Today’s blog post is the fourth of five in a series on The Spirit of Forgiveness by Marc Fisher, my husband, for the week of Advent.

“And the cherubim shall spread out their wings above, covering the mercy seat with their wings, facing each other and looking down toward the mercy seat” (Exodus 25:20, AMP).

God continues, facing each other, or as the King James says, their faces shall look one to another.

What a magnificent thing!

Being married this has become even a more enlightened truth for me now!

It takes two on either side, the polarity of everything that is in nature, God, the church, and the callings of God.

He could have told Moses to make one figure, like the pagan religions of the day with a single idol, but God’s unity comes out of conflict and opposition. That reconciliation that comes in the end through His grace, which could not have begun to come if He had only fashioned one thing, what glory there is in that amen!

We never want to gaze into opposition with a steady and non-faltering gaze; we want to look into that which compliments us only.

God is calling us not to just tolerate those differences but to understand and apprehend them.

To contemplate them.

Look into the face of them.

To appreciate them.

Admire them.

And see the beauty of God in them.

If He has required it, then He will give us the grace. It wasn’t just they were looking each other in the face though; it was also that they were looking down toward the mercy seat. Through the mercy seat to the testimony God told Moses to put there, namely the Ten Commandments, His righteous decree to His people.

Every issue that seems to create these irreconcilable differences has got to been seen in the context of God’s righteousness.

But to see God’s righteousness independently of God’s mercy is not to see rightly. Can you imagine a church with this type of understanding and disposition? Can you imagine your own relationships with this type of understanding and disposition?

Right is wrong if not tempered by mercy.

To be right is not right enough.

To be correct is not correct enough.

To be right without mercy is more painful than error.

Can you be wrong even when you are right?

What seems as a paradox amidst contradiction, but God’s ways are not our ways and His thoughts not our thoughts. [Isaiah 55:8–9] We must see the righteous requirement of God through the place of mercy or we don’t. We NEED to have that reality in our lives.

A spirit of forgiveness is required if ever such a reality will be allowed to seep into every part of your soul.

We are so quick to cause a rift between us and another when it comes to wanting to be right. We see something through our own vision and immediately it becomes irreconcilable.

They don’t talk like me.

Think like me.

Dress like me.

Enjoy the things I enjoy.

Act the way I act.

Wwhatever it may be but this is our own distorted vision of trying to see righteousness apart from mercy, apart from forgiveness.

Oswald Chambers once wrote, “There is always one fact more in every man’s case about which we know nothing” and if we did know it would radically alter our perception and reality about that person. But you see it is NOT for us to know, just as we do not know why exactly “two and a half”. We need to learn to be humbled in our knowledge that there always is one more thing and that we cannot be complete in our own assessment of any person or be offended because if we knew the totality it would remove the offense.

Can we see the beaten work?

Can we understand what goes into the making of such a man or woman? Oh to be wrong even when we are right!

[Photo taken from our wedding via Danny Avila]

Today’s blog post is the third of five in a series on The Spirit of Forgiveness by Marc Fisher, my husband, for the week of Advent.

“And you shall make two cherubim (winged angelic figures) of [solid] hammered gold on the two ends of the mercy seat” (Exodus 25:18, AMP).

But we must also realize that “And thou shalt make two cherubims of gold, of beaten work”, that it is all beaten out of gold!

The willingness to bear tension is the willingness to suffer pain.

Don’t miss that!

God is the author of that tension.

Pain is to defer immediate gratification for something distant and to wait on it in trust.

And this is what God is willing to do and is doing it now in heaven, it pains Him. [2 Peter 3:9, Psalm 130:5] He wants an authentic resolution hammered out of gold!

Every hammer blow is pain!

You beat them out of solid gold.

Much of our tension with one another is often really a result of another making a genuine attempt to keep things right and pure but we don’t see that.

Our doctrinal disputes, arguing over the right style of worship, even in our marriages picking away over how to raise our children, use our time, or spend our money.

You have to ask yourself are you willing to beat it out till your relationships with your friends, family, spouse, other believers is not just a piece of compatibility but a statement of glory?

One of the saddest statistics in the church is the overwhelming amount of divorce. How many marriages end because two people can no longer bear the continued agitation of something not yet reconciled? God Himself is the author of that disparity and contradiction at times though. It is tragic we let our own satisfaction become more important than the glory of God.

We look for a more instant gratification for ourselves instead of passing through these difficulties so that God might be glorified when the things yet incomplete are made complete.

Our relationships, in particular marriage, are an issue of the glory of God not of compatibility because it is the mystery of the church itself.

Are you learning to walk in forgiveness, bear those differences which create pain at times, knowing it must be beaten out the gold and when it is it will be something pure and angelic?

The passage also makes it clear that “Thou shalt make”, not God.

Let this register on your soul and conscience, it is not going to fall from heaven.

But isn’t that what the church is, what marriage is, what relationships are?

You must experience this; this must be engraved in your heart. Pure gold is the symbol of deity. God makes the situation and circumstances; He is letting us employ what is of Him. To pass through and be formed from our handling those experiences which He has already established in heaven. We have been called to something authentic not magical and we can only come to that authenticity if it is out of our own handling.

You can’t avoid being inflicted by what seems irreconcilable right now.

It is going to come.

Do you bear the tension?

Do you go through it so something of greater purity and worth might be revealed in the end?

[Picture taken from Pinterest]

Today’s blog post is the second of five in a series on The Spirit of Forgiveness by Marc Fisher, my husband, for the week of Advent.

“And you shall make a mercy seat (a covering) of pure gold, two cubits and a half long and a cubit and a half wide” (Exodus 25:17, AMP).

Can you live with incompleteness knowing it precedes something whole that is yet to come?

It is here but not yet here.

It is like the kingdom of God is here yet not yet here.

We have it in part but will have it in full.

Man tends to not like things in part. But the distinctive of the church is to live with incompleteness, to be comfortable with something that is partial that will one day be completed and to live as though it is already in hand.

As in our broken relationships, to live under that tension of something that has not yet been resolved, not demanding terms that will complete it instead waiting on God to perfect in His completion not only something that will alleviate that human tension but also glorifies Him. That is our calling as believers, to be willing to live with the tension of incompletion, confident that when the resolution comes it will not only be answer to the agitation as applied to the human nature but will glorify God.

The very reason for the rupture is so that a solution can come that will not only please man, though it undoubtedly will, but that God will be all the more glorified. For that reason we can bear the tension, for the glory of God we must always raise far above our own human infirmities.

Think about this for just a moment.

Of all people, Jesus, who was perfect, deserved to be among only perfection and yet was willing to bear the imperfection of man because He knew the completion was yet to come and that in it God would be made great among the nations.

He bore the incompletion and because of that by His stripes we are healed. [Isaiah 53:5] In bearing the tension you also are part of God’s design in proclaiming His Son to a lost and dying world through His church. It is in His plan that His church, as an example of reconcilers, bear testimony of Himself, as the ark bore the testimony of God.

[Picture taken from Pinterest via The Life, Art, and Times of Fudge]

Today’s blog post is the first of five in a series on The Spirit of Forgiveness by Marc Fisher, my husband, for the week of Advent.

“Yet now has [Christ, the Messiah] reconciled [you to God] in the body of His flesh through death, in order to present you holy and faultless and irreproachable in His [the Father's] presence“ (Colossians 1:22, AMP).

In 1994, in the course of only 100 days, the world sat back as it witnessed one of the more cruel and inhumane episodes in human history, the slaughter of over 800,000 people in the African country of Rwanda.

Almost 20% of the country’s population was wiped out as the culmination of tensions between the Tutsis and Hutu people boiled over. A war raged between two sets of people, of a close ethnic kinship, but of seemingly irreconcilable differences due to a long history of one group monopolizing power. The events were so extreme that the Kagera River literally became plugged with bodies as they flowed up towards Lake Victoria.

If we are daring enough to stop and put our ear to the graves of these victims we just might hear God’s truth echoed through their deaths, a truth in fact that is meant to change the world.

Let us go back to a passage from Exodus 25, that for most probably seems as far removed from this subject as possible, but we need more exploration of God’s Word beyond the surface level. We need, as Paul puts it, gravity [Titus 2:7, KJV] in our preaching and in our studying of God’s Word.

This may seem as an obscure passage to most, but God put it there in His infinite wisdom, from before time began He laid its foundation, knowing what is appropriate for one generation is appropriate for all and that it takes on heightened meaning as it comes nearer to the last generation.

“Let them make Me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them. And you shall make it according to all that I show you, the pattern of the tabernacle or dwelling and the pattern of all the furniture of it… And you shall put inside the ark the Testimony [the Ten Commandments] which I will give you. And you shall make a mercy seat (a covering) of pure gold, two cubits and a half long and a cubit and a half wide. And you shall make two cherubim (winged angelic figures) of [solid] hammered gold on the two ends of the mercy seat. Make one cherub on each end, making the cherubim of one piece with the mercy seat, on the two ends of it. And the cherubim shall spread out their wings above, covering the mercy seat with their wings, facing each other and looking down toward the mercy seat. You shall put the mercy seat on the top of the ark, and in the ark you shall put the Testimony [the Ten Commandments] that I will give you. There I will meet with you and, from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are upon the ark of the Testimony, I will speak intimately with you of all which I will give you in commandment to the Israelites” (Exodus 25:8-9, 16-22, AMP).

This passage is a statement about God Himself!

It speaks about some aspect of His infinite deity and therefore it is with great care and concern we ought to approach it and all Scripture for that manner. It is God breathed for the purpose of revealing Himself to us and getting glory for Himself as its truth penetrates our needy hearts. He lays out things in remarkable detail and that detail deserves exacting examination–for He is instructing Moses to establish a counter-part to that which is altogether perfect and heavenly. Each word is designed to bring us to a greater awareness of God as He is and therefore there is much to be gained from such a passage.

He wants to speak to us of reconciliation, of a spirit of forgiveness, and how this all fits into His divine plan to reconcile His people to Himself.

First we must stop and ponder for ourselves why two cubits and a half? What a strange thing to use only a half instead of a whole number for our God is whole, not lacking in anything so why construct something seemingly lacking? Something in the divine mind turned an irregular measure into regular, as if something will be completed by something in the future.

It is something incomplete and its completion will conclude the redemptive purposes of God. It is yet future, we live with the incomplete measure, and we ourselves are in part being used as the instruments in affecting its completion.

I think Colossians chapter 1, verse 20 gives us insight into this mystery, “And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.” It is as though the heavenly tabernacle will one day meet with the earthly and become the one everlasting whole. Just as one day our salvation, which is now working itself out, will one day be complete as we worship Him in heaven as He ought to be worshipped. [Philippians 1:6]

[Picture taken from Pinterest via Amanda Siceloff for National Geographic]