Back in January, I wrote about how I am reading through the Bible this year in my devotions and for each chapter I read, I am choosing one verse to underline. I thought it might be good for me to revisit that thought by sharing a few of the verses that I am choosing to underline. So here it goes…
Understand, today is Wednesday so I have underlined a total of 12 verses this week from Numbers 19-30. I will share with you just 4 of those 12 verses.
On Sunday I underlined Numbers 19:22, “Anything that an unclean person touches becomes unclean, and anyone who touches it becomes unclean till evening.” That is not a verse that I would normally have underlined, but since I was choosing to underline one verse from each chapter, this is the one that I chose from chapter 19. The reason I chose it is because it reminds me of the holiness of God. In order for us to understand God’s grace and love we also need to understand His holiness and justice. We need to grasp the concept that our sin, and anything that is unclean, separate us from a holy God. It is only when we grasp that separation that we can understand our need for the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
On Monday I underlined Numbers 22:18, “But, Balaam answered them, ‘Even if Balak gave me his palace filled with silver and gold, I could not do anything great or small to go beyond the command of the Lord my God.'” If you were at The River on Super Bowl Sunday, you would have heard me preach on the story of Balaam. But I focused on Nubmers 23:19 and not on this verse. But this verse is a great reminder to us as well. In a world that is all about compromise, this is the attitude we need to take. All the time we get opportunities to compromise in our faith. But we need to take a stand. We need to recognize that nothing is worth turning away from what God has called us to do. That means being true to God first in our workplace, being men of integrity in our marriages, and being bold with our testimony. We need to be willing to do and say only what God commands of us. We need to be right in the center of His will at all times.
On Tuesday, one of the verses I underlined was Numbers 25:13, “He and his descendants will have a covenant of a lasting priesthood, because he was zealous for the honor of his God and made atonement for the Israelites.” This is an interesting verse with an interesting context. In Numbers 25 we see Israel is being seduced by Moab. The men are falling into sexual immorality with the Moabite women and that is leading them to idolatry as well. And we see that God is angry with this and sends a plague against Israel. At one point we see an Israelite man blatantly falling into sexual immorality with a Midianite woman right in front of the whole assembly and Phinehas the grandson of Aaron the priest, grabs a spear and drives the spear through both the man and the woman and the plague that was against the Israelites stopped. Then the Lord commends Phinehas and we see in verse 13 that God commends him for being zealous for the honor of his God. How often are we zealous for God? How often do we stand up for God? People all around us blaspheme God. I am obviously not saying that we should pick up a spear and drive it through them, but how often do we ever even simply stand up for God? Where’s the zeal?
Then finally, today one of the verses that I underlined was Numbers 30:2, “When a man makes a vow to the Lord or takes an oath to obligate himself by a pledge, he must not break his word but must do everything he said.” That is a great challenge for us. We treat our word so casually. How often do we keep our promises. When we say something, we should be willing to stand by it, or we shouldn’t say it. I know the term is overused, but we really should be “promise keepers.”
So that is a little taste of some of the verses that I have underlined this past week. I will plan to do more of this in the weeks ahead. I would commit to blogging everday about one of the verses that I chose to underline that day, for those who would like to follow along, but then I would probably find myself not keeping my word and that would not be good.