16th October 2024

16th October 2024


Pray (ACts)


Read (Psalm 90 focus v2)


Message (Alan Burke)


Do you remember the bombers coming up Strangford Lough and dropping their contents on Belfast? A couple of years ago now I buried a man who had recalled to me that when he was a boy they heard the planes and they knew that it wasn’t the RAF just from the sound of the engines, he and his brother ran out of the house over the fields to watch the skies over Belfast lit up with the anti aircraft guns and hear the sound in the distance of sirens and the bombs exploding when they fell. Were you there, did you see it? I wasn’t. Maybe you read of it the next day in the paper? I didn’t. The events he recalled took place over forty years before I was born, the Belfast Blitz took place 82 years ago now but I suspect that very few of you who are reading this have first hand memory. Where were you when the mountains were formed?


Before the mounts were born or the Lord brought forth the earth and the world the Lord was, from everlasting to everlasting he is. The Lord God that we come before this evening is a spirit, he is infinite, and he unlike us is eternal. We are finite, God is eternal. Here Moses portrays the awesome truth as he gases upon the eternal God speaking of his eternal being. He has only been their God of successive generations because of who he is in his very nature, he himself is before all generations, his absolute eternity stretches boundless forward and backwards into perpetuity without any limits on either side of this moment right here right now, from everlasting to everlasting he is God. The psalmist affirms the eternal existence of God, his work of creation (Gen. 1) how God Himself had always been there.


He exists in a different way from us: we exist in a derived, finite, and fragile way, we exist as created beings of a creator God but our Creator exists as eternal, self-sustaining, and necessary. His existence is necessary in the sense that there is no possibility in Him of ceasing to exist. How much confidence, hope and assurance do we rob ourselves of as believers not by supposing God is too great but rather by limiting his greatness, how much do we allow our present problems to become larger than the infinite and eternal God. What we believe about God directly impacts how we live and how we respond to him, our theology matters, and sadly many errors result from limiting God, we place conditions upon him because of our own finite existence, in the life of faith we can too easily impoverish ourselves by embracing an idea of God that is limited and small.


Each and every harvest, no matter how poor or plentiful remind us the truth of God’s providential care, of his purpose in giving seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, everything in its order throughout all these years. Its purpose is to direct us to him, to the one who created it all, for what we often forget, the theologian AW Pink put it better than I could when he said ‘behind natures laws is the Natures Lord’, Our Lord and God reminds us of his faithfulness, daily, with each changing season, in the cold and the heat with the food that we eat should remind us who he is. Put your trust not in the strength of your hand, the riches you have accumulated, instead put your trust in Christ Jesus everything else will fail you, for we are just like the grass, we weren’t there when the mountains were formed but they were made though him and in him all things hold together, the one who came to lay down his life so that we might have eternal life. 


Pray (acTS)


Sing


WSC
Q10. How did God create man?
A. God created man male and female, after his own image, in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, with dominion over the creatures.
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