| Good morning everyone, Our theme for this month: “Fully Alive” Our Bible verse for today: “On the seventh day God finished the work that He had been doing. He ceased on the seventh day from all the work that He had done.” Genesis 2:2 (JPS) (Jewish Publication Society Translation) Our thought for today: “We are fully alive when we are fulfilling our God-given purpose” Recently a friend gave me a very unique commentary on the book of Genesis. It was written by Dr. Dennis Prager and is part of his series of commentaries called “The Rational Bible”. He calls it “The Rational Bible” because he believes the Word of God to be rational. He means that it is meant by God to make sense to us. Dennis also labels his work “rational” because he believes that if his explanations of God’s Word don’t make clear sense to us, then he hasn’t done his job. The Bible itself is rational, and explanations of it should be rational too. Dr. Prager is a Jew. He is also a Bible scholar and one of the world’s foremost experts in Biblical Hebrew. His specialty is The Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament). As part of his commentary on Genesis chapter two, he offered an insight that I have missed before in my own study and which, once I understood it, made profound sense to me and helped to shed more light on how we Christians are supposed to live today. Dennis was commenting on the fact that after Genesis 2:2, God was done with creating and He then handed the creation off to mankind to do something with it: “To put it another way, creation was only the beginning. “To make” something of creation is our task as human beings. This is in fact the normative Jewish view: Human beings are “partners” with God in “making” the world. We live in the “Eighth Day,” the post-Creation world, which is ours to make of what God created in the first Six Days.” I like that, we live in the “Eighth Day” of creation. We are to take what God made and which He has entrusted to us, and do something good and meaningful with it. This is where living with purpose comes in. We’re not to simply go through our days enjoying life and living for ourselves. God has handed to us a wonderful creation filled with innumerable opportunities for us to make good things happen. He has given us life, health, skills, resources, and a world filled with other people. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, our job is now to go out into the world as it exists in our day, and do something good with it. That’s our assignment and our purpose, and it should be our passion – the thing that gives our life meaning and which inspires us to live well and to live fully. We’re not fully alive until we’re fulling our God-given purpose. Let’s go out today and do something helpful and meaningful in the beautiful world that God has created and given to us. God Bless, Pastor Jim |
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