In the series of postings titled I’m Okay; You’re Okay I brought out the Biblical fact that in His great love and mercy, God blesses both the churched and unchurched, true Christians and fake Christians, good and evil, obedient and disobedient. He does this for two reasons: 1) He loves all men and wants all to love Him and obey Him so as to receive eternal life, and 2), if He blessed only the righteous, everyone would obey Him for the sole purpose of receiving His blessings. He wants us to obey Him because we love Him and want to please Him. Jesus identified those who indeed love Him and the Father when He said: “If you love Me, keep My commandments” (Jn. 14:15). He went on to say through the Apostle John: “For this is the (how we prove our) love of God, that we keep His commandments.” “And this is love (for Him), that we walk after His commandments (1 Jn. 5:3;2; Jn. 1:6). Because of His great love for mankind, God sends sunshine and rain on both the just and the unjust (Mat. 5:45). The I’m Okay postings brought out how members of the Institutional Church, like their Laodicean ancestors (Rev. 3:14-17), believe that because God blesses them and at times performs miracles of healing, deliverance, etc. in their lives, that they are saved, one with Him and have their heavenly future fixed for eternity. Having such a mind-set, parishioners see only the positive side of the Lord. Refusing to acknowledge that the wages of THEIR sins is death, they continue to walk in heathenism, in His name while defying Him by choosing Satan’s word over His Word. God’s attitude toward them is brought out in Numbers 14:33-35 where He warns that doubting His Word is to commit “whoredoms” and “iniquity,” makes one “evil” and proves that one is “against Me.” He promises to punish with death those who refuse to believe and obey Him (Rom. 6:23). Keep in mind that both Testaments were written to and about those who call themselves by God’s name. The question then becomes, does He use those who disobey Him to fulfill His will?

The answer is “yes.” Throughout the Scriptures and in today’s world we read about and witness God using the unbelieving and disobedient–most of them “Christians”–to keep His name before the world’s masses. Mankind’s refusal to believe and obey Him does not preclude them from being used by Him. This principle is graphically displayed by His use of Assyria and Babylon–evil personified–to punish Israel and Judah for their sins. The Lord uses the wicked for both positive and negative purposes. Church people tend to accept the positive, but have difficulty accepting the negative. Let us go to the only source of Truth relative to spiritual things for examples of how God uses the most vile of human beings to accomplish His goals.

In the first 14 chapters of the Book of Exodus we find the well-known story of Moses, the Hebrew/ Israelite child who was saved from certain death, taken in and raised by an Egyptian princess. At first glance this does not appear to be an unusual thing to happen. Women having an innate maternal instinct, it was only natural that upon seeing a baby in distress this woman’s first concern was the welfare of the baby. But this was not the normal female-baby situation. There was much more involved than a woman’s need to help a child in distress. The Egyptians hated and despised the Hebrews whom they considered to be less than human and fit only for manual labor–enslaved fodder for the machine of state. Marked for death, the lowly Levite child had been given a chance for life by his parents. The story is too well known to be repeated at this point.

Knowing the story and the attitude of the Egyptians toward their slaves, one must ask why a member of the royal Egyptian family would deliberately defile herself and her relatives by embracing a despised Hebrew child? No doubt she was looked down on by the Egyptian elite for her decision. So why did she dare to do something so out of character for an Egyptian, especially a female, especially a female member of the highest ranking family in the kingdom whose head was the nation’s god ? There is only one explanation–the true God moved on her spirit, causing her to adopt Moses and provide for him all of the riches of what was at that time the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. Moses’ life was saved so that God could later use him to free the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. In their day the Egyptians were the most vile people to be found in a world populated by heathen masses. Nevertheless, the Lord used their “god” (the pharaoh), his family and his government to raise up a man who would one day bring about their nation’s destruction through a series of miraculous acts. To be continued. L.J.