"Where is God?"
"Maybe instead of making God prove himself to us, we need to prove ourselves to God"
I find this statement flawed at base from a Biblical standpoint. Some examples like Gideon, Moses, and multiple followers of Jesus show that God is not opposed to proving himself... When it will actually make a difference. Most of the time when someone asks where is God, they are standing in broad daylight with a blindfold on, saying "where is the sun!?!" They are like an alzheimer's unit hiding their own easter eggs. They hide the truth from themselves and complain that they cannot find it.
The followup that we need to prove ourselves to God is a disasterous line of thought. First off, we can never measure up to God's standards. Paul points out in Romans that we can't even stand up to our own standards. Which of us could stand if our own standards of Good were immortalized on stone tablets and then we were judged by them? Certainly not I!
How much more lost are we then when standing against God's perfection? Even if we ignored the foolishness of it, and took a standpoint of borrow a penny here, pay back a penny there to God, and we come out even, we would have a hard time coming out even. Let's ignore the fact that we are here to Love God all the time and do the good he has previously provided for us to do all the time, and make the false assumption that we can act positively, negatively, or neutral in any situation. We can't, but for the sake of arguement, lets say we can.
We are still stuck, because it is God, not us who determines where the pennies lie. Like a babysitter that lets the kids draw on the walls, and the parents determine that to even out this iniquity you have to do the dishes, we foolishly prefer to try to whitewash the wood paneled wall to pay them back. But when the parents arrive, what will they say? You have failed, because not only did you let the kids draw on the wall, you then tried to hide it from us!
We have this nasty habit of trying to fix things our way instead of doing things God's way. I was brought to this line of thought by my devotions in Deuteronomy 1. Deuteronomy is kind of Moses' recap to the Jews of their current situation, as their generation is "screwed" and their children are all that get to go into the promised land.
Here's the deal, God gets the Jews out of Egypt through miraculous plagues against their captors, he pulls them across the Red Sea while they are being pursued by the Egyptian Army, simultaneously delivering Israel out of Egypt and destroying the following forces. He then feeds them, providing meat, bread and water miraculously, on a daily basis. He makes a covenant with them, shows them special favor in battles, brings them to the steps of the promised land! Sounds like a pretty awesome deal, right? What would any of us give to get to see even ONE of these great acts in our lifetimes? This generation saw EVERY ONE of these miracles, and what do they do?
"Lets send out spies" Because you know, God might be holding out on us, this "land of milk and honey" well, it may not be all it's cracked up to be, and what if the other team has a good defensive line?
The spies go out, and 10 of the 12 come back with this report "The land over there, is awesome! but we'll never be able to kick the people out, there's giants, angel/human hybrids that are immortal, and we'll get our butts handed to us, so let's not bother" And Israel despairs.
God, at this point, is understandably pissed. He's led these whining complaining irritating people out of slavery, across uncrossable deserts, through a sea! He's defeated one of the most formidible nations ON EARTH for them single handedly without one of them taking up arms, and now they are afraid of a few measly city states? As if he's not big enough to handle them? Fine! have it your way! You don't want in? Great! I won't let you in! You can all DIE, and I'll show your children special favor and let them in, even though they didn't get to see all the awesome stuff I just did for you guys.
So what do the people do? Do they listen to God and go to the desert to hurry up and die so their kids can get the benefits of the promised land? Of course not, we're humans! They said "maybe God doesn't need to prove himself to us, maybe we need to prove ourselves to him!"
"Hey I know how, lets go do the thing he told us to do in the first place, you know before he told us we could have what we wanted and die in the desert!"
"Yah, that's a great idea, it'll show him we're strong enough and trusting enough to be his people, there's no way he's going to have us all die without entering the promised land then!"
Moses, of course, warns them that God's not going with them and they are all going to die. But what do they do? They go throw rocks at the big kids, and they get their butts kicked "from Seir all the way to Hormah" I did my best to try to figure this out, Seir doesn't exist any more and I can't find it on a map, but we know it's "in the hill country" so I'm figuring somewhere a bit south west of Jerusalem to be generous, and Hormah is estimated to be about half way down the dead sea, and about 15 miles out from the coast, I've seen it farther south on some atlases of the time. Using a kind estimation, they got slaughtered for about 35 miles. For a city's forces, this is pretty incredible. These guys chased them what would take a single man well loaded 2 to 3 days to travel. They must have been doing pretty well to chase them out that far from home, willing to risk getting cut off from supplies, or be 2 days out in the event of a secondary attack on the city.
The point is that God doesn't want us to Prove ourselves, God just wants us to do what he says the first time. He loves us and wants what's best for us, and just wants us to love him and trust him, that he's not holding out on us. There is no more than what God has to offer us. And no matter what we do, we can't prove ourselves to God, and if we're honestly trusting, he's not going to have to prove himself to us. And in my experience, that is the atmosphere where really remarkable things happen, where I am trusting enough that I'm not suprised by God coming through.
No comments:
Post a Comment