D is for DEVIL

It was a beautiful moonlit and starry night with a distinct chill in the air and the threat of a frosty morning not so far away. I stood for a while at the front porch, clutching a cup of hot coffee and surrounded by a mixture of artificial and natural lighting, just gazing at the myriad of house lights, street lights and car headlamps that lit up my world as far as the horizon and lying below a canopy of stars and a moon that seemed to have fallen over onto its side, in the vain hope of attracting some attention. A few steps later and I was out on the road, beyond the confines of the house and the diluting effect of artificial lamps with only the stars to keep me company. It was a wonderful sight so I chose to do something I've never even attempted before. I decided to count them. Starting off with just a small area that I could border inside a rectangular shape I had constructed with my fingers and thumbs, I began to count, but I hadn't even reached double figures when fainter and more distant stars began to appear inside the shape, as my eyes became more alert to the dim conditions. Several times I tried again but each time the same thing happened until soon I realised that I could never even begin to count the stars.

I guess it's much the same with blades of grass, even in a small lawn and certainly for sand pebbles on a beach. There just is no way of even coming up with an estimate of the number of stars, grass blades or sand pebbles that exist in our world and yet God knows exactly how many of each. So what a wonderful promise God made to Abraham when he said 'I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore.' And even in my gradually increasing state of hairlessness, I still couldn't count the hairs on my head but God can for He says 'And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don't be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.'

And what are we worth to Him if He knows even the number of hairs we have. Well we are worth enough for Him to sacrifice His only Son and that little word 'whosoever' in some of the older Bible translations is just so all encompassing that it leaves nobody out and means that each of us is individually important to Him and noone more so than any other. How great to think that the President of America, the Queen of England, the Pope in the Vatican, the owner of Microsoft, Mr Putin, Kylie Minogue, Pele, Paul Macartney and Ian Paisley are all equally loved by God and none of them any more loved than I am or a mother living in a Cape Town township. What a beautiful picture of God's love and also of His knowledge of each of us and His concern for our spiritual well being. And so often, because we believe in His all embracing power and majesty, His all-knowing all-seeing eye, we are quick to lay blame at His feet when trouble knocks at our door. And sometimes we forget that while He is in control of our lives, we do have free will and we also have the presence of a fallen angel who is directly opposed to everything God has made and stands for.

John writes, 'He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work.' And in the process of dying and rising again He did just that by claiming victory over death, the devil's only prize for those who follow Him. Sometimes I wonder why Eve was not completely shocked when a snake actually spoke to her. Maybe it's just a warning to us all that the devil may not always approach us in exactly the way we expect. After all he is also described as a roaring lion. And even God himself in human form was not spared the attraction of temptation that was set before Him in the wilderness. Yet again, it's not the temptation but what we do with it that matters.

Anyway, this was all supposed to be about the devil, but I've really no room for him. And you should do the same..