The Spirit of Forgiveness Part III
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]