The God Of Our Ancestors

By Odon Bulamba (summary only - 26 Oct, 01)

The Lord is good and His loving kindness has no limits. If you were to count what the Lord has done in your life you won’t be able to find words that are worthy enough for our God to hear. Unfortunately as human beings we are ungrateful and when God does something for us we believe that He should do it anyway. You may say you have a right to live, or it is your right to wake up every morning, but when we say this we are mistaken because this right belongs to someone else. We are like eggs to God, we live but we don’t know God’s last decision because we don’t know what will happen in the next 2 minutes, and this is why God is called the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Abraham is the father of our faith.

Acts 7:32, I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac & Jacob. Moses trembled with fear and did not dare to look.

Who is the God of our ancestors? Because we are not grateful God reminds us that He is the God of our ancestors, so who are our ancestors? Why does God say that He is the God of our ancestors? It is because they use to live as we do today, they also said, “we have the right to live”, but where are they now? God wants us to look at what happened to our ancestors because everything that existed back then exists today. Our ancestors use to eat, drink, marry and pray to God, but when their lives stopped they had to give an account to God, so we must learn from them. How did they live? Did their lives please God? If their lives didn’t please God, what can we as Christians do today to avoid the same mistakes they made?

Many people are selfish because they don’t think about other people’s lives, whether they are pagans or Christian’s selfishness is a problem for a lot of people. If you are lucky enough to have a grandfather you can tell him that the God we pray to is the God of his ancestors. Our first ancestor was Adam, it means that we must think from Adam’s time up until now. It is not enough to say they are just your ancestors but they are all those who lived before you. God created pagan and Christian, so don’t be surprised that a pagan says that their God lives in heaven.

One thing that God doesn’t like is for us to imitate what our ancestors did, and this is called culture. If your ancestors didn’t have a culture that fitted God’s word you will sin, and when you sin nobody will help you.

1 Corinthians 11:16, if anyone wants to be contentious about this, we have no other practice, nor do the churches of God.

Many Christians practice their culture. So, what do we do, do we follow the cultures of our ancestors, or do we follow God? Culture causes confusion in the church and in the life of a Christian. In New Zealand the Maori have their protocol’s whether you are Christian or not, and they do things according to their ancestors, but as Christians today we must think about their behaviour to see if it fits with God’s word.

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