January 18, 2011
Turning Away
When a person says or does something that’s inappropriate, such as having a foul mouth or telling an off-color joke, my normal reaction is to avert my eyes and turn my head away from them. God seems to do something similar with the disobedience of the house of Israel. “And the nations will know that the people of Israel went into exile for their sin, because they were unfaithful to me. So I hid my face from them...” (Eze 39:23 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----If Adam and Eve had not listened to Satan and ate the forbidden fruit, would God have had an eternal mess on His hands in what to do with Satan then? Or would one of their children have listened and ate, giving the world a few eternal humans and a bunch of dying ones? If the house of Israel had obeyed God impeccably, all the nations and peoples would have had irrefutable evidence of God’s truth and existence before their eyes in all the things God would have done for them. Maybe obedience to God would have become irresistible in the light of His interactions. Then who would have failed to recognize Christ when He came, and who would have crucified Him as the atonement for our sins? Would the world’s eyes be set to see its problems’ answered in the AntiChrist had the church lived in the unity Jesus prayed for her and had she heeded His warnings in the seven letters of Revelations? The requirements God gave to man with the security He would have provided by man’s obedience are part of His actual plans for providing that security through His mercy upon man’s failure to live as He requires.
-----I believe this mercy is a big part of the manifold wisdom He is making known to the principalities and powers of the heavenly places through the church (Eph 3:10). Certainly the behavior of the church exhibited in the New Testament and in the centuries of its history that followed has not been a great showing of unity within and loving kindness to all. And it still has not become that today. The blood in her trails, doctrinal bickering, and jealous strife over who gets to lead the masses has turned the world away from knowing that Christ was sent by God (John 17:21) as much as Israel’s disobedience left the world of its time in pagan confusion. Yet God, being faithful though all men be false, remains in His church and beside His Israel.
-----What God would have done in response to our obedience and what He does do out of His mercy is a message of history. The history we make of our ongoing lives is also a message. It is our message. We each understand things a little differently and state things by our responses a little differently, meaning we each get things a little right and a little wrong. God needs His people to hold each other’s behavior up to His standards as they understand them. Some of us do this in a spirit that accentuates required obedience; others accentuate the mercy shown to failure. Without the one, I think standards would crumble. Without the other, I think people would crumble.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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