The Inseparable Love of God (1) [ Romans 8:38-39 ] Why can nothing separate us from the love of God? 1. Because God’s love is eternal. Romans 8:29a says: “For those whom He foreknew…” The word “foreknew” refers to before eternity began —before the creation of heaven and earth . The phrase “those whom He foreknew” does not simply mean knowing about someone intellectually, but rather loving them. In other words, it refers to “those whom God loved from eternity past.” Amos 3:2a says: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth.” If “known” merely meant intellectual knowledge, that would imply that God only knew Israel and did not know the other nations—which cannot be true, because the all-knowing God lacks knowledge of nothing. Therefore, “I have known you only” means “I have loved you only.” God loved Israel among all the nations of the earth. Hosea 13:5 says: “I knew you in the wilderness , in the land of great drought.” The “wilderness” was where the Israelite...
A dismayed heart [Psalms 143] One of my cousins was really afraid of a dark room when he was a child. As I know, the reason he was afraid of the dark room was because his father used to put him in the dark room as a discipline when he didn’t listen to his parents. As I was meditating on Psalms 143, he came into my mind because the psalmist David said in verse 4, “So my spirit grows faint within me; my heart within me is dismayed.” The meaning of the word "dismayed" here according to a Korean dictionary is s (a) very dark and (b) horrible, and according to the Korean-Chinese dictionary (a) darkness and dreariness, (b) cruel and helpless or (c) miserable (Internet). In Psalms 143:4, the psalmist said his heat is “dismayed’. Here, the word “dismayed” in Hebrew has meaning the psalmist David’s heart was afraid because of great disaster of God’s judgment due to his sins. In other words, David...