Grief

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And those men said to him, “We are unclean through touching a dead body. Why are we kept from bringing the Lord’s offering at its appointed time among the people of Israel?” 8 And Moses said to them, “Wait, that I may hear what the Lord will command concerning you.”

Numbers 9:7–8

This passage is surprising to me. As Christians, we’ve come to expect instant answers – Google it, Reddit, Quora it, etc. There remains little doubt that we can find the answer we want if we search for it on these platforms. But that’s not the mindset we see in Moses. He said, “Hang on, let me check with God.” That’s amazing!

Moses was chosen by God and is perhaps the most outstanding servant in the Bible, other than Jesus. Yet, Moses had the wisdom to not dole some instant-ramen chicken soup. He left the men standing while he went into the holy-of-holies and enquired of God. I pray that we have the wisdom to say, “Hang on, let me check with Jesus, my Savior.”

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I nearly always read and meditate on BibleGateway’s “Verse of the Day.” Today’s verse is a prophecy about Jesus, the Messiah:

3 He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4 Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

Isaiah 53:3-4:

I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised by this verse. Does God grieve? We often forget that He does. Later in Isaiah, we find: “But they rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit1….” And the in shortest verse in the Bible, we see: “Jesus wept²“. And, of course, we have today’s verse.

Why does God grieve? He grieves because He loves us. It’s because of His love that He is grieved by us. Why else would God be grieved by us? No one grieves the loss of something they don’t care about. But God’s Word tells us, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son³.”

Let’s live to be a joy to God and not a person that grieves Him.

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1: Isaiah 63:10
2: John 11:35
3: John 3:16