
likeness because I have been justified by grace through faith and now stand
before my heavenly Father in the gift of righteousness that he himself has
given me in his Son.[7]
I have already been delivered out of the domain of darkness and transferred
into the kingdom of Jesus Christ, the beloved Son of God.[8]
What this tells me is that “he who began a good work in you will bring
it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”[9]
God has already proven his excellencies by
making people like me into “a chosen
race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that
you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into
his marvelous light.”[10]
We now trust him completely to finish what he has started.
When God’s Book declares that, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to
destroy the works of the devil”,[11]
it highlights what God promised the serpent. Jesus Christ is the offspring of
the woman who has crushed the serpent’s authority through his suffering and
death and destroyed the works of the devil in every person who receives Jesus’
gift of grace.[12]
Now that the devil’s work is destroyed in us
who believe, God is again proving his excellencies by transforming us into the
same image as his Son “from one degree of
glory to another,”[13]
leading us to that day when Jesus appears and, “we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.”[14]
What do we do while waiting for that day?
On one side, “everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.”[15]
And, on the other side, we keep proclaiming the excellencies of our heavenly
Father who called us out of darkness and into his marvelous light until the day
we are taken home to live in the light of the divine presence forever and ever.
Amen!
© 2019 Monte Vigh ~
Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise
noted, Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible,
English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway
Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.)
[1] I Peter 2:9. “Excellencies” refers to both moral excellence and the
accomplishment of what this moral excellence desires to do.
[2] Revelation 21:23. This, of course, makes perfect sense since, “God
is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (I John 1:5).
[3] You can read about this in Genesis 3.
[4] Philippians 4:8
[5] See John 10:10 for a contrast between Satan’s work and Jesus’
success.
[6] Genesis 3:15
[7] The whole book of Romans explains this in the most excellent of detail!
[8] Colossians 1:13-14
[9] Philippians 1:6
[10] I Peter 2:9
[11] I John 3:8
[12] Knowing God’s promise that the offspring of the woman would destroy
the devil’s work makes this Scripture all the more glaring in its brilliance: “But when the fullness of time had come, God
sent forth his Son, born of woman,
born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might
receive adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:4-5).
[13] II Corinthians 3:18
[14] I John 3:2
[15] I John 3:3
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