DAILY HOPE DEVOTIONALS: NOVEMBER 2 DO WE STILL HAVE ALTAR OF REMEMBRANCE? (1) SCRIPTURE: GENESIS 8: 18 – 21

What information do you easily see while entering someone’s house? It is probably family pictures of course. The pictures ranges from husband and wife, line up of photographs of children according to their birth ages. In like manner car owners hang picture of a loved one or a personality the car owner adores. Football fans host emblems of their club team. Common features in many urban settlements in Africa are epitaphs on graves of departed loved ones with inscriptions of the names of the dead ones and details about dates of their birth and day they died.

All these point at how human beings have desire to be remembering certain events in life or keeping memory of somebody. In the Old Testament times, people of Israel are noted for raising altars, not basically for worshipping God but for the remembrance of their peculiar encounter with God.

At various times, the people of Israel set up altars of remembrance at a place where God did a spectacular powerful miracle, or at a place God dramatically rescued His people. Altar can be raised at a place where God taught the people of Israel an important lesson, either by punishing them or delivering them. The people of Israel never joked with erecting altar for God in memorial reasons and for worshipping God. Majority of altars raised in the Old Testament were for the purposes of refreshing their memories of God’s spectacular encounter with them. We are to bring to focus, the importance of using altars for remembering the good works of God in our lives. Among Christians, it seems like the place of altar for remembrance of God’s faithfulness is been down played in favour of “personal altar” being preached or taught widely these days._

As good as building personal altars is; this devotional desires to draw the attention of readers to the uniqueness of altar of remembrance. The first mentioned case of raising an altar for the LORD God was in Gen. 8: 20 where Noah built an altar and offered burnt offering of every clean animals and birds to God for saving him and his family from the flood. This altar was for them, to keep remembering this great favour God bestowed on Noah. As many times as Noah visited this altar, he refreshed his memory of the great deliverance from the flood. This is a pertinent question: Do we still build remembrance altar for God? Raising altars for family devotion or personal place to talk with God is important. However, using personal altar for pride and show of superiority over others should be reconsidered._

PRAYER:

FATHER LORD, I detest raising personal altar that does not built a bridge between me and my trust on you. Make me know how to build altar for you in my heart rather than in my head only. I prayed this in the name of Jesus.

bishopubaudenyi@hopealivechurch