“I am the Lord, and there is no other; there is no God besides Me. I will gird you, though you have not known Me, that they may know from the rising of the sun to its setting that there is none besides Me.”
Here, in our sermon text for today, God is speaking of Cyrus in particular. God is raising up Cyrus, a foreign, gentile king to perform His salvation for Israel. But Cyrus is a type of every true believer, every Christian. God reveals Himself, God reveals that He is unique and there is none besides Him by saving strangers. God never saved a friend. God never saved someone because they had done their part. God never saved by giving a helping hand. God saves sinners. God saves His enemies. God rescues those who don’t know Him and don’t know they need Him. And He does that by sending Jesus to die for us, in our place. Some men and gods might die for good men, but our God died for bad men, our God died for enemies and strangers and traitors. God clothes strangers and enemies with His glory, so that the world may know that they have never seen a love like this. They have never met a God like this. They have never known grace like this.
But do you know this grace? Do you know this ridiculous, mind blowing love? Are you amazed? Does it make you laugh out loud? Does it choke you up? Does it grip you? Weigh down like glory on your head? Or has it become mundane, normal, ordinary? As we confess our sins together and pause to consider our own individual lives, confess any sins that you know of, but then ask God to make you amazed at His grace. Ask God to fill you with awe at His goodness, at His mercy, at His love. Ask God to rescue you from any sense of apathy, any sense that this is ordinary, boring. God’s plan is to fill this world with the knowledge of His glory. Pray that we would be part of that glory, so that the whole world might know Him.
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