Old Testament reading: Ezra 6-7
“Let the foundations of it be firmly laid” (Ezra 6:3). No matter what we might build, be it a house, a friendship, a marriage, a nation, etc., a firm foundation is key. The most magnificent of structures is doomed to fail without a proper foundation undergirding it. The only enduring foundation is God’s word. Chapter 7 contains Artaxerxes’ letter to Ezra. In both texts is seen the providence of God toward his people as exercised through the ruling kingdom of the earth. At the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin, affirming his faith “that God Governs in the affairs of men,” quoted 127:1, “Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.” The most well known passage of this reading is Ezra 7:10, “For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the law of the Lord and to do it, and to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel.” One is not fit to teach that which he neither knows nor lives.
New Testament reading: Revelation 4-7
“This is the song that never ends. Yes it goes on and on my friend…” So sang the characters at the end of Lamb Chop’s Play-Along some years ago. When I read Revelation 4, I think of another song that will never end, as the four living creatures “do not rest day or night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, Who was and is and is to come” (v 8). And whenever the four living creatures do this (which is all the time), “the twenty four elders fall down before Him who sites on the throne and worship Him who lives forever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, “You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, for You created all things, and by Your will they exist and were created” (vv 10-11). Then in chapter 5 we see the twenty four elders singing a new song declaring the praise of the Lamb “who redeemed us to God by His blood out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation. And made us kings and priests to our God, and we shall reign on the earth” (5:9-10). Of course, we know Revelation 4:9-11 is not to be understood literally as the four living creatures and elders are seen doing and saying other things elsewhere in the book (cf 5:9-10, 7:9-17). The emphasis here is God’s worthiness to be praised at all times, for all time.
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