“The LORD frustrates the counsel of the nations; He restrains the purposes of the people. The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the purposes of His heart to all generations. Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom He has chosen as His inheritance.” Psalm 33:10-12

Whose purposes and plans will stand? We sometimes forget that when nations and people devise plans and policies that oppose the will of the LORD God, who created the heavens and the earth, they will ultimately fail (cf. Gen. 11:1-9; Psalm 2). It is as the psalmist writes: “The LORD frustrates the counsel of the nations; He restrains the purposes of the people.”

Thus, the attempts of our own rulers to throw off the Bible and its truths will ultimately fail. When our own people rebel against the God who has revealed Himself to us in the Bible, He restrains their purposes and will judge them for their erring ways.

On the other hand, “The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the purposes of His heart to all generations.” God’s will and His purposes will stand forever. His plans to judge this world will come to pass — no one will escape His judgment! And His plans to grant pardon and forgiveness to all who flee for mercy to Christ Jesus and His cross and place their faith in Him will also be fulfilled in all generations.

Despite the attempts of people and rulers to silence the preaching of the Gospel, it continues to sound forth; and people, by the gracious working of God’s Spirit through His Word, continue to come to faith in Jesus. They trust in God to forgive all their sins and count them righteous in His eyes for the sake of Jesus’ holy life in their stead and His innocent sufferings and death on the cross as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of all.

Even though people and nations refuse to believe it, Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead. He will establish an eternal kingdom in which only righteousness dwells, and all who trust in Christ as their Savior will live forever with Christ in this kingdom. But those who reject Christ and continue to oppose Him and His Word will be cast out and suffer His wrath and punishment forever. They will be cast into the lake of fire prepared for the devil and his evil angels (cf. John 3:18, 36; Rev. 21:8).

Yes, it is true: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom He has chosen as His inheritance.” It is indeed a blessing to trust in the LORD and to believe His Word, and the nations and peoples who do so will be blessed. God watches over and protects His people in this life, and He grants to them the eternal joys of heaven in the age to come!

However, the nations and peoples who reject Him and His Word forfeit God’s care and blessing and bring upon themselves God’s curse and judgment! Sad to say, we now see this happening in our own nation and land. Unless we as a people repent and turn back to the LORD and His Word, things will only continue to grow worse.

We thank You, O God, for ruling over all things, frustrating the plans of the wicked, and establishing Your purposes. Despite the opposition of this world, You sent Your Son to redeem us and win for us salvation through faith in His name. You continue to reach out to the world with Your Word and call Your chosen ones to repentance and faith in Christ Jesus and His cross. Grant that we turn from our erring ways to You in faith and partake of Your mercy and Your everlasting blessings for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

[Scripture is quoted from The Holy Bible, Modern English Version. Copyright © 2014 by Military Bible Association. Published and distributed by Charisma House.]

“By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of His mouth. He gathers the waters of the sea together as a heap; He puts the depths in storehouses. Let all the earth fear the LORD; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him. For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.” Psalm 33:6-9

When we consider God’s creation, we have every reason to fear and honor the LORD God, who made all.

The LORD God spoke the word and called all things into being. He simply said, “Let there be,” and “there was” (cf. Gen. 1).

It is amazing to remember that “by the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of His mouth.”

He laid out the heavens and all the stars. He spoke the word; they came into being! By His word, they continue to exist. “He … upholds all things by the word of His power” (Heb. 1:3).

And who formed the seas and created the depths? It is the LORD God who created the heavens and the earth.

It is as stated in Nehemiah 9:6: “You alone are the LORD. You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and You preserve them all. And the host of heaven worships You.”

And the psalmist calls upon us to honor and praise this God for his amazing works. As the psalmist says, “Let all the earth fear the LORD; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him. For He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.”

Do you fear the LORD and stand in awe of Him? Do You give Him the honor due unto His name for creating the heavens and all that is in them — for stretching out the vast universe and placing the stars in it and preserving it all? The more we learn about the universe and its stars and galaxies, the more reason we have to stand in awe of our Creator!

And how do we fear and honor Him? We acknowledge Him as our Maker, and we humble ourselves before Him. We accept His Word to us and repent of our sinful and rebellious ways, looking in faith to the redemption He provided for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus fulfilled all the righteous demands of God’s law for us and then took upon Himself our punishment that we might be pardoned, forgiven, and restored to fellowship and communion with God, our Maker, through faith in Christ Jesus and His cross.

Almighty God, we stand in awe of Your great power and wisdom. You created the heavens and stretched them out as Your fingerwork. You also created the world and everything in it. You spoke, and it came to be! By Your Word, all stand fast! You gather the waters together into the seas; You store them in the depths. Forgive us for failing to recognize Your great power and glory and to honor You as our God and Maker. Forgive us for the sake of the Son, Christ Jesus, who died for our sins and rose again so that we might trust in Him and receive mercy. In His name, we pray. Amen.

[Scripture is quoted from The Holy Bible, Modern English Version. Copyright © 2014 by Military Bible Association. Published and distributed by Charisma House.]

“Sing for joy in Yahweh, O righteous ones; praise is becoming to the upright. Give thanks to Yahweh with the lyre; sing praises to Him with a harp of ten strings. Sing to Him a new song; play skillfully with a loud shout. For the word of Yahweh is upright, and all His work is done in faithfulness. He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the lovingkindness of Yahweh.” Psalm 33:1-5

The Psalms, which served as the hymnal of believers under the old covenant, and also the new, call upon all to praise and honor the God who created the heavens and the earth and who has redeemed us from sin and its just punishment that we might be restored to communion with Him and give to Him honor and glory.

Though many English translations render the name of God in Hebrew as LORD, the Legacy Standard Bible seeks to translate the Tetragram (the four-letter Hebrew theonym) by using the commonly accepted name, Yahweh. By so doing, the translation makes clear that the psalm is speaking of the God “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty,” the “I AM,” and not just a more generic god or lord (Rev. 1:8; Exo. 3:14).

The psalmist calls upon us to praise, honor, and give thanks to this God — the only true God — with both songs and instruments. It speaks of a lyre and a harp of 10 strings, instruments of the day. It might be with piano, guitar, flute, trumpet, keyboard, etc. today.

We are to sing for joy, give thanks, praise Him and sing to Him a new song — while the old hymns and songs are beautiful and useful for worship, there is certainly nothing wrong with writing new songs as well (as long as they agree with the teaching of the Bible) to express our thanks and praise to Yahweh for His goodness and mercy to us in Jesus Christ, the Son.

And why should we praise Him? The opening verses of Psalm 33 give us the beginning of a list of reasons: “For the word of Yahweh is upright, and all His work is done in faithfulness. He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the lovingkindness of Yahweh.” (You might also compare David’s call to worship in Psalm 103.)

What do these words say? The word of Yahweh — God’s Word, which we have recorded in our Bibles — is upright. It’s true and right and good, even though the thinking of this world often opposes it. God’s Word is trustworthy; we can believe it and depend upon it!

God’s work is done in faithfulness — it will not fail and cannot be undone or thwarted. Even though Satan sought to destroy God’s work of creation and then thwart His plan of salvation, God sent His only-begotten Son into the world. Jesus remained faithful in temptation, true to God’s Word, and submissive to the will of the Father, even to the point of going to the cross and being crucified as a perfect and holy sacrifice for the sins of all mankind that we might look to Him in faith and be pardoned, forgiven and granted a place in God’s everlasting kingdom.

Yahweh loves righteousness and justice. To be acceptable in His sight, we must be righteous. Though none of us measure up on the basis of God’s holy law, He counts us holy and righteous in His sight when we place our faith in Jesus, who lived a righteous and holy life for us and then made full atonement for our sins. And God is just in forgiving our sins because Christ Jesus suffered our punishment and paid the price for our sins when He suffered and died on the cross (cf. 1 John 2:1-2).

And, of course, “the earth is full of the lovingkindness of Yahweh.” Instead of judging this world and all of us as sinners, God is dealing with us in lovingkindness and mercy. This world goes on, despite its evil and the terrible things people do, because God is merciful and giving us time to repent and look to Jesus and His cross for pardon and forgiveness.

It is as Peter writes in his second letter (2 Pet. 3:7,9): “By His word the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men. … The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some consider slowness, but is patient toward you, not willing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.”

We, therefore, have every reason to sing for joy to Yahweh, to praise Him with a new song coming from grateful hearts, for He has shown us lovingkindness and mercy, and His words, His promises to us, are true!

We thank and praise You, O merciful God, for creating us and redeeming us so that we might be Your own through faith in Christ Jesus, Your Son, and our Savior. Amen.

[Scripture quotations taken from the (LSB®) Legacy Standard Bible®, Copyright © 2021 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Managed in partnership with Three Sixteen Publishing Inc. LSBible.org and 316publishing.com ]

“Do not marvel at this; for an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs will hear His voice, and will come forth; those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment.” John 5:28-29

Not only did God the Father entrust to His Son the power and authority to call the spiritually dead to faith and life through His Word, but He has also entrusted to the Son the power and authority to raise all the dead on the last day and judge them.

We confess this truth about Jesus Christ in the Apostles’ Creed when we say, “He shall come to judge the living and the dead.” And the Bible teaches this throughout.

In Revelation 1:7, we read of the Lord Jesus: “Behold, He is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see Him, even those who pierced Him; and all the tribes of the earth will mourn over Him. Yes, amen.”

Jesus told His disciples in Matthew 24: “But immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory. And He will send forth His angels with a great trumpet and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of the sky to the other” (Matt. 24:29-31).

In Matthew 25:31ff., Jesus said, “But when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. And all the nations will be gathered before Him; and He will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; and He will put the sheep on His right, and the goats on the left …”

And in 2 Corinthians 5:10, we read that “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be recompensed for his deeds in the body, according to what he has done, whether good or bad.”

What does Jesus say will be the basis of His judgment? “Those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment.”

While this sounds as though Jesus’ final judgment will be entirely based on whether we have done good deeds or bad deeds, we must remember that God’s Word clearly teaches that “there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins” (Eccl. 7:20); that “all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; and all of us wither like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, carry us away” (Isa. 64:6). The Bible tells us that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23).

St. Paul also lays out this truth in Romans 3:19-20 when he says, “Now we know that whatever the Law says, it speaks to those who are in the Law, so that every mouth may be shut and all the world may become accountable to God; because by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in His sight, for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.”

So, how can we be made acceptable to God? How can we do works that God accepts as good and righteous in His eyes? The Bible tells us in Colossians 1:21-23: “You were formerly alienated and enemies in mind and in evil deeds, but now He reconciled you in the body of His flesh through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach ⁠— if indeed you continue in the faith firmly grounded and steadfast, and not moved away from the hope of the gospel, which you have heard, which was proclaimed in all creation under heaven, and of which I, Paul, was made a minister.”

It is through faith in Jesus Christ and His atoning sacrifice on the cross that our sins are washed away and we are counted righteous and holy in God’s eyes. And through faith in Christ, our works are cleansed and made acceptable to God.

It is as Jesus said in His parable of the vine and the vinedresser: “Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit from itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing” (John 15:4-5).

Jesus explains this in his parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:34-46): “Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you who are blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom, which has been prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me something to drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.’ Then the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, and feed You, or thirsty, and give You something to drink? And when did we see You a stranger, and invite You in, or naked, and clothe You? And when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?’ And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me.’ Then He will also say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry, and you gave Me nothing to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me nothing to drink; I was a stranger, and you did not invite Me in; naked, and you did not clothe Me; sick, and in prison, and you did not visit Me.’ Then they themselves also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of You?’ Then He will answer them, saying, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

So, Jesus Himself says that He will judge based on whether we’ve done good or bad. However, no one measures up — even our best works are tainted by sin and are unclean in God’s eyes. But those who trust in Christ have forgiveness for all their sins — their sins will not be held against them. And they have a new birth and a new life. They are born again and trust in Christ by the gracious working of God’s Spirit through His Word and seek to do those things God created them to do (cf. Eph. 2:8-10). Though their good works are still imperfect, God forgives their sins and accepts their works done for Him and counts them perfect in His eyes for the sake of Christ Jesus and His holy life in our stead and His innocent sufferings and death on the cross as the atoning sacrifice for all our sins. Only those who trust in Christ do works counted as good and acceptable in God’s sight.

O Jesus, Son of God, our only source of life and salvation, move us to hear Your voice and repent of our evil ways, looking to You and Your cross in faith for pardon and forgiveness that we may be acceptable in Your eyes and bring glory to Your name by the works You enable us to do. Amen.

Scripture quotations taken from the (LSB®) Legacy Standard Bible®, Copyright © 2021 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Managed in partnership with Three Sixteen Publishing Inc. LSBible.org and 316publishing.com

“Verily, verily, I say to you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live. For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself; and hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man.” John 5:25-27

While many misunderstand these words of Jesus to be a reference only to His raising of all the dead and His judgment on the last day, Jesus here speaks of the power of His Word to raise up those in spiritual darkness and death to spiritual life.

The Apostle Paul also speaks of this when he wrote to the Ephesians (Eph. 2:1-7): “And you hath he made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins; in which in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: among whom also we all had our manner of life in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath made us alive together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.”

Jesus pointed out that the hour was coming and now is that the spiritually dead would hear the voice of the Son of God calling them to faith through His Word, and those who hear Jesus calling them to faith in Him and His cross would be raised up from spiritual darkness and death to light and life eternal through faith in His name.

Jesus also told His apostles in Luke 10:16: “He that heareth you heareth me; and he that despiseth you despiseth me; and he that despiseth me despiseth him that sent me.”

What are we to make of this? Jesus is calling us with His life-giving Word. When ministers faithfully preach and teach the Word of Jesus, Jesus is speaking through them. He is calling the spiritually dead to faith and life in Jesus through faith in His name.

Of course, not all who read the Bible or hear the words of faithful preachers hear Jesus’ voice calling them to repentance and faith through the Word. Many take His Word lightly and do not take it to heart and believe. They remain dead in their sins and under the wrath of God. But those who hear Jesus’ voice calling on them to repent of their sins and trust in Him and His atoning sacrifice on the cross for pardon and forgiveness are raised up to spiritual life and live — eternally! Cf. John 3:14-18.

Jesus explains: “For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself; and hath given him authority to execute judgment also, because he is the Son of man.”

In the same way as God the Father raises people up from spiritual death to spiritual life through His Word, so also God the Son gives life to those who hear His voice and place their faith in Him.

So, not only is Jesus given the authority to be our judge on the last day, He now raises the spiritually dead and gives life — spiritual and eternal — to all who hear His voice calling them to repentance and faith through the Scriptures. And those who hear and heed His voice now will not be condemned in His judgment on the last day because they have “passed from death to life” (John 5:24).

Dear Lord Jesus, open my ears that, when the Bible is read and proclaimed, I may hear Your voice calling me to repent of my sinful ways and look to You and Your cross in faith for pardon, forgiveness, and life everlasting. Amen.

[Scripture is quoted from the Revised 1833 Webster Version of the Bible.]