Title: God's Plumbing/Amos 7:7-9
Around 760 B.C., during the reign of King Jeroboam II of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, the nation of Israel was enjoying an era of prosperity and peace. However, along with this abundance, idolatry spiritual corruption, moral decay, and social corruption have followed. The more severe the pollution of injustice and corruption, the more the nation and society lost the direction God had given them. God's righteousness was revealed through Amos, who came from the neighboring country of Judah to this sinful city. Amos' mission was to denounce the corruption of Israel's society and religion, and to warn of the imminent judgment of God. Amos had God's plumbing line to convey God's will. A plumb line is attached to a cone with a string so that the tip of the cone faces downwards under the force of gravity. The builders knew that when the buildings they were building were measured with a plumb line, walls that did not stand side by side were torn down.
God compared Israel to a derailed wall and said that it was on the verge of collapse. In order to show such things, God has given the people the plumbing line of God's Word. God always provides a plumb line of His Word to His children. In the future, I would like to share the lessons of the plumbing that Bruce Thompson showed through ‘The Wall of My Heart’.
We live in a time when we do not have the knowledge and no longer think about the plumbing of God's Word. However, I am very interested in 'What is life and how should we live it?' This fundamental question can be divided into four categories. The first is the question ‘Who am I?’ (identity is a fundamental question of ontology). Revealing your identity means ‘who am I’. To answer the question ‘Who am I?’ we first need to return to our own origins. We must return to the God who is Himself and find ourselves. To understand who we are, we must start by understanding who God is. He is the beginning from which we all started, and our whole being is longing to return to our relationship with Him. Jesus is the only way to know God. The identity of knowing ‘Who am I?’ begins with God, and the way to know God is through Jesus.
Deacon Yong-bok Kim, who is now attending Somang Church, was standing at a dead end in his life due to a desperate business failure before meeting Jesus. He cursed reality, tried to forget everything with alcohol, and decided to die, carrying drugs in his pocket. Then, as God extended a loving hand to him, his life began to change. Concentrating on making money, he was reborn with a firm identity as God's chosen child. As Korea's largest rice farmer, it produces 12,000 islands of rice every year.
In order to answer the question ‘What is life and how should we live it?’, we need to ask three questions. The two questions are 'Where am I from? Where am I going?’ These two questions are related to human history and destiny and belong to teleology. It is about the intrinsic need to have direction and purpose in life. The third question is 'What is valuable to me?' It is about value theory. Everything we invest our life, effort, time, and finances into are our values. We believe that it is valuable, so we believe it is well worth the investment. Intellectual value content is expressed in words, whereas values in the heart are the decisive attitudes and realizations of life emanating from the mind.
The fundamental question to these three questions is, “How do we know?” Through which glasses do we see the world? We want to know how our knowledge determines right and wrong. (This is epistemology.) We believe that God has revealed the truth to us. The answer to all questions about life and how to live it must be found in God's Word of the Bible and the revelations through Jesus. This is God's plumb line.
When we answer these questions, we discover our own worldview. We each have our own worldview, which is the story of what we believe and why we believe it. The worldview includes the origin, nature, and destiny of humans and the universe, as well as the role and purpose of human beings in the universe. Human responses to these fundamental questions about life vary and depend on the epistemological glasses of seeing the world. Some worldviews include monotheism, polytheism, atheism, atheistic humanism, atheistic rationalism, atheistic existentialism, and mysticism. One of these worldviews is that people have.
Everything but monotheism speaks of man's efforts to find answers as he moves away from God. Atheistic humanism and atheistic rationalism that excludes God can see man struggling to become God.
This erroneous worldview was created to seduce humans from the God of love and bind them to become slaves of Satan.