Opus 2024-013: Solar Grace

As I sat in the dark, focusing on the glory of God, I paused to read a Psalm like I do every day. Today was Psalm 134.  In there I came across this verse,

Psalm 134:2 (KJV) Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, and bless the LORD.

My thinking immediately went to that word sanctuary and trying to place how that word could be used in a Psalm written before the temple was built.  The text does not say this Psalm was written by David, so we have no reason to believe it had to be written before the temple was built, but I still wanted to look into that.

So I looked into the meaning of the word sanctuary, and found out that actually a better translation would be holy place or sacred spot.  The word is translated holy much more often than it is translated sanctuary.  As an example, here is the first place the word appears in the Old Testament,

Exodus 3:5 (KJV) And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.

Our Hebrew word here is translated as “holy.  So you can see where I realize this could have been written before the temple.

As my mind continued down, it’s rabbit trail, which I believe is often guided by the Holy Spirit, I got to be thinking about how we use the word sanctuary.  For us as Protestants, and I believe even as Catholics, the sanctuary is that large room where people gather together to worship.  That led me to think about worship services, historically, and how the Catholic Church and later the liturgical churches would offer up the host as a part of what we call communion or the Eucharist.  The theology of this has gone through many steps, depending on your denomination, but in the Catholic Church, at least the idea was that you were offering up the body and blood of Jesus.  One protestant pastor, who was virulently anti-catholic, claimed this was a sacrilegious re-crucifying of Jesus, and keeping Him in perpetual agony.

I am not as anti Catholic.  My understanding is that they believe there is spiritual merit, or grace, given by taking of this host.  This turned my thinking to the meaning of grace.

Grace is a wonderful concept.  A beautiful word in the Bible, but I believe it is grossly misunderstood.  The popular definition of grace is unmerited favor.  I cannot accept that because it says Jesus grew in grace, and if it is unmerited, then Jesus was not God and the verse is nonsense.  In other words, walking with God and His grace is not a matter of Him giving us an unlimited credit card that we can us to charge anything we want.  It doesn’t even work with the idea of having a credit card where there’s a limit but if we apply we can raise the limit.  I got to thinking about modern technology.

Grace is like a modern electric commuter train that runs on electricity.  If you’ve been around them, you noticed that they have these arms that reach out and connect to the power line above them.  Thus they are constantly supplied with what they need at the moment.  They don’t have batteries to store it up.  They don’t have an electric tank.  They have a constant source of power.  If we ever get the technology, a better illustration might be having a solar panel on the top of a car that powers everything you need to do on a constant basis.

Of course solar batteries only work when the sun is up.  For your car, that would be a problem.  If we’re talking about spiritual power being radiated from the son of God, and it is no problem because God is always extending his power in his grace.

Spiritually we are there.  Technology is still trying to catch up.

homo unius libri