Where Are They Now? a Sequel – Report Card
the heart of Biblical Greats
October 8th, 2021
Romans 8:3-4, ‘God went for the jugular when He sent His own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In His Son, Jesus, He personally took on the human condition, entered into the disorderly mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that. The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.’ (the MESSAGE)
REPORT CARD
Numbers 13:31-33, ‘But the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we.” And they gave the children of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying, “The land through which we have gone as spies is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great stature. There we saw the giants (the descendants of Anak came from the giants); and we were like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight.”’ (NKJV)
Has anything or anyone ever been so big in your imagination that you couldn’t see what was right in front of you? And the more you thought of it, the larger it grew to where eventually that was all you could envision? The fact is, we all have giants we wrestle every day. But sometimes we visualize giants that aren’t even there; not so much different than the childhood monsters that hid in closets or under beds which really never existed at all. We swore they did though, right? We envisioned them so they must exist.
Not much different than in the day of the Israelites as they wandered and hoped in the promise of the land they had been given to possess. But unfortunately, we can be given something but never step into or never accept or possess the gift we’ve been given.
Joshua and Caleb saw something far different than the other ten men in their team sent out to scope the land. They utilized the spiritual eyes God made available for them to see through but of course their teammates saw through a different set of lenses; the lenses that would cause the people’s short-sightedness, and in essence, lead them on a lost trek through a forgotten wilderness for several generations. For every bad report, there is also a good report.
It is also impossible to get someone to see what you see, right? We all have our own interpretations, our own visuals and assumptions. It can also be difficult to change what we imagine. It is too often etched in our memories. The bad report that returned from the ten men was about the giants who were devouring the land and they felt as small and dismal as grasshoppers. However, Joshua and Caleb carried truth back to their people but were unable to pass their vision onto those necessary to see through their lens. Consequently, the people would be marauders in a land that belonged to them which they would not lay claim to for lifetimes. What time is wasted sometimes as we wander, lost in another’s vision.
John 3:16-17, ‘”For here is the way God loved the world—He gave His only, unique Son as a gift. So now everyone who believes in Him will never perish but experience everlasting life. God did not send His Son into the world to judge and condemn the world, but to be its Savior and rescue it!”’ (TPT)
