A friend was asked to give his ‘testimony’ to a group of people. If you are asked to give such a statement it is usually because you are highly respected for some quality you have displayed. It is a witness statement about one’s self so it is very revealing and very personal.
Our friend was thoughtful about giving his testimony and treated the request with great respect. He spent many weeks preparing exactly what he would tell everyone about a particular aspect of his life because he understood the permanency of what he was doing. He couldn’t change it if he got a bad reaction.
There are plenty of people who ‘testify’ and later say they did not mean what they said and there are plenty of people who will take a testimony out of context and try to alter the meaning of it.
So while it is an honour to be asked to open your deepest knowledge of yourself for scrutiny, it is also a most solemn charge. You must remember you are putting yourself on public record so anything you say may be used in evidence!
And that is exactly what the Lord God did. He put himself on public record, he gave evidence, not in a private office memo or in a spoken broadcast that could be re-written or misunderstood. He wrote his testimony in stone, Exodus 31:18.
You only have to read about archaeological discoveries of testimonies written on stone to know that such stoneware is regarded as incontrovertible truth.
Nobody knows what finally became of God’s testimonial stone but all is not lost – He gave us the transcript in Exodus 20, written as ten laws.
And He is still writing the same ‘testimony’ but now He writes on ‘living stones’. You will know it when He does because He said ‘I shall set my laws in their understanding and write them on their hearts,’ Hebrews 8:10.
Elizabeth Price
reprice@dragnet.com.au
Team writer with Just a Minute