Chapter 58
January 3
Psalm 18:3,6,41
"I called to the Lord, who is worthy of praise, and I have been saved from my enemies. In my distress I called to the Lord; I cried to my God for help. From His temple He heard my voice; my cry came before Him, into His ears."
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Preface
God is analogous to the sun. The sun uses its own fuel to produce and provide light, giving it to the earth and our solar system. It's the earth's primary source of warmth. From this we get life. Life on the planet couldn't exist without it.
It's within and from out of God we find the inner workings of the creation process. He's the source of the sun.
God uses the fuel of love to create the processes that we call life. He is the light of light.
And we are His rays. It's in this way we're all connected at the source of our existence. And each one of us was born to be a ray of light, sent from God to earth. We represent a collective source of His light to the world, providing people with love's warmth and life.
People on the planet couldn't exist without it. Without love we would have killed all of ourselves off ages ago.
This is what fear wants.
Fear purposes to rip us into eight billion splintered suns, toward the objective of snuffing out life's light. It wants to extinguish faith's fire. Its goal is to essentially (re)terraform the earth, returning it to the original "home" from out of which it was born. When "...the earth was formless and empty...." When "...darkness was over the surface of the deep."
It wants things to go back to the time before "The Spirit of God" hovered over the waters and said, "Let there be light." (Genesis 1:2-3)
First God created light and separated it from darkness. He called the light good. (Genesis 1:3)
When we call something "good," whether we realize it or not, we're actually saying that it's God's created light.
But later God created the sun, moon and stars. God created these because, as He said, for us to essentially have the ability to develop a calendar. (Genesis 1:14-18) These celestial bodies served as smaller sources of light, providing it in varying degrees, inside the separated realm of light/darkness created earlier. So what was the first light?
It was choice. The first thing created was faith. In other words, faith was separated from fear. And faith was called good.
To call anything good is to call it faith.
And we were made with a readily available choice.
How did God create this? He spoke it. As we learned in Fear Not Chapter 38, to "speak" is to promise. This means that God promised us light, and all the good, life and love in which we find there, if we choose it over the darkness.
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The entirety of Psalm 18, from which today's verses come, is a near complete repeat of 2 Samuel 22. (See Fear Not Chapter 39.)
"In my distress I called to the Lord." Here David defines the Lord according to five military accoutrements (identifying characteristics): 1) Rock, 2) Fortress, 3) Shield, 4) Horn and 5) Stronghold.
1) 'Rock' is taken from the Hebrew word 'sela.' Synonymous with refuge, this too means to be 'lofty'; a 'fortress' that's set inaccessibly high. But in this sense it speaks to God being our unshakeable foundation upon which we're built, unreachable by faith's enemies who reside in and operate from fear, which exists far below. Faith's floor is fear's ceiling.

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