Friday, January 18, 2013

There 'aint' no such thang!

"But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream saying, 'Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.'"- Mathew 1:20


When we read through the first chapter of Mathew we tend to skip a few parts. The first part we tend to skip is that boring genealogy in the beginning; however, I found that we also skip another interesting part. We usually just read the above verse right through without giving it much thought.  This part is essential in many aspects. The first aspect is that it is a proclamation about Jesus and the nature he has. This is the part we usually pick up almost instantly, however, we never really take into consideration the actual event of him having a dream. Joseph had a dream and a literal angel come to him to speak to him. This is CRAZINESS! I mean in today's society we usually chalk this up as delusional. I mean to be honest, if I had a dream that an angel was speaking to me about something, I would probably put it into the catagory of bad food from the night before. What if you had a dream like this? It is another interesting note that  when we hear about other religions having spiritual events like this we usually term it as superstition.

My first point is this: God uses our cultrual and contemporary context to speak to us. In that day and age (the time of Joseph), people believed the supernatural was a part of everyday life; in many instances, there was really no seperation between the supernatural and natural. Consequently, when someone had a dream, they did not really question its validity. Joseph is no exception. God spoke to him through his cultural beliefs to reach to him. He does the same today. The importance of this point is that God will reach out to you in a way that you will find believable. If you look at developing countries (many people call them third world countries though I don't like that term), people still talk about God reaching out to them in dreams and visions. There are supernatural things that happen because that is their culture. God speaks to us Westerners in a different aspect (well most of us anyway) This wasn't my main point though so I don't want to waste your time talking about this lol.

The main point is the first part of the verse. Joseph "considered these things". This guy had a a lot on his plate. Imagine, if you have a girlfriend and they suddenly got pregnant without you having.... (well you know what I mean lol)... Would you believe them if they denied it? I mean seriously, I probably wouldn't (which gives me the thought that God would have to reach out to me miraculously to tell me otherwise lol). But Joseph was also struggling with this. What should he do? How should he approach this situation? He was a religious man that had the fear of God and it is probably safe to say that he prayed about it as well. The significance is that we need to do the same. When we go through our issues or trials we need to use our brains to think the situation through. We need to dig into God and ourselves to see if we can find a solution. This is when God reaches out to us in the best way possible.

I know I went through a pretty large discourse (College word!) in order to get to the point I just wanted to encourage those out there that are going through a difficult time. Keep digging into yourself and into God. Keep praying and I'm telling you that God is going to speak to you in a way that you are going to understand.

Peace out Homies
~1~

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