Celebrations

Today is Bob’s sixtieth birthday. Our granddaughter and I started if off by getting up before six and making him ham, a delicious whole wheat variety of Belgian waffles, Orange Julius, and a side of fruit. He was pleased, to say the least. We are taking him to a concert tomorrow night and having a ‘golf’ birthday party on the weekend. Our family is big on multiple celebrations for one birthday, and often combine the event with several other reasons to just have fun together.

I’m amazed and extremely thankful for how well our granddaughter is doing. She made her first loaf of bread last night. Granted the dough was mixed and kneaded in a bread maker, but she shaped the loaf, let it rise, then cooked it in the oven. We enjoyed that special aroma drifting through the house as we went to bed, and she was delighted with her accomplishment.

This morning we again disproved the theory that two women cannot share a kitchen. She and I work as a team, and although that breakfast could easily have been made by one, the two of us, groggy and a bit giggling, shared the cooking and clean-up, then sent Bob off to work so we could go back to bed.

I’m up again to a quiet house and my quiet time. Today’s verse is from a passage describing King Solomon’s temple. God’s people restored the Ark of the Covenant to the Most Holy place inside the temple, and at this time, “Nothing was in the ark except the two tablets which Moses put there at Horeb, when the Lord made a covenant with the children of Israel, when they had come out of Egypt.”

These were the commandments of God written in stone. You’d think they would have hung them on the wall for everyone to see, but they were hidden in a gold-covered wood box that represented many things to God’s people. They may not have understood then, but this Ark pointed to the future new covenant of salvation by faith in Jesus Christ.

My first thought was that the tablets were hidden much like God says we are to hide His principles and precepts in our hearts. While that is so, I like how my devotional book describes this hiding of the tablets. It says these laws would have been a perpetual testimony against God’s people. As important as they were, no one could keep those commandments, so seeing them all the time would only serve to remind the people of God’s condemnation and judgment. The ark, which typifies Christ, thus stood between the people and the judgment of God, shielding them from their witness against them.

I know the law of God. It is there to guide me but in myself I cannot keep it because I am a sinner; His standard is beyond my capacity. However, the Ark was also known as the Mercy Seat, the place where sacrificial blood atoned for the sins of God’s people. By the laws on these tablets I am guilty before God, but by the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, I am no longer condemned.

Not only that, my devotional book says, Jesus came to fulfill the law for us, “so that which was on the tablets against us has now become what is in the Ark for us.” In other words, “the law-maker on the throne has become the law-keeper in my heart.”

So I celebrate today three things: my husband’s birthday, our granddaughter’s strides toward well-being, and the love of Christ that frees God’s people from condemnation and gives us the grace we need to live the way God wants us to live.