We Are What We Believe

Elijah had just won a decisive victory over the pagan gods Baal and Asherah at Mount Carmel. In a great display, he had called the fire of God down from heaven in front of the people thereby showing people who the true God was. In the aftermath of his display, he had killed around a thousand of the prophets of these false gods. He should have been feeling good with himself and confident in the power of God. However, shortly after this great display, he receives a message from the Queen Jezebel who threatens to kill him like he killed the prophets of the heathen gods she worshipped. Instead of being confident of the God who had just displayed such naked and awesome power on his behalf, Elijah runs away from the threat of the queen, abandoning his servant along the way.

Elijah ends up in the wilderness in Beersheba in the country of Judah, far from Jezebel’s reach and falls down tired, asking God to take his life. While resting under a juniper tree, God sends an angel twice to feed Elijah for the journey ahead. After a long journey, God catches up with Elijah in a cave. God then asks Elijah what he’s doing there in the cave. Just like he asked Adam where he was after he had eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and his eyes were opened and he knew he was naked, God was not asking Elijah a question he didn’t already know the answer to. Elijah then launches into a sob story of how he had been quite zealous on God’s behalf and everybody had abandoned God and he was the only one left serving God. God then tells him to stand on the mountain so that he could speak with him. While on the mountain, a strong wind, an earthquake and a fire pass by Elijah. The Bible says that while these things passed by him, God was not in it. It was until a still, small voice was heard that he heard God’s voice. When God spoke, it was to ask the same question he had asked at first. Again Elijah answered God with the same story of victimisation and abandonment he had rehearsed earlier. After this God gives him instructions on the people to anoint and to prepare himself for death.

At times we all go through circumstances that debilitate us. Circumstances like anxiety, depression, fear and other negative emotions come to test us and to try our faith and belief in God. They come to taunt us, to make us doubt the presence of God and his saving power. They want us to forget the numerous God has come through for us. Ultimately, they want us to confess negatively and speak words that agree with the circumstances we are going through. While the Bible says God was not in the wind, earthquake or fire, I believe those phenomena were sent by God to remind Elijah of his awesome power that was available to Elijah if only he could correctly discern what was happening. Instead of seeing God’s power at work, all Elijah could see were his present circumstances (which were temporary) and he therefore could not see the power of God. The Bible urges the weak to declare that he is strong and for the poor to declare that he is rich because of what the Lord has done. This is about recognising that while we go through things in life, the things we go through do not define us. What defines us is what God says we are.

God didn’t want Elijah to die. I believe he still had a lot for Elijah to do. However there was nothing God could do because of what Elijah believed about himself. Even after seeing a display of the awesomeness of God, he still could not look past his circumstance to lay hold of God’s goodness and grace by faith. Hence he died. We live in a fallen world and most and generally it’s a terrible place to live. But God want’s us not to look at the world with natural eyes, seeing those things that are temporary. He wants to look with eyes of faith to those things that are eternal, resting our hope and trust in him.

JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO published by WestBowPress, a division of Thomas Nelson publishers and LOST, BUT FOUND.

It's Not For Us To Wonder How

“How shall this thing be seeing that ….”

When Mary the mother of Jesus was told by the angel Gabriel that she was going to give birth to a child that would save the world from sin, she wondered how it was going to happen. She wanted to believe but to her there were several reasons why it was not going to happen. She was looking at the facts that would negate this promise of God. The normal process of life is that for a woman to get pregnant, she would normally have to have sex with the proposed father of the child. However here was God telling her that she didn’t need to be with any man to see the fulfilment of God’s promise to her. All she needed to do was to believe. God would make the rest possible by the power of the Holy Spirit.

In the book of Joel, specifically Chapter 2 verse 28, God promises to pour out his spirit upon all flesh and promises that his spirit will cause the opening of eyes so that men and women will see visions and dream dreams. We all have dreams and visions for our lives and there are some of us who think we need psychiatric help due to the dreams we have envisaged. Like Mary, we ask ourselves, “How shall this thing be?” We seem to be looking for one excuse or the other to let God know that the dream or vision he has impressed upon our hearts are just too impossible to accomplish. The fact is that even when we see dreams about what we are going to be, we want to understand the process. Our finite minds desperately try to grasp and understand how God is going to make it happen. But can I say that understanding how is not really our role.

The story is told in the book of 2 Kings 7 about a famine in the land of Israel. Elisha brought a word from God telling the king about what God was going to do in the land. However the king’s adviser scoffed. Elisha promised him he was going to see what God would do but he wasn’t going to partake of it. Somewhere else there were four lepers outside the gate of the city. They were impoverished men who had no hope. However they reached a decision about their future and they acted on that decision. God used their decision to bring deliverance both to them and their nation.

It’s really not our role to worry about things like how. Ours is to walk in obedience to the vision or dream God has given us. When we do that, the power of the promise keeping God will come to help us become all that he has called us to be. What vision or dream do we have or have we seen? Now is the time to act on it. 

JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO published by WestBowPress, a division of Thomas Nelson publishers, http://bookstore.westbowpress.com/Products/SKU000194087/Deceptio.aspx and LOST, BUT FOUND available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DPLLEUQ/. You can follow him on Twitter @Cruz_JCReal.  

The Gospel of Jesus Christ or the Gospel of The Kingdom?

The other day I was reading Exodus Chapter 20 and I was going through the twelve commandments and something occurred to me. It struck me that each law was not so much in respect of the whole nation but in respect of each individual in the nation. Going through the verses in the chapter, it occurred to me that the “Thou” that began each verse at the beginning of each commandment was in really in respect of the whole nation but in respect of each person reading or hearing the words. God gave Moses the law in the Old Testament but he promised in the book of Jeremiah that the days would come when the laws would no longer be written on tablets of stone but on the tablets of our hearts. He also promised that God would give us hearts of flesh instead of hearts of stone.

That was Jesus agenda when he came. Jesus did not come to give us a religion but he came to offer each and every one of us a personal relationship with God. Jesus spoke out against religion. According to him, people set up religion to stop people from getting to know God and they didn’t get to know God themselves. However when Jesus talked about that new personal relationship with God, nowhere in the Scriptures did he refer to the new relationship as the “Gospel of Salvation”, “Gospel of Jesus Christ” or Christianity. When Peter or Paul referred to the new relationship, they also never referred to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They all talked about the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven which as Christ had taught was in our hearts.

We seem to have a fixation with getting people saved and getting them to on the road to Heaven. But Paul taught that as a result of us getting saved, our spirits are seated with Christ in heavenly places. If God wanted all just be in Heaven, then he would have translated all of us like Enoch. The fact is that as Christ said, we are in this world but not of this world. The question then is, if we are not of this world, then of which world are we? We are definitely not of Heaven because only spirits live in Heaven. The fact is that we are citizens of the place which Jesus talked about which starts in our hearts the moment we accepted Jesus as our Lord and Saviour. The Kingdom of Heaven is not a geographical place so to speak like Heaven or Earth but a place in our hearts where God dwells. We carry God in our hearts from the moment we were born of the spirit. While the liberals in America argue for the separation of Church and State, God doesn’t want us to do so. Peter says we are a royal priesthood. God wants us to carry the Kingdom of Heaven wherever we go and to establish outposts of Heaven as ambassadors.

While Jesus came to bring us the message of the Kingdom of Heaven, he himself said he wasn’t the be all and end all of the message. Jesus described himself as the door, the way into the Kingdom. We need to press past the “Gospel of Jesus” and walk into the kingdom. Jesus is our perfect example. He reached out to the all those who needed him and brought the kingdom to them in the form of healing, joy, peace, salvation, food. He exerted the power of Heaven on the Earth and created heaven on earth. He brought about the Kingdom of Heaven. He fed thousands, calmed the seas, walked on water, raised the dead. He was able to that because he had a deep and personal relationship with the Father. That’s what we have been called to do. To have a deep and personal relationship with the Father and by that relationship cause Heaven to exert on Earth and to bring others into the Kingdom. That is our mission. Not to have religion.       


JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO, a thriller about persecution of Christians. DECEPTIO is published by WestBow Press, a division of Thomas Nelson Publishers. The book is available here
http://bookstore.westbowpress.com/Products/SKU-194087/Deceptio.aspx. He is also the author of LOST, BUT FOUND available here http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DPLLEUQ