April 2025 – Page 2 – Praying Pint

56.d. Deuteronomy 32:10

Deuteronomy 32:10 [God] found him in a desert land, and in the howling waste of a wilderness; He encircled him, He cared for him, He guarded him as the pupil of His eye.

Living far from God isn’t all pain, and it isn’t all pleasure. But one of the most confusing things about wandering away from God is how long we can stay there without severe consequences. Ecclesiastes 8:11 says, “Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed quickly, therefore the hearts of the sons of men among them are given fully to do evil.” When God doesn’t zap us the moment we step out of line, we think He doesn’t care about sin.

One reason God may not judge sin immediately is His patience. In 2 Peter 3:9, the apostle explained why the Lord has delayed His second coming. Peter said, “The Lord . . . is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.” God doesn’t have a short fuse like we do–He doesn’t blow a gasket when somebody cuts Him off in traffic. But just because God is patient doesn’t mean His judgment isn’t coming. If you’re living apart from God and He hasn’t judged you yet, He may be giving you one final chance to repent. (Jeffress)

____________________________________________

Repent (becoming aware of and turning away from that which does not honor and glorify God in obedience to His Word) – It is a word that we don’t often think about, yet it is the very thing we need to be ready to do. What is it that brings us to repentance? The Holy Spirit exposes our hearts and minds to the Holiness of God and our sinfulness. It is in this light that Jesus Christ’s sacrifice, redemption, and salvation are freely offered and faith, repentance, obedience, reliance, and trust change the heart and mind of a person. They are born again, made new, and have eternal life.

There will always be areas of our lives that are hidden from us. The Holy Spirit through the Word of God will bring these hidden areas to view. When this occurs we can disregard or confess and repent of it. The key is the Word of God must be in our lives and we must desire and seek the Holy Spirit’s leading.

Do not neglect God’s Word or disregard the Holy Spirit’s instruction, conviction, and leading.

56.c. Jos 4:9-24

Jos 4:9-24 And Joshua set up twelve stones in the midst of the Jordan, in the place where the feet of the priests bearing the ark of the covenant had stood; and they are there to this day. For the priests bearing the ark stood in the midst of the Jordan until everything was finished that the LORD commanded Joshua to tell the people, according to all that Moses had commanded Joshua. The people passed over in haste. And when all the people had finished passing over, the ark of the LORD and the priests passed over before the people. The sons of Reuben and the sons of Gad and the half-tribe of Manasseh passed over armed before the people of Israel, as Moses had told them. About 40,000 ready for war passed over before the LORD for battle, to the plains of Jericho. On that day the LORD exalted Joshua in the sight of all Israel, and they stood in awe of him just as they had stood in awe of Moses, all the days of his life. And the LORD said to Joshua, “Command the priests bearing the ark of the testimony to come up out of the Jordan.” So Joshua commanded the priests, “Come up out of the Jordan.” And when the priests bearing the ark of the covenant of the LORD came up from the midst of the Jordan, and the soles of the priests’ feet were lifted up on dry ground, the waters of the Jordan returned to their place and overflowed all its banks, as before. The people came up out of the Jordan on the tenth day of the first month, and they encamped at Gilgal on the east border of Jericho. And those twelve stones, which they took out of the Jordan, Joshua set up at Gilgal. And he said to the people of Israel, “When your children ask their fathers in times to come, ‘What do these stones mean?’ then you shall let your children know, ‘Israel passed over this Jordan on dry ground.’ For the LORD your God dried up the waters of the Jordan for you until you passed over, as the LORD your God did to the Red Sea, which he dried up for us until we passed over, so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the LORD is mighty, that you may fear the LORD your God forever.”

When all were over, then came the twelve and Joshua, who would spend some time in gathering the stones and rearing the memorial in the river-bed. Through all the stir the ark was still. Over all the march it watched. So long as one Israelite was in the channel it remained, a silent presence, to ensure his safety. It let their rate of speed determine the length of its standing there. It waited for the slowest foot and the weariest laggard. God makes His ‘very present help’ of the same length as our necessities, and lets us beat the time to which He conforms. Not till the last loiterer has struggled to the farther shore does He cease by His presence to keep His people safe on the strange road which by His presence He has opened for them.

The form of the miracle was a condescension to weak faith, to which help was ministered by giving sense something to grasp. It was easier to believe that the torrent would not rush down on them when they could look at the priests standing there motionless, with the visible symbol of God’s presence on their shoulders. The ark was no more the cause of the miracle than were its carriers; but, just as Jesus helped one blind man by laying moistened earth on his eyes, and another by sending him to Siloam to wash, so God did here. Children learn best when they have something to look at. Sight is sometimes the servant of faith.

The 12 stones preached at once the duty of remembering, and the danger of forgetting, the past mercies of God. When they were reared, they would seem needless; but the deepest impressions get filled up by degrees, as the river of time deposits its sands on them. We do not forget pain so quickly as joy, and most men have a longer and keener remembrance of their injurers than of their benefactors, human or divine. The stones were set up because Israel remembered, but also lest Israel should forget. We often think of the Jews as monsters of ingratitude; but we should more truly learn the lesson of their history, if we regarded them as fair, average men, and asked ourselves whether our recollection of God’s goodness to us is much more vivid than theirs. Unless we make distinct and frequent efforts to recall, we shall certainly forget ‘all His benefits.’ The cultivation of thankful remembrance is a very large part of practical religion; and it is not by accident that the Psalmist puts it in the middle, between hope and obedience, when he says ‘that they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments’

The dullest would understand what had wrought the miracle when they saw the immediate consequence of the ark’s leaving its place. Cause and effect seldom come thus close together in God’s dealings; but sometimes He lets us see them as near each other as the lightning and the thunder, that we may learn to trace them in faith, when centuries part them. How the people would gaze as the hurrying stream covered up their path, and would look across to the further shore, almost doubting if they had really stood there that morning! They were indeed ‘Hebrews’-men from the other side-now, and would set themselves to the dangerous task before them with courage. ‘Well begun is half done’; and God would not divide the river for them to thrust them into a tiger’s den, where they would be torn to pieces. Retreat was impossible now. A new page in their history was turned. The desert was as unreachable as Egypt, The passage of the Jordan rounded off the epoch which the passage of the Bed Sea introduced, and began a new era. (MacLaren)

56.b. Hebrews 13:13

Heb 13:13 Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured.

I confine myself here to the general ideas suggested – that the very living heart of the gospel is an altar and a sacrifice. That idea saturates the whole New Testament, from the page where John the forerunner’s proclamation is, ‘Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world,’ to the last triumphant vision in which the Apocalyptic seer ‘beheld a Lamb as it had been slain’; the eternal Co-Regnant of the universe, and the mediation through whom the whole surrounding Church for ever worships the Father. The days are past, as it seems to me, when any man can reasonably contend that the New Testament does not teach – in every page of it, I was going to say – this truth of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ

I will just suggest that the relation between the ancient system of revelation, with its sacrifice, altar, priest, temple, and the new system of Christianity is far more profoundly, and, I believe, far more philosophically, set forth in this Epistle to the Hebrews, as being the relation between shadow and substance, between prophecy and fulfilment, than when the old is contemptuously brushed aside as ‘Hebrew old clothes,’ with which the true Christianity has no concern.

And what lies in this great thought? I am not going to attempt a theory of the Atonement. I do not believe that any such thing is completely possible for us. But this, at least, I recognise as being fundamental and essential to the thought of my text; ‘we have an altar,’ that Christ in His representative relation, in His true affinity to every man upon earth, has in His life or death taken upon Himself the consequences of human transgression, not merely by sympathy, nor only by reason of the uniqueness-of His representative relation, but by willing submission to that awful separation from the Father, of which the cry out of the thick darkness of the Cross, ‘Why hast Thou forsaken Me?’ is the unfathomable witness. Thus, bearing our sin, He bears it away, and ‘we have an altar.’

From this altar, says the writer, the adherents of the ancient system have no right to partake. That implies that those who have left the ancient system have the right to partake, and do partake. Now the writer is drawing a contrast, which he proceeds to elaborate, between the great sacrifice on the Day of Atonement and the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. The former was not, as many other sacrifices were, partaken of by priests and worshippers, but simply the blood was brought within the holy place, and the whole of the rest of the sacrifice consumed in a waste spot without the camp. And this contrast is in the writer’s mind. We have a sacrifice on which we feast.

That is to say, the Christ who died for my sins is not only my means of reconciliation with God, but His sacrifice and death are the sustenance of my spiritual life. We live upon the Christ that died for us. That this is no mere metaphor, but goes penetratingly and deep down to the very basis of the spiritual life, is attested sufficiently by many a word of Scripture There is one Christ that can thus hallow and make acceptable our living and our dying, and that is the Christ that has died for us, and lives that in Him we may be priests to God. There is only one Christianity that will do for us what we will need, and that is the Christianity whose centre is an altar, on which the Son of God, our Passover, is slain for us. (MacLaren)

56.a. Hebrews 13:13

Heb 13:13  Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured.

Luke 6:22    “Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil, on account of the Son of Man!

Acts 5:41    Then they left the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer dishonor for the name.

1 Corinthians 4:10-13    We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute.  To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless,  and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure;  when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things.

2 Corinthians 12:10   For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

1 Peter 4:4     With respect to this they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you;

1 Peter 4:14-16    If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.  But let none of you suffer as a murderer or a thief or an evildoer or as a meddler.  Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in that name.

56. Hebrews 13:13

Heb 13:13  Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured.

Hebrews 11:26   He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward.

Hebrews 12:3    Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.

Matthew 5:11    “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Matthew 16:24   Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

Matthew 27:39-44     And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads  and saying, “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”  So also the chief priests, with the scribes and elders, mocked him, saying,  “He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him.  He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him. For he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’”  And the robbers who were crucified with him also reviled him in the same way.

55.z. Hebrews 13:12

Heb 13:12  So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood.

1 John 5:6-8     This is he who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ; not by the water only but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth.  For there are three that testify:  the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree.

1 Corinthians 6:11    And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

Leviticus 24:23     So Moses spoke to the people of Israel, and they brought out of the camp the one who had cursed and stoned him with stones. Thus the people of Israel did as the LORD commanded Moses.

Numbers 15:36   And all the congregation brought him outside the camp and stoned him to death with stones, as the LORD commanded Moses.

Jos 7:24-25  And Joshua and all Israel with him took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver and the cloak and the bar of gold, and his sons and daughters and his oxen and donkeys and sheep and his tent and all that he had. And they brought them up to the Valley of Achor.  And Joshua said, “Why did you bring trouble on us? The LORD brings trouble on you today.” And all Israel stoned him with stones. They burned them with fire and stoned them with stones.

Mark 15:20-24    And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him. And they led him out to crucify him.  And they compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to carry his cross.  And they brought him to the place called Golgotha (which means Place of a Skull).  And they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it.  And they crucified him and divided his garments among them, casting lots for them, to decide what each should take.

John 19:17-18    and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called The Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them.

Acts 7:58   Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him. And the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul.

55.y. Hebrews 13:12

Heb 13:12  So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood.

Hebrews 2:11    For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers,

Hebrews 9:13-14    For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh,  how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

Hebrews 9:18-19    Therefore not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood.  For when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people,

Hebrews 10:29     How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?

John 17:19     And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.

John 19:34    But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.

55.x. Hebrews 13:11

Heb 13:11  For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy places by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp.

Leviticus 6:30     But no sin offering shall be eaten from which any blood is brought into the tent of meeting to make atonement in the Holy Place; it shall be burned up with fire.

Leviticus 9:9     And the sons of Aaron presented the blood to him, and he dipped his finger in the blood and put it on the horns of the altar and poured out the blood at the base of the altar.

Leviticus 9:11    The flesh and the skin he burned up with fire outside the camp.

Leviticus 16:14-19     And he shall take some of the blood of the bull and sprinkle it with his finger on the front of the mercy seat on the east side, and in front of the mercy seat he shall sprinkle some of the blood with his finger seven times.  “Then he shall kill the goat of the sin offering that is for the people and bring its blood inside the veil and do with its blood as he did with the blood of the bull, sprinkling it over the mercy seat and in front of the mercy seat.  Thus he shall make atonement for the Holy Place, because of the uncleannesses of the people of Israel and because of their transgressions, all their sins. And so he shall do for the tent of meeting, which dwells with them in the midst of their uncleannesses.  No one may be in the tent of meeting from the time he enters to make atonement in the Holy Place until he comes out and has made atonement for himself and for his house and for all the assembly of Israel.  Then he shall go out to the altar that is before the LORD and make atonement for it, and shall take some of the blood of the bull and some of the blood of the goat, and put it on the horns of the altar all around.  And he shall sprinkle some of the blood on it with his finger seven times, and cleanse it and consecrate it from the uncleannesses of the people of Israel.

Numbers 19:3     And you shall give it to Eleazar the priest, and it shall be taken outside the camp and slaughtered before him.

55.w. Hebrews 13:11

Heb 13:11  For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy places by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp.

Exodus 29:14   But the flesh of the bull and its skin and its dung you shall burn with fire outside the camp; it is a sin offering.

Leviticus 4:5-7     And the anointed priest shall take some of the blood of the bull and bring it into the tent of meeting,  and the priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle part of the blood seven times before the LORD in front of the veil of the sanctuary.  And the priest shall put some of the blood on the horns of the altar of fragrant incense before the LORD that is in the tent of meeting, and all the rest of the blood of the bull he shall pour out at the base of the altar of burnt offering that is at the entrance of the tent of meeting.

Leviticus 4:11-12    But the skin of the bull and all its flesh, with its head, its legs, its entrails, and its dung—  all the rest of the bull—he shall carry outside the camp to a clean place, to the ash heap, and shall burn it up on a fire of wood. On the ash heap it shall be burned up.

Leviticus 4:16-21    Then the anointed priest shall bring some of the blood of the bull into the tent of meeting,  and the priest shall dip his finger in the blood and sprinkle it seven times before the LORD in front of the veil.  And he shall put some of the blood on the horns of the altar that is in the tent of meeting before the LORD, and the rest of the blood he shall pour out at the base of the altar of burnt offering that is at the entrance of the tent of meeting.  And all its fat he shall take from it and burn on the altar.  Thus shall he do with the bull. As he did with the bull of the sin offering, so shall he do with this. And the priest shall make atonement for them, and they shall be forgiven. And he shall carry the bull outside the camp and burn it up as he burned the first bull; it is the sin offering for the assembly.

55.w. Hebrews 13:10

Heb 13:10  We have an altar from which those who serve the tent have no right to eat.

1 Corinthians 9:13   Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get their food from the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in the sacrificial offerings?

Numbers 3:7-8   They shall keep guard over him and over the whole congregation before the tent of meeting, as they minister at the tabernacle.  They shall guard all the furnishings of the tent of meeting, and keep guard over the people of Israel as they minister at the tabernacle.

Numbers 7:5    “Accept these from them, that they may be used in the service of the tent of meeting, and give them to the Levites, to each man according to his service.”

1 Corinthians 5:7-8     Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.  Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.