Alright, guys, Jim Richards here. Good to talk to you this month. You know, every month, I desire to put something out that will bless you and help you in your daily life. I’m really not interested in just passing information along. I want to give you tools and resources, or at least the truth that once you get it, it improves the quality of your walk with God and the quality of your life.
I’m going to talk to you about seeing God as He is. This is such an essential factor. The children of Israel had all these promises made to them by God about coming out of slavery in Egypt, God’s provision and protection as they journeyed from Egypt to Canaan, which is the Promised Land, which, by the way, is a type of the kingdom of heaven. It’s a realm where all the resources are there for God’s provision and God’s protection for you.
So, God made these promises to them, which meant all they had to do was follow Him. Pretty simple. Well, now there’s a problem there. There’s a reason they never trusted God fully. There’s a reason they never followed Him, but they went into the land of Canaan and lived this incredible life that God wanted them to live. Every person who came out of Egypt had to pass away before God could carry a new generation into the Promised Land. There was an exception to that because there was Joshua and Caleb, but all the rest of the thousands of people perished in the wilderness and never saw the promises.
Now, why? Why was that? What happened? What was the great failing? They had a lot of individual failings all along the way, and the amazing thing is God was always merciful. When they wanted forgiveness, God always gave them forgiveness. When God could have rejected them, you know, He didn’t. He always kept calling them back. The Bible says in Romans 2:4 that it’s the goodness of God that draws us to repentance. God kept being good to them in the hopes that they would repent.
Remember, the word repentance is not just about dealing with sin. The word repentance refers to being teachable, flexible, and adaptable. God kept treating them well with the hope that they would see that He was good and that they would open their hearts to Him and hear what He had to say. But their problem revolved around one thing. Remember, they were enslaved people for 400 years in Egypt, which meant that they had generations of children who were born into slavery. They came into the world born into slavery.
An interesting thing we understand now from cellular memory is that people who live in a certain way for four generations, by the fourth generation, come out of the womb already pre-programmed to continue that particular lifestyle. That means that people who grow up in crime, their children after several generations, are going to have a predisposition to go into crime unless something happens in their heart. Unless somehow they have a different heart.
But the children of Israel, their thing was they had a slave mentality, and they didn’t know about God. They knew about gods in general, and so their slave mentality mixed with the fact that they brought their beliefs about the pagan gods and projected those beliefs onto the true God. This made it utterly impossible for them ever to trust Him. Slaves don’t trust Masters. See, in the pagan world, you relate to your God like he’s a master and you’re the slave. But not only were they slaves to the false religions, but they were slaves to the Egyptians. When God wants to meet with and speak to and teach them, they tell Moses, “We don’t want to meet with Him. You go meet with Him and come back and tell us who He is and what He wants.”
If you have that pagan mentality about God, which more than half of the church today probably has, you’re always in dread of what those gods are going to do to you. You’re always afraid that they’re going to hurt you. You’re always afraid that you may do something wrong, anger the gods, and incur their wrath. That was their approach to God; that’s how they saw God. They did not see God as He was.
Therefore, they did not trust His promises because the pagan gods were slippery. Through their priests and various intermediaries, they would have promises made to them, and then it would turn out to be a trick. It would be something that worked against them, or the god would change his mind. They didn’t see God as He is but as if He were like the gods they saw in pagan Egypt. So, seeing God as He is becomes incredibly important.
In Isaiah 52, and you might want to follow along with this, I will read Isaiah 52:5-7. Isaiah 52 presents one of the most interesting prophecies in the entire book. It presents people’s problems that cause them to continue going into captivity. Isaiah 53 is all about what Jesus does on the cross to set us free from that captivity to sin. Isaiah 54 then goes into explaining the Covenant of Peace. So you’ve got the problem, the cure, and the covenant. It’s all there, but sadly, it is rarely read.
Anyhow, let’s jump into this. Isaiah 52:5, God speaking through the prophet Isaiah, says, “Now therefore, what have I here,” says the Lord, “that my people are taken away for nothing.” That is so incredible. My people are taken away for nothing. In other words, they go into captivity; there’s no reason for them to go into captivity. There’s no one more powerful than God; there’s no one that could give them more protection. But they go into captivity. Why? Because they don’t see God as their protector. They don’t see God according to His names. If we just believed in the names of God, it would be amazing the difference in quality of life that we would have. He says, “My people are taken away for nothing.”
Now listen to this: “Those who rule over them make them wail,” and one translation says, “Wail and mourn,” says the Lord. So, whether it’s governmental leaders, political leaders, church leaders, or educators, those who have positions of authority tend always to make God’s people wail because they are almost all predominantly anti-God people. I’m not saying that all of them are that way, but that’s the predominant mindset among people who love power.
So, he says, “Those who rule over them make them wail, and my name is blasphemed continually every day.” In other words, they are being oppressed, and the problem is they blame God for the fact that they’re oppressed. They have been told from the pulpits they listen to that this is God getting even with them, God being angry with them, and God chastising them to bring them back to walking with Him. The problem is that the Bible says His goodness brings us back, not His chastisement.
In verse six, he says something incredibly interesting: “Therefore my people shall know my name.” Knowing God’s names tells us about God’s character and nature. Jehovah Jireh means “God will see and God will provide.” Jehovah Shalom means “God is my peace.” Jehovah Tsidkenu means “the Lord is my righteousness.” You go down the list of these covenant names of God, and if we come up with any concept of God that is outside of His names, then we are lying about God, giving a false testimony about God.
God loves us and gives us His names so we can anticipate how He will relate to us and what He will do for us. This is so interesting. People ask me, and I haven’t had it asked lately. Still, for those of you who receive letters from me or anytime you contribute to the ministry, I usually close my letter by thanking you for your contribution and saying that together, we are changing the way the world sees God.
I’ve had some people ask me over the years, “Why do we want to change the way people see God?” You know what? That’s a fair question. It’s a good question and a question you need the answer to. So this month I’m telling you why my mission statement has to do with changing the way people see God.
He says, “My people are blaspheming my name every day. Therefore, my people will come to know my name. Therefore, they shall know that I am He who speaks.” The word “know” where it says, “Therefore they shall know that it is I who speaks” in the Hebrew is the word “yada.” The word “yada” has three letters in its root: yod, dalet, and ayin. Yod speaks of a message from God, Dalet speaks of a portal, gate, or opening that, when we go through it, we discover a new path, journey, and direction. The last letter in the root word has to do with perception. Some translations would translate this as, “Therefore, when they see me as I am.” This is very different. This is not talking about knowing, just like knowing information. “Therefore, my people shall know my name.” That’s when they shall perceive me as I am and recognize me when I am speaking.
Then, He says this is what they will recognize when they hear Him speak. “Behold, it is I. How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of them or feet of him who brings good news, who proclaims peace.” The Apostle Paul in Romans 10:9 says, “Who proclaims the gospel of peace.” There was no peace between God and man until Jesus came, and now there is peace between God and man. So he says, who proclaims the gospel of peace, who brings glad tidings of good things.
Man, that doesn’t sound like the god of religion! The god of religion is all about chastisement, testing, trials, tribulations, and all these bad things that are going to happen to us. But God said, look, when you know my name, you will understand that the person that speaks on my behalf brings glad tidings of good things and proclaims salvation, publishes the gospel of peace, and they say to Zion, your God reigns.
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Jesus showed us exactly what God would look like, how He would function, and how He would treat people.
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I want you to understand something. The world never saw God as He was until Jesus came. Jesus came and lived a life without sin, but He was the exact representation of God. One of the problems is that some people now make assumptions about who God is. They devise their own ideas of what God does and doesn’t do. It’s incredible to me how many people do not realize how vile that is because that’s considering God to be a liar. But Jesus showed us exactly what God would look like, how He would function, and how He would treat people.
We have the names of God, we’ve got the promises of God, but more than anything else, we’ve got the person, the life, the ministry, the teaching, the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. When we look at Jesus, we see God as He is. And I’ll tell you what, that’s when we start realizing how good God is. That’s when we begin enjoying the incredible benefits of God’s graciousness and goodness.
We are doing everything we can to draw people to repentance through the goodness of God by showing them the goodness of God in the Lord Jesus Christ. It will not be a message of wrath. It will not be a message of judgment. It will not be a message of torment. It will not be a message of tribulation. Many people think that the book of Revelation is where God gets so angry and so sick of the world that He starts punishing the whole world. That is not at all what the Book of Revelation is about. The Book of Revelation is a revelation or a revealing of Jesus Christ, our Savior, and our deliverer, who will come on the scene when the wicked of the world are doing all the persecution.
The Antichrist, the dragon, and his followers do all those bad things happening in the Book of Revelation. When God finally does pour wrath out on earth, He has already delivered His Church, the bride of Christ, and He has taken Israel into a place of protection so that the only people who are going to be destroyed are those who follow the Antichrist. There are probably millions of people who will not die. When Jesus returns, they will be here and still be able to choose whether they will trust God. But at least when Jesus comes and sets up His kingdom, they can see how good God really is because Jesus will display and manifest the perfect glory of God.
Listen, read the gospels. I implore you to read the gospels from the perspective of “This is Jesus speaking to me.” I want to hear what He is saying to me. Period. When you do that, your confusion and difficulty in understanding the Bible will go away, and suddenly you can go anywhere in the Bible. When you don’t know what it means, you can look back at Jesus and say, “Okay, how did Jesus present this?” He wants you to know Him. He’s done everything He can to cause you to know Him.
Listen, I want to thank you so very much, all of you who support this ministry. We are stretching as far as we can. We are starting Bible schools worldwide because we want to show people who God really is, and we want them to take the message, preach the gospel of peace, and establish people in the goodness and love of God. I appreciate it so much that you help us do this every month financially. I thank you and appreciate the fact that you’re praying for us. As I say at the end of every correspondence, thank you for all you do because we are changing how the world sees God.
Dr. Jim Richards
DrJim@drjimrichards.com