Friday, February 14, 2020

Paying the Price

Friday, February 14, 2020

Then at last the land will enjoy its neglected Sabbath years as it lies desolate while you are in exile in the land of your enemies.  Then the land will finally rest and enjoy the Sabbaths it missed.  As long as the land lies in ruins, it will enjoy the rest you never allowed it to take every seventh year while you lived in it.  “And for those of you who survive, I will demoralize you in the land of your enemies.  You will live in such fear that the sound of a leaf driven by the wind will send you fleeing.  You will run as though fleeing from a sword, and you will fall even when no one pursues you.  Though no one is chasing you, you will stumble over each other as though fleeing from a sword.  You will have no power to stand up against your enemies.  You will die among the foreign nations and be devoured in the land of your enemies.  Those of you who survive will waste away in your enemies’ lands because of their sins and the sins of their ancestors.  “But at last my people will confess their sins and the sins of their ancestors for betraying me and being hostile toward me.  When I have turned their hostility back on them and brought them to the land of their enemies, then at last their stubborn hearts will be humbled, and they will pay for their sins.  Then I will remember my covenant with Jacob and my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land.  For the land must be abandoned to enjoy its years of Sabbath rest as it lies deserted.  At last the people will pay for their sins, for they have continually rejected my regulations and despised my decrees.  “But despite all this, I will not utterly reject or despise them while they are in exile in the land of their enemies.  I will not cancel my covenant with them by wiping them out, for I am the Lord their God.  For their sakes I will remember my ancient covenant with their ancestors, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt in the sight of all the nations, that I might be their God.  I am the Lord.”  These are the decrees, regulations, and instructions that the Lord gave through Moses on Mount Sinai as evidence of the relationship between himself and the Israelites.  Leviticus 23:34-46

It may seem a harsh thing for God to be at the back of punishment.  The Israelites hadn’t even reached the Promised Land and Moses was laying out this threat that if they wouldn’t keep this commandment or that commandment, God was going to see them off in chains to their enemies.  Truth be told, punishment for sin is the one part of relationship with God that gives more people trouble than anything else.  It’s been my experience in the past 38 years as a pastor to hear these anguished and angry words quite often:
I find it impossible to believe in a God who sends people to Hell.
Yet that is the rub…I find it hard too!  And the hardest part for me isn’t that God SENDS people to their punishment; in reality God isn’t the one who chooses the rebellion that causes punishment, we do.  Like a ticked four year-old who stamps his feet and lashes out at his Mom or Dad because he isn’t allowed to drive the family car, rebellion is what it is…a kicking against rules we don’t like, but the wiser parent has chosen for our own good. 
The physical laws often find a parallel in spiritual realities.  For instance, in Newton’s Third Law of Motion[1], for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  For every up there is a down; for every cold there is hot…and so on.  So, the fact that punishment exists at all should be no surprise.  It would go against all the laws of creation for the opposite reaction of Newton’s law of motion to be interrupted.  The real surprise is anyone living in the kind of denial that imagines God could just wink at sin.  As our heavenly parent God is loving and desires a close relationship with us.  We can choose to accept God’s offer…or we can choose the other…the ball is in our court!
For You Today
You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!
Title Image:  Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©

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