Breath Taking!

Wow… can you believe that it is just about the end of June already!  Where does the time go?  We’ll be hanging out the flag, getting out the fire safe sparklers (personal fireworks are banned in our county) and celebrating the fourth of July this coming Monday.  I guess that is why it is so important to make sure that you enjoy each and everyday, expecting God’s best with each new dawn.

And speaking of God’s best, my wife and I have been watching a new Christian teaching series on TV the last couple of nights.  What drew my interest was that the minister is talking about God’s definition of “good.”  Being as I have been discussing this same subject here on the blog, I thought that it would be interesting to get her insight on the topic.  In last evening’s segment, the minister began to differentiate between the world’s description of “good’ and God’s.  The explanations that followed really expanded my vision and it caused me to do some further delving into the subject in my morning Bible Study today.

My first stop (of course!) was at our old friend, Hebrews 9:11, where the writer states that “Jesus came as a chief priest of the ‘good’ things that are now here.”  (Gods Word ©)  Strong’s and Thayer’s similarly defined the original intent of the word “good” as something that is “a benefit, useful, excellent, distinguished, joyful and/or honorable.”

One of the rules for Bible interpretation that I learned in Bible School was the “Law of First Mention.”  This principle basically means that one should find and study the first occurrence of a doctrine in order to get its fundamental inherent meaning.  (see: http://www.biblicalresearch.info/page48.html for more info)  So if Jesus is our chief or high priest over the “good” things that are now here for us, I thought it best to go back to God’s first reference to “good” as found in Genesis chapter one.  As you know, this chapter describes the creation process.  Numerous times during the six days of creation, the writer says that God sat back and looked at what he had done and noted that it was “good.”  The Hebrew word translated “good” has the same basic meaning as does the Greek work we looked at in Hebrews.

At the end of the chapter in verse 31 though, we get what I see as the clinical definition of God's view of “good” where it says that “God saw everything that he had made and behold it was very good.”  (King James Version)  According to Strong’s, that descriptive word “very” means “vehemence”.  Webster defines vehemence as something having “great force, derived by velocity, with forcible action, animated fervor or passion, or to carry that is: to rush or drive.” (Webster’s 1828 dictionary – where he normally used a Biblical passage as an example of the definitions)

We’ll look at this a little more in tomorrow’s post, but we can sum up today’s thoughts by stating that God defined “good” when He looked at His creation as something that was spectacular, overwhelming to the senses, and able to give the recipient quite a rush!  Think on that description this day, as you go out expecting to receive the “good things” that God has planned for you.  Let your imaginations soar and your horizons expand in order to see the extraordinarily outrageous, breath-taking “good” things that our Heavenly Father desires for you!  They are “exceeding, abundantly above ALL that we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20 KJV) Wow… Isn’t God “good”!  Stay tuned and keep asking yourself… “What GOOD THINGS am I expecting today?”