Greetings,
Today I am heading back to Las Vegas after several great days at CitiLife Church in Deming, New Mexico. God was very good. God is joining lives for the purpose of life! We are being defined by God as children of the tree of life. It was a great time in Deming, but I am blessed today to get a couple more days with two of my grandbabies in route to my next destination. We will no doubt play and celebrate life together!
Does God judge? Many believe that there is no judgment in God, but God’s judgment is a boundary of life meant to guide, lead, and transform people into His way of life. It is created by the flow of life. God’s judgments are the boundaries defined by life. In the same way that a river cuts boundaries causing the course of the river to be defined, God’s boundaries are defined by His flow of life. The boundaries do not define the river, it is the flow of water created the boundaries that define its direction of flow. The point is the flow of the river, the direction of the river, and the destination of the river. It is a source of life, a course of life, and it carries a destiny of life for a final goal. God is a giver and not a taker, thus the judgments of God are the places outside of His flow of life. They appear as a consequence upon all things that destroy the testimony of true life in Him. God is not one who shames men, but rather heals them of all of their shame. We cannot be healed of our shame if we continue to live in our shame. Things that do not produce life for the generations cannot be the true life that God has for us. This is true in the natural and in the spirit. There are shameful things in the natural and shameful things in the spirit that are not the path of destiny for sons and daughters of God in Christ. We can only be healed of our shame when God comes into our shame and transforms us from the guilt of shame and then leads us into the path of life that does not lead to shame again.
Isaiah 2:4 He shall judge between the nations, and rebuke many people; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.
The word rebuke in this verse is the Hebrew word, h3198. יָכַח yâḵaḥ; a primitive root meaning; to be right(i.e. correct); reciprocal, to argue; causatively, to decide, justify or convict.
God does not condemn us, but He does convict us. He doesn’t just condone our flaws, He desires to transform our character. He wants to transform our lives to become as they should be in Him. We were born to be the likeness and the image of God in the earth. We are God’s agents of life to all things. Love cannot be defined by what we deserve or what we get from another, but by the fruit of life it produces for our family name. It has to be life-giving in a generational way to be the true life of God. We cannot be takers of life and fulfill our true calling, testimony, and destiny in Christ. God wants to bring heaven into our hearts and our minds to change us by the power of His internal kingdom of life. In this, there is a means of transformation that causes us to become as we should be. The rebuke of the Lord is not a matter of right and wrong, it is a matter of life and death. When we choose things that are outside of the character of God and call it life, or call it love, we are deceived. God is life! God is love! He can define us, but we cannot define Him. It is only when we allow Him to transform us to become like Him that we can see our weapons of death become the tending tools of life. It is only then that swords can become plowshares and spears can become pruning hooks. We cannot lay down our swords without embracing the process of being plowed. We cannot lay down our spears without embracing the process of pruning. We must be willing to be changed and we must expect to be changed. It is a supernatural thing and is impossible apart from Christ.
Blessings,
Ted J. Hanson
