Full of Eyes @fullofeyes-blog - Tumblr Blog

New Website - fullofeyes.com

Hello all,

I’m sure some of you have been assuming that Full of Eyes died since there has been no update for 1/2 a year. This is simply because in August of 2014 I launched FoE as an actual ministry and am now - by God’s grace - working full time creating new pictures, animations, blog posts, study guides, etc.

So, to stay up to date with Full of Eyes (including new blog posts) just visit the new site: Fullofeyes.com

Ok, thank you much

in Him,

Chris

Upheld by Invincible, Wounded Hands

The Lord is the upholder of my life

- Psalm 54:4

What a wonderful word, what a wonderful hope. Our lives are upheld by someone else.

The Christian's life is not a free standing structure. It is not a self-supported tower, it is upheld by the strength of another, it is sustained by the arms of someone else….that alone is a powerful reality, and a greatly comforting one. God commands us to stand, but HE holds us up.

My soul clings to you; your right hand upholds me

- Psalm 63:8

And the right hand that upholds my soul is wounded…the right hand that sustains me has been pierced by my punishment, and bears the wounds that should have been my damnation.

The scars inflicted by hell's fire on my Savior's hands are now seals of my eternal hope, emblems of my acceptance, springs of divine blessing and heralds of God's love….my soul clings to Him, and His wounded-yet-sovereign right hand upholds me.

And consider the wonder of this:

The sovereign hand of God is wounded. The hand that controls all things and orders all things according to His will and p

urpose bears the scars of death….

What sort of God is this, then, who uses His omnipotence to lay down his own life?

Here's an update on a new direction my wife and I believe God is leading us in ministry. I'd love to have your support in this endeavor if you feel so inclined.

An animation showing how God in the flesh took our curse and died in our place so that we could know and love Him.

The Distress-Flag of a Broken Heart

"The Lord is near to the brokenhearted…"

- Psalm 34:18

A broken heart in one of God's people is like a flag of distress waving above a battle-worn fortress. Though God is always near to those who are in Christ...there is a special sense in which He pulls close to the brokenhearted.

When He sees that "flag", He draws near. He is NEAR to the broken hearted….NEAR to the weak and mourning….NEAR to us when tears well up in the heart and our soul's breathing comes in gasps….at that moment, the God of reality and Lord of existence stoops near to us as our Comforter….And notice that there is no description of what sort of "broken heart" this is....God leaves it open so that we can take hold of this promise in a myriad of situations.

And YHWH, One True God can be near to us in a way unlike any other false God because, our God alone knows what it is to have a broken heart. He knows what it is to be utterly abandoned, to be hated, to be mocked, to be murdered by those whom He loves…in Christ, God is both sovereign OVER suffering and a sharer IN suffering,

Comfort comes best from one who has suffered as we have suffered, and only the God of the Bible can wipe away our tears with a hand that has both ordained and borne all of our pain.

A Mighty Hand and Outstretched Arm

"And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm…"

- Deuteronomy 26:8

YHWH drew His people out of their slavery in Egypt with a mighty hand of sovereign authority and an outstretched arm, sending devastation and plague on those who opposed Him. It was through His salvation of His captive people, and His decimation of the Egyptian gods that the One True God showed Himself to be "YHWH", the LORD, the one and only Sovereign of the universe and the One to whom all worship is due.

However, nearly 1,500 years later, God would again – and more perfectly – communicate Himself to the world as YHWH, the supreme Savior and Sovereign and Satisfier of His people. Through His Beloved Son - Jesus Christ - God would again save His people from slavery…but this time the people would be from every nation, tribe, and language, and He would save them - not from slavery to people - but from soul-damning sin.

And His salvation would again come from His mighty hand outstretched arm….but this time the mighty hand would bear the wounds of His invincible love, and the outstretched arm would be spread out on a cross.

Behold Your God –

Enthroned on the Cross

Reigning from the Tree

Subduing His enemies in weakness

Eternally redeeming His people through death

Fulfilling every hope by dashing them against the Stumbling Stone of the Crucified Messiah

Saving the nations with a Mighty Hand, pierced by Roman steel

And an Outstretched Arm, bound to rough hewn timber.

THIS is how God shows Himself to the nations. THIS is how God saves His people. THIS is how God distinguishes Himself from every false deity and puts to shame every imposter to His throne.

Through death He slays death, and raises His people up to Himself with indomitable and sovereign, and holy love – "with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm."

A picture inspired by Paster Matthew Westerholm's sermon at Bethlehem Baptist Church this last weekend.

The Glory of Sinai

"The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, 'The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation.'”

- Exodus 34:6-7

And when Jesus laid down His life on Calvary, He perfectly embodied this self-description and showed all of Creation what God is like...

God will punish sin and He will show love to His people....and the cross alone makes this possible.

Wrath Fall

"Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief; when his soul makes an offering for guilt, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the LORD shall prosper in his hand." - Isaiah 53:10

The Awesome Cost of "Fear Not"

Matthew 17:5-7, "…a voice from the cloud said, 'This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to Him.' When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces and were terrified. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, 'Rise, and have no fear.'"

We must ask this question: How can Jesus, the Holy One of God, the One whose purity humbles Seraphic eyes and incinerates the wicked, how can He say to three sinful men "have no fear”?

Jesus can tell His disciples to fear not while they stand in the midst of glory and light on the mount of Transfiguration because He will hang in the midst of shame and darkness on Golgotha…

The face that shone like the Sun on this mountain will be beaten beyond human semblance on that one…

The garments that were as white as light on this mountain will be stained with divine blood on that one…

The cloud of God's favorable presence will become the darkness of abandonment…

And the voice that declared "this is my Beloved Son" will be silenced while the Beloved Son cries, "My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?"

Because the Author of Life and the Lord of Light will be crushed for the wickedness of Peter, James and John (and anyone reading this who will trust Christ as Lord) and then will rise up in invincible victory from the grave…that is why He can say, “have no fear.”

And for everyone who is trusting Him…He says the same today.

Easter

Good Friday

The Blessed Wounds of Those Who Mourn

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted."

- Matthew 5:4

Why are those who mourn blessed?

Jesus says it is because they will be comforted.

So, this comfort must be something that they will receive that they would not have had apart from their particular experience of mourning. The comfort Jesus promises to mourning believers is not simply a return to a "pre-mourning" state. Rather, it is a unique healing of their unique wound which will bless them in unique ways that those who never mourned as they did will never experience.

So, Jesus looks at His disciples in all eras…He looks into the tear-worn eyes of a young mother who has lost her child, into the confused eyes of an elderly man succumbing to Alzheimer's, into the terrified eyes of a child whose world is collapsing, the suffocating eyes of the depressed, the darting eyes of the anxious, the frail eyes of the cancer-stricken…He looks into every mourning eye and says:

"This this sorrow, this weight, this terror, this ache will be comforted with a comfort that I have designed uniquely for your pain…and through the comfort I will pour into this particular wound, you will know me in ways more beautifully and intimately than would have been possible in any other way."

Christian, mourning in this life is carving a sovereignly designed wound into our souls, one that no one else shares in exactly the same way – and when Christ fills those wounds with His individually tailored comfort in the coming ages, the very thing that brought us to the brink of death by sorrow in this age will be a source of rapturous communion with our Lord in the one to come…

So, blessed are those who mourn…because comfort awaits them…a comfort that they could have had in no other way.

The King of Terrors

"He is torn from the tent in which he trusted and is brought to the King of Terrors."

- Job 18:14,

A haunting image of an unbeliever's death…the trusted tent of security is torn to shreds, like a wet paper towel in a wind storm, and the unbeliever, naked and without defense, is dragged before Jesus Christ - the blazing King of Terrors…

The King of Terrors…a living mountain of fire, with piercing, searching eyes fixed on their exposed souls. Nowhere to run, nowhere to seek shelter, no excuses to be made, no repentance is offered…only an inescapable judgment followed by unending, unspeakable horror at the command of the King of Terrors.

This is the lot of the one who dies in opposition to Christ…the one who dies without having been reconciled to God…For the unbeliever, there is a "Miserific" rather than Beatific vision awaiting past the paper-thin door of death…For them, the Prince of Peace presents Himself as the King of Terrors…and though He is the same person who will be the believer's exceeding joy and soul-satisfaction, the very holiness that makes Him our hope will make Him the unbeliever's horror and damnation……

Seeing Jesus will be our supreme Joy or the final Terror, depending on how out hearts have responded to Him in this life.

Ah, Lord….King of Terrors and King of Joy…have mercy on the world, Lord…have mercy on those who don't know you…have mercy for the sake of your name on the lost….that they might….that many might, Lord…see you as the King of Love and not of Terror. In Christ's name I ask, Amen.

Genesis 3:15

"...He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel."

- Genesis 3:15

The Two Breaths of Life

“Then the Lord God formed man of the dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life…”

-Genesis 2:7

“Then Jesus called out in a loud voice, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!’ And having said this, He breathed His last.”

-Luke 23:46

Here in Genesis and Luke we see God's two "breaths of life", one the breath of natural life, and the other the breath of eternal life.

Who among the angels could have guessed that when the Almighty Creator stooped to breathe existence into His dust-born children that He would one day breathe out His very life so that they might never die…

When YHWH stooped down and breathed into the mold of clay that would become humanity, He did it knowing that this first breath would lead to His final agonized breath on an execution device that the children of this clay-man at his feet would design. Staggering.

So, when the Creator breathed into our first father's nostrils, He gave us natural life. And 8,000 years later, when the Creator breathed out His own life in death on the cross, He gave us eternal life.

Who is like this God?

YHWH

If we want to know who God is - we look to the Cross of Jesus Christ.

There is simply no where else for the human heart and mind to turn...God has determined that He will be most truly and most deeply and most beautifully, and most soul-satisfyingly, and most life-captivatingly known at the Cross...and to deny Christ, or to deny His death IS to deny the One True God Himself.

At the Cross the entire Trinity is present (Hebrews 9:14) in the single greatest communication of the Knowledge and Love of God that has ever taken place.

At the Cross God speaks His name to us through the language of His incarnate Son...and Name did He speak on that dark Friday afternoon?

"YHWH, YHWH, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and fourth generation".

- Exodus 34:6-7

What God whispers on Sinai, He shouts from Golgotha.

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