Dust
"Like
as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear
Him. For He knoweth our frame; He remembereth that we are dust."
-PSALM
103:13-14 [KJV]
Oftentimes
we shock ourselves in our failures and surprise ourselves and others
in our weakness and sin. We do this because we naturally think more
highly of ourselves than we ought. We are full of self-righteousness
and far overestimate our strength, knowledge and wisdom. But though
we surprise ourselves and others in our failures and weakness, we
never surprise God! We may not know what we are but He does!
The
word He uses to describe us is “dust.” Dust is our origin:
“And the LORD God formed man of
the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of
life; and man became a living soul” (GENESIS
2:7). Dust is what we’ll become again: “In
the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the
ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto
dust shalt thou return” (GENESIS
3:19). Dust is what we all are in between in ourselves and our
sin: “Behold, the nations are
as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the
balance: behold, He
taketh up the isles as a very little thing” (ISAIAH
40:15).
But
by His grace, God remembers what we are in Christ. He remembers us as
those in relationship to Him. He is the Father and His elect people
are His “children.” He loves us in Christ with an
everlasting love. He pities us and nothing about us takes Him by
surprise or leaves Him in disappointment. To God, all in Christ,
though dust, are “all fair.” Nothing done by us can
nullify our relationship with Him. We are His children but we are
children by grace. We ought to be disappointed by our failures and
sins but these children of grace are dealt with as children! Their
only strength is in and from Him. He pities us. He has compassion on
us. He does not look upon us with the eye of a critic but with the
eye of a loving, heavenly Father whose love is unchanging.
All
our standing, all our righteousness, every reason for God to love us
is in Jesus. We are loved and pitied because He dealt with us in our
Substitute. “He hath not dealt with us after our sins;
nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. For as the heaven is
high above the earth, so great is His mercy toward them that fear
Him. As far as the east is from the west, so far hath He removed our
transgressions from us” (PSALM
103:10-12).
-Gospel report by preacher Gary Shepard
Sovereign
Grace Baptist church of Jacksonville, North Carolina USA
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