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El Cajon SDA

Vincent Bujor

God Doesn’t Care

I want you to turn with me to Psalm 46 as we get started here.

And we just read the portion of the Psalm here.

And as we contemplate on what we're about to read, I would just ask you 1 more time to bow your heads with me and ask the Holy Spirit to guide us.

Father Lord, we thank you so much for your providence and your protection, for the miraculous things you're doing on in our midst and we are just grateful Lord to study your work right now.

We ask for focus, we ask for your Holy Spirit to guide us, to show us new beautiful truths so that we go away from this place loving you more in Jesus name amen.

I'm gonna read parts of the psalm again Psalm 46 verse 7 says the Lord of hosts is with us the God of Jacob is our refuge and then the psalmist is is contemplating about just the greatness of God, right?

He says, come, behold the works of the Lord.

And we see what he has done in the earth, right?

And he says, he makes wars to seize, and he breaks the bow, and he cuts the spear, right?

And then it says, be still and know that I am God.

And at the end, the psalmist concludes, you know, first he says, God is our refuge, the God of Jacob is our refuge, right?

And then at the end, it says the same thing again, the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of who?

I don't know if you ever thought about this, but I was wondering why does the psalmist here use the phrase God of Jacob 2 times?

It says here in verse 7, the Lord of hosts is with us and then it says the God of Jacob is our refuge.

And then in verse 11, the same thing again, the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge.

If you have been reading your Bible and you have read the book of Genesis, at least parts of it, you probably know the story of Jacob, right?

His life is not the most perfect life of the Bible characters that you can read about in Scripture, right?

Why did God choose to call himself here the God of Jacob?

Why not call him the God of Abraham, the father of the faithful, right?

Abraham, I mean, what a wonderful man he was, trusted God's Word when it seemed impossible obeyed the Lord without fully understanding what will happen or why James chapter 2 calls Abraham the friend of God he built altars wherever he went He was worshiping the Lord in a foreign land He grasped god's promises for him and he couldn't see it, but he believed god and it was counted to him for righteousness He was a blessing to others you remember those stories right hospitable Super nice.

I mean Entertaining angels Abraham was a patient and persevering man The God of Abraham that would have been a good title But no, it says the God of Jacob.

I was wondering why not using Jacob's father Isaac the God of Isaac Did you know that in a country and in a society full of polygamy where people were marrying women and women and having different partners, right, Isaac was the 1 who was true and faithful to 1 wife?

We read about stories where Isaac was meditating in his field.

He just loved to spend time with God, communion with his creator.

It was just an amazing time for him and you know he he was he was fully submissive even in his early years to his earthly and his heavenly father right when Abraham was called to sacrifice Isaac he you know scholars agree he was not 5 years old.

He was old enough to defend himself and run away, but no, Isaac was submissive even to the point of death.

Why does God choose to call himself here the God of Jacob?

You know, we do this today as well, right?

We are name dropping and we're trying to gather names to make ourselves look a little bit better.

Don't you try when you apply for a job to put names on your resume or companies on your CV that look good and makes you look a little bit better, right?

I remember when I was studying the piano as a teenager and I was taking piano lessons at the conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany, there was this competition that was going on, not so much between the students, but between the teachers.

1 piano professor and another piano professor, and even more than that, but we had the 2 that were kind of competing and they were sending their kids to the competitions.

And they were trying that all of their kids win all of their, all the awards that they can win, right?

And when, when, you know, this 1 teacher, because you always had in the brackets kind of the name of the teacher so everyone you know this is that he is with that teacher oh she's with that teacher right and so and so when you were going there you're like oh I'm actually taking I'm under I'm under his wings I'm taking lessons from her you know what I mean so if if we're name dropping we're usually trying to associate ourselves with people who have a great reputation, who know what they're doing, who are reputable and wonderful people.

And God is using, out of all the names that He could use, Jacob?

In case you're tempted to think, oh, Vincent, you're just picked up Psalm here where God is choosing the God of Jacob as a name.

And by the way, you can do this yourself very easily nowadays.

How many times certain words or phrases come up in the Bible.

In fact, the God of Abraham is mentioned in Scripture.

There is even the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, right?

But the God of Abraham, you find that about 230 times in Scripture, in the Old Testament.

You can look at the God of Jacob, sorry, the God of Isaac, right?

The God of Isaac I mentioned about a hundred and 20 times, also quite a number of times.

So we have Abraham about 230 times, Isaac about a hundred and 20.

The God of Jacob is mentioned more than 350 times.

You go to other Psalms, you go to other books in the Old Testament, you read about the God who chooses to call himself God of Jacob.

At the end of his life, not actually, he wasn't that old at this point, his name was changed from Jacob to Israel.

And if you take both names, Jacob and Israel, and you look how often does God call himself the God of Jacob or the God of Israel, you find out that it's close to 3, 000 times in Scripture, more than any other name.

You have Abraham, about, what did I say, 230 times, right?

Then you have Isaac, 120, the God of Jacob, and Israel, close to 3, 000 times.

3, 000 times associating himself with Jacob.

Deceiver, layer of snares, supplanter, heel grabber.

I mean, that's not the best name you want to choose to associate yourself with right and Still God digs that name out by the way when the psalm was written this psalm I mean hundreds of years later right then Jacob's story I mean the psalmist could have had so many different names to choose from that would have been a better choice than God of Jacob.

Jacob was already dead for hundreds of years at this point.

And still God digs out that name and he associates himself with that name.

In order to understand that, we got to dig a little bit into the story of Jacob and understand why.

Just a couple of weeks ago, most of you know this, I had the privilege of speaking at a youth conference in Slovakia together with another speaker who originally is from Australia and we were asked to preach on the life of Jacob, doing a series on the life of Jacob.

Did you know that Jacob's life was a life of struggle?

The Bible records that even before he was born, his mom experienced the children struggling inside her womb.

It was a miraculous and very peculiar event.

And so she inquired of God and asked God, hey, what is going on here?

And God, you know, answered her, but he raised even more questions after he answered because he said, our 2 nations are in a womb and the older shall serve the younger.

You see, back then we had this thing called primogeniture.

Primogeniture is, it was a custom, it was a worldly custom where always the oldest, the firstborn would get all the wealth and the inheritance and all these things, right?

Now, God also had a plan for his people that He would give the birthright and the blessing to someone in the family, usually the oldest, but not always.

In the case of Jacob's family, he wanted to give Jacob the blessing because his brother didn't really care about the spiritual things and all of that, right?

Now the problem was his mom received that promise or that hint from God.

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God Doesn’t Care

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