Very Wise In Very Good

“Be wise in what is good… and the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.” – Romans 16:19

This promise is remarkable.

God is the God of peace. Different parts of the Creation mirror that God is a God of peace; bird songs in a forest, the gentle sound of crickets at night, the rustling of the leaves in the breeze , the sound of waves at the beach. By all sorts of things, we’re reminded that where God is, there is peace.  Peace is sweet to the soul; it’s the foundation of joy. It the birthplace of love. It’s difficult to be happy and free unless you have peace; and it’s hard to love when anxiety is strong in you. But God’s peace opens new frontiers to the mind and heart. 

Wrong can disturb peace in our hearts.  Sometimes it’s in our camp and sometimes it’s concern for others. Being wise in what is good and having the God of peace crushing Satan under our feet is the way back to peace–and power to help our situations and others’.

How’s it work?

Psalms 115:15 states the epicenter of all Life-giving blessing, “May you be blessed of the Lord, Maker of heaven and earth.”  

There is one God.  He made all that is in the heavens and all that is on the earth. He possesses infinite mind and infinite strength.  It is impossible to comprehend the power difference between the Creator and the created. His blessing brings peace and everything else that is good.

A Whooping Amount of Stars

Look out at the stars at night. On the clearest night you see only about 4000 stars.  But, what is actually out there staggers the mind.

There are at least 100 billion stars in the galaxy of stars we live in, the Milky Way.  It would take you 3000 years–night and day– to count all the stars in our galaxy alone. This is difficult to imagine. 

It doesn’t seem like it could be true when you see the lights of the Milky Way stretch across the sky on a moonless night. But, it is completely true. Three thousand years. There are even new estimates that the number of stars in our galaxy may be twice as much as that. TWICE AS MANY STARS: 200 billion! That would take you six thousand years to count! 

And an average size of a star is about the size of our sun; one million times the size of earth. Heaven doesn’t need to be a new universe. Just transpose a few stars into earth’s elements and deck them out and it’d take us a million years to explore them!

Stars are hugely huge. Some are so big that if you placed them where our sun is, you could wake up in the morning, go outside and touch the star!  And some are MUCH bigger than that. God wasn’t sparing anything size-wise when He created the heavens!

Slightly Too Many Galaxies

Try hard to soak in this next paragraph. And it’s worth a minute of time to try and get it to percolate in your brain–even if you are not a numbers person.

If you were to set a clock to roll off the seconds to 3000 years and you were to attempt to count all the stars God created, you’d have an interesting problem. After the first second had ticked off, you’d have to stop the clock for 3000 years and count the stars in galaxy 1.  Then after second 2, you’d have to stop the clock again and  count the stars in galaxy 2 which would take another 3000 years.  After 10 seconds, you’d have counted 30,000 years and only rolled through 10 galaxies. You’d have 100 billion minus 10 galaxies to go.

Good luck.

Why the Overkill Number of Stars?

There are an insanely large number of stars out there.

WHY WHY WHY did God make so many?

Giving it my best shot, I believe God really really wanted to help us get a truth into our hearts:  “No matter what happens, no matter what the need or hoped for desire,  i am infinitely bigger. Never lose your peace. i can handle anything. “

Think of Moses. He had two million people about to be attacked by Pharaoh’s army and nowhere to go. Was it a problem at all to God?  No. 

God merely separated the sea and the sea swallowed up the problem. The problem went from BIG to zero with one of God’s chess-piece moves. 

God is the Creator of the universe, the earth, and all the infinitely complex genetic codes of living things.  When evil makes its move, He laughs– He mock’s evil’s thought that it has power to curb His intentions. (Psalms 2:4). Actually, I don’t think God bothers to mock…but you get the picture. Nothing shakes God up.

Nothing of the created can stop the infinite power of the Creator.  When God wants, He merely makes his chess move and it’s over. 

And God’s chess-piece moves are priceless to see and quite amazing to experience personally.  

Jesus went to the cross. He died and was buried. Game over? No. God, the Father moved His chess piece. Jesus rose from the dead. Not only did He rise from the dead, He rose having won back all authority in heaven and on earth. (Matthew.28:18) With that one move, all evil of all time was positionally defeated. We’re in the middle of the outplaying of that complete win in time and space.

Grasshoppers and Drops

The most powerful inhabitants of the world are “as grasshoppers in His sight” and the nations are like “are drop in the bucket” or “as a speck of dust on the scales.” Isaiah 40) Grasshoppers are small; drops are tinier; dust is really small.  God wants to make sure we get it and adds that the power of greatest nations on earth is “less than nothing and meaningless.”(Isaiah 40:17) How exactly you get less than nothing, I’m not sure–but you get the gist of what God is saying! It’s something along the line of, the power of the created is less than NO power in comparison with the Almighty. 

Don’t breeze pass those words. GOD, the living God…the God you pray to…this God says EVERYTHING in time and space is as less than nothing and meaningless to Him.  It’s all powerless to be the tiniest hinderance to anything He desires. Good luck.

Wise in What is Good

God asks, “What is troubling you?”

He continues: “Don’t be troubled. Believe in Me. Believe in the working of My power and in the wisdom by which I am guiding your life,.  I have a plan–an astonishingly good one. One that will fill you with awe. My plan involves helping your beloveds and other men and women and boys and girls you will one day love who are still held captive by the power of the evil one. Trust Me wholly.”  

The God of peace wants to help more in many many ways. And part of the benefit of His help is that we receive His peace.  Often this peace comes from God doing new things in our midst. Mary and Martha were brought into quite sweet peace when Jesus un-wrapped-up outer difficulties. 

We need to grab hold of this each hour we live even as Jesus did.  We must seek to be very wise in what is good–even what is very good.. This doesn’t mean being wise in what is shrewd,  nor is it being wise in common sense. It is wise in doing what is good in His sight.  This does only from receiving His “living” wisdom from Him.  And God is always up to more than we expect–so keeping alert is essential–and a great blessing!  

How wonderful it is when God does “awesome things which we  do not expect” in the most ordinary days! (Isaiah 64:3)  What a gift it is to leave the ordinary and become a partaker of God’s extraordinary. The commonplace becomes stamped with the presence of God and His meeting us.  Little and large things are made beautiful in His time. 

Leave the Ordinary for the Extraordinary

The beauty of understanding that this wisdom is not our cleverness or simply the outflow of our self-driven or frantic work is that it causes us to draw near to the Lord. This in itself is a great blessing. We become truly wise with God’s wisdom because we receive His guidance and His very good plans.  And when we do, God continues His work. And, it is quite wonderful when God gives His answers and His help and see our God crush what is not from Him. 

“But when he sees…the work of My hands, in his midst, …they will STAND IN AWE of the God of Israel.” - Isaiah 29:23.