You are an epistle of Christ … written not with ink but by the Spirit of the Living God. II Corinthians 3:3
This may be a far-fetched illustration, but let’s give it a try. According to MSNBC, The British Medical Journal recently reported the case of a 76-year-old woman who visited her doctor complaining of stomach problems. When the scans came back, doctors were amazed to see a long object in her stomach, it was a pen! The woman remembered having put a pen in her mouth 25 years ago. She lost her balance, fell, and swallowed the pen. Her doctor at the time didn’t believe it, and the x-ray equipment of that day didn’t detect it, so nothing was ever done about it.
Now here’s the remarkable thing. When surgeons removed the pen, it still worked. Sometimes we feel we’re like being swallowed up in troubles, trials, pressures, and problems. But our God watches over us as He watched over Jonah in the belly of the whale. Trials produce testings, but from testings come testimonies. We never lose our message. We never run out of ink. Because of Christ, we never lose our ability to write the words: “Great is Thy Faithfulness!” Discovery: Experiencing God’s Word Day by Day. 2012 Feb 24 David Jeremiah.
Think about it. Most of the world around you doesn’t read the Bible. So … God gives the world a living epistle – you! Kay Arthur. As Silver Refined 1997)
And Now For the Rest of His Story while couched in our history… This time from Keith Miller
Last Sunday at our local Mennonite church, we sang the “The Love of God,” a hymn I’ve always enjoyed for its wonderful third verse, with its convoluted syntax.
Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made;
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.
By a weird coincidence, I got an email from my dad the next day, commenting on the origins of the verse. He’d learned about it from my uncle, who goes to church with Jeremy Nafziger, a writer interested in church music. Here are Jeremy’s comments (used with permission):
Frederick Lehman, the author and composer, sounds like he should be a Mennonite, but alas, he was a Nazarene minister. Early in his ministry (around 1900), he heard a preacher end his sermon with lines similar to the third verse of this hymn. The lines had been found scribbled on the wall of an insane asylum after the inmate’s death; Lehman says that “the general opinion was that this inmate had written it in moments of sanity.”
Lehman later used the words, slightly altered, years later as the third stanza of “The Love of God.”
It turns out, however, that the lines from the asylum wall came from a long poem written in Aramaic in the 11th century by a Jewish rabbi in Worms, Germany. (Note—the author was Rabbi Ben Isaac Nehorai, in a poem called “Hadamut,” written in 1050.)
And that may not even be the original—the Koran, written in Arabic four centuries earlier, contains this passage: “And were every tree that is in the earth (made into) pens and the sea (to supply it with ink), with seven more seas to increase it, the words of Allah would not come to an end; surely Allah is Mighty, Wise” (XXXI:27).
And you can go further back than that, to the Gospel of John, to find another similar passage. In the last verse of the book, we read: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”
BOTTOM LINE:
So in this one hymn, we see the story of ALL God’s children signing the covenant that “shall forevermore endure.”
Keith Miller March 31, 2012. See millerworlds.blogspot.com/2012/03/love-of-god
NEXT UP: Fear is thrown away>>>>>