A New Day

By: Pastor Johnie Akers     

Romans 11:33, “O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and His ways past finding out!”  As a young man, Christopher Columbus used to sit in the harbor and observe the ships as they approached the dock.  It was an era when many seamen believed that the world was flat, and the sea was filled with monsters.  The common lore was that if a person ventured too far out into the ocean, their ship would fall off the edge of the world into an abyss.  But Columbus noticed that when a ship would begin to appear over the horizon, the mast would first appear, then the sails, and then the entire ship would be visible.  It was apparent to him that the world was not flat but round. Instead of falling off into an abyss, a ship could circumnavigate the globe.  Our view of the horizon is limited by how far we can see.  But we know the world extends beyond our vision.  The same holds true for the cosmos.  The farther we peer into the universe, the more we discover.  The new planets revealed by space telescopes and satellites do not come into existence when we discover them.  They have existed long before we knew they were there.  The limitation, therefore, is not on what God has already created, but on the extent of what we can see.  So it is with the depths of God’s grace.  It is amazing to me that some religious voices of our day characterize grace in the same terms as those who believed the world was flat.  In fact, there remains to this day a Flat Earth Society.  Not so in the kingdom of God.  Each day God reveals to us the boundless expanse of His grace and mercy.  If grace is truly grace, then the limits we perceive are only because of our limited vision.  The more we seek, the more we find.  The more we find, the more we understand that God’s boundlessness is not confined to the cosmos, but also to His unfathomable love and grace, to each of us, waiting to be discovered, with each new day.