Daily Bible Readings YLT February 10th

God is a God of justice and of mercy. While his righteous anger against the people he had brought out of Egypt who, in the absence of Moses had pressed Aaron to make them gods to go before them, demanded that He consume them and make Moses become a great nation, yet Moses pleads with God to relent from harming His people. He reasons with God as an advocate for the people, that the Egyptians would think that He had brought the people out in order to slay them among the mountains. Moses reminds God of his promise to Abraham, Isaac and Israel, "thy servants", that he would multipy their seed as stars of the heavens and all this land, he would give to their seed. And God repenteth of the evil which he hath spoken of doing to His people.Those who say that God is immutable, that He does not change, are wrong. God is a God of relationship, and He changes His mind when persuaded by righteous argument, to repent from the evil he intended. This is a God of mercy who longs to do good for His people.While Jonah was a man of justice who wanted God to destroy the people of Nineveh because of their great evil, but God is love, and wants people everywhere to repent and to come to a knowledge of the truth, that He is God and there is no other. Moses so loves the people of God that while he knows of their evil, he pleads for them and asks God to take away their sin and if not, blot me out of Thy book which thou hast written. He is a man of mercy.How much we see of Jesus in this servant of God, Moses, who for the sake of the children of Israel, offers his own life in their place. What great love is this! Moses is angry and grinds the golden calf to dust and pours it on the water which he makes the people drink, yet he goes back to God to plead for them that God will not destroy them. Jesus fulfilled this mercy by offering HImself in our place, for God is not willing that any should perish. For God so loved the world that He gave His only son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.Jesus came into the world not to condemn it but to save it. In the New Testament reading, the people who say that we go to heaven when we die do not know the truth from the Scriptures.Jesus speaks of the time when he will separate the goats from the sheep and to those who lived righteously, looking after the hungry and thirsty, the stranger and those without clothes and the infirm and those in prison, he says: "Come ye, the blessed of my Father, inherit the reign which hath been prepared for you from the foundation of the world". All of Chapter 25 speaks of this future time when Christians are judged according to how they have lived during their time on the earth, and rewarded or punished in order that those who are rewarded will rule and reign with Jesus to establish God's rule upon the earth, when God will put the nations under Jesus' feet (psalm 2) and the earth will be brought into the order God planned for it from the foundation of the world, for which time "all creation groans for the revealing of the sons of God (Romans 8:9) Surely the god of this world has blinded the eyes, even of believers, so that this time when Satan is held chained for a thousand years and Jesus establishes his reign upon the earth (Revelation 20) is hidden from our knowledge, teaching and expectation. Pray that God will open our minds and hearts to read the Holy Scriptures with wisdom and understanding, for we now have the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth.