Title: Jin Chang-gil and the Miracle
Contents
What God delights the most in our worship is that we restore our dulled sensibility, awaken our sleeping souls, and renew our thirsty spirits, so that we can joyfully praise our lives and pray to God. I believe it is something that will make you sing. Because we are exhausted from our work in life, and because of the various wounds and worries of life, our greed and sins, our souls are easily withered and sometimes hardened like stones. I believe you want to be soft and dance for joy.
We are gathered before a holy God so that we may realize that we are, by nature, holy people, created in the image of a holy God, even though we sometimes deceive ourselves and sometimes deceive others in a muddy world. because of.
That today is a holy day, that this day of worship we worship is, as Abraham Joshua Hessel put it, “the most holy place in time,” is that we wash away the darkness and lies of our hearts, and resurrect the holy image of God in our souls. , I believe it is because it is the day when we make a new decision to live as holy people.
Believe that our church is a "holy place" because it is a place where we confess our sins and are forgiven, fill our whole body with the life force of God who always makes all things new, and also share that life force with other saints. wish.
Today's Bible text is the story of an incident where God's people safely crossed the Red Sea through the miracle that God made a way through the Red Sea when the Israelites fled from Egypt. It is a text we are all too familiar with. In verses 16 and 22 in the text, it is clearly confessed that “they passed on dry ground”, but when I think about it again, God pushed the sea back with a strong east wind, and the sea parted, and the people of Israel went into the middle of the sea. If they went in, wouldn't it mean that they walked in mudflats? Even if I hadn't walked through muddy mud like the west coast that fell to my knees, I suddenly thought that I would have walked on a wet and slippery muddy road like a beach after low tide, not "dry land" like a white sandy beach. I did.
One.
King Pharaoh led all 600 Egyptian special chariots and infantry units and pursued them right behind them, but the sea was blocked in front of them. With tanks in the back and the sea in front, it must have been crazy. It was a situation in which one could not move forward and one could not step back, and death was chasing from behind, but death was waiting in front of them. It must have been the moment when your lips were dry. 14:10 says, "The people of Israel were very afraid and cried out to the Lord. They grumbled against Moses," and in 14:15, "The Lord said to Moses, 'Why are you crying?' Why do you only cry out to me?"). Moses, too, must have been really pitiful. In verse 15, God said, "Tell the children of Israel to go forward," and in verse 16 he says, "Take up your staff and stretch out your arm over the sea, so that the sea is divided."
Moving forward comes first and miracles come next. I believe this means that if we boldly move forward in a dilemma, God's miracles will happen at the last minute that even divide the seas.
2.
The Israelites would have had to walk through the dark mud all night long. When I thought there was no way out, I moved forward by the grace of God who miraculously made a way into the middle of the sea, but my enemies still pursued me. Verse 23 says, "Pharaoh's horses, chariots, and horsemen all followed after the people of Israel into the midst of the sea." Even though the sea is parting and fleeing into it, you must still be restless and anxious. Although it was behind the pillar of cloud and brightly lit the side where the Israelites were, it was midnight, and it must have been a darker night because of their anxiety.
As such, there are many times when we think that not only our personal lives, but also our history is like walking through a muddy road. When you look at the photos of many young people who died here and there while defending the wiretap until the last 22 years ago during the Gwangju Incident, we must be sober so that their blood will not be in vain. We think that it will not happen, but when we see how our society works, we still think that we are walking on the muddy path of history.
3.
How do we find renewed strength when we think we are walking on a muddy path like this, personally and historically, that will never end? In Jewish commentaries there is a story of Ruben and Simon. It is said that they continued to complain as they crossed the Red Sea all night long. Too dark, too slippery. They told them that the Red Sea miracle did not happen. If you don't see a miracle and just complain, it doesn't happen. We must look up and see the miracle of God who parted the sea. Even if we live each day like a muddy road, we should see the miracle of God who rescued us from death and the miracle of God who made us alive. Verse 22 says, “The water became a wall that covered them from the left and right.” There must have been beautiful coral reefs, pearl oysters, and fish in the sea on either side of the road they walked.
As a part-time lecturer in college for the past 10 years, which is the most exploited job in Korea, I experienced well what a jinchang-gil is. How did you survive 10 years? Every morning I wake up, consciously thinking that I immigrated from Jupiter last night, and I wake up with my eyes wide open. When you think of living on Jupiter where there is no grass, not a single bug, and then immigrating to Earth last night from Jupiter where there is no life, everything was a miracle. It was a thrill to be alive every day. I was able to dance to the melody of Daegeumsanjo every morning.
Teacher Da-seok Yoo Young-mo once said this. Christianity is said to be "a religion within a brick wall".
In my own interpretation of those words, Mr. Yoo Young-mo, who enjoyed looking at the night sky through a telescope, said that Christianity does not talk about nothingness and emptiness like Buddhism, but because of the influence of Greek philosophy, it is a religion that only thinks about things that exist. I think of it as a criticism of "religion within a brick wall" that takes everything that exists for granted.
A map of the universe made by National Geographic a few years ago showed that the universe had a radius of 75 million light-years. There are 100 billion galaxies in it, and one of them is 100,000 light-years in diameter. In that endlessly distant space, every existence is a miracle. In particular, life is a miracle itself. It is said that even a single sparrow is a miracle in this universe.