Thursday, September 10, 2020
Wondrously, Creation Dances
Genesis 9:13
I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.
Hebrews 13:9
Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings; for it is well for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by regulations about food, which have not benefited those who observe them.
Words of Grace For Today
Regulations about food. Abstinence from tobacco, or from alcohol, or from dancing, or from Jazz, or from [fill in the piety thing to forego].
These are all ways to try to gain God’s approval.
Foregoing these or anything else, or obligatorily keeping some ritual or habit, are all futile efforts. Nothing we do or do not do can gain us God’s favour. Our place in God’s creation is far lower than that we have such capacity.
More significantly it is superfluous. God already has given us God’s favour. Still we get carried away by all kinds of strange (and yet devilishly familiar) false teachings about our place in God’s creation, as if we were as powerful as God, or more so, even able to be godlets ourselves.
It is the truth that many regulated behaviours have been scientifically good for us at the time and therefore healthy for us to observe. Not all are beneficial. Dancing is actually an activity that if one continues to practice into one’s old age it can help keep one’s mind clear, and one’s body able longer than if one had not. Still many call for avoiding dancing, because it leads to sex, which leads to children. The greater truth is that sex leads to children, which leads to dancing joyously. Whether sex is healthy depends not on dancing, but on one’s choice of partner and how one relates to him/her; which dancing has little to do with.
To remind us how we were and are so sinful and evil that God chose to flood out all life except a sample of each kind along with Noah and his family, and how gracious God is in re-establishing a covenant (an unusual unilateral covenant) with us, beginning with a promise not to flood all life away again.
So that we not forget, which we do so easily as we try to re-invent our relationship with God and creation … So that we do not forget God places a rainbow in the sky.
Light intersects the moisture of rain in the sky, and the prism effect of the moisture paints a bow of all colours across the sky. God continually works to show us how gracious God is.
Instead of abstaining or partaking or striving to achieve God’s favour, God invites us to immerse ourselves in God’s Grace which fills us and overflows all around us.
Grace! Grace is God’s free gift of liking us, of loving us unconditionally (despite the truth that we deserve condemnation), of forgiving us and giving us new chances. Second chances are far too few for God’s attitude towards us. God gives us new chances at life each minute, in each decision.
Grace!
Bask in Grace. It’s like dancing only wondrously better for strengthening one’s heart, soul and mind at all ages.