Thursday, August 11, 2022

A Tale of Two Pities

 

Thursday, August 11, 2022

Come back, we beg you, O God of Heaven’s Armies.  Look down from heaven and see our plight.  Take care of this grapevine that you yourself have planted, this son you have raised for yourself.  For we are chopped up and burned by our enemies.  May they perish at the sight of your frown.  Strengthen the man you love, the son of your choice.  Then we will never abandon you again.  Revive us so we can call on your name once more.  Turn us again to yourself, O Lord God of Heaven’s Armies.  Make your face shine down upon us.  Only then will we be saved.  Psalm 80:14-19

Come, descendants of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the Lord!  For the Lord has rejected his people, the descendants of Jacob, because they have filled their land with practices from the East and with sorcerers, as the Philistines do.  They have made alliances with pagans.  Israel is full of silver and gold; there is no end to its treasures.  Their land is full of warhorses; there is no end to its chariots.  Their land is full of idols; the people worship things they have made with their own hands.  So now they will be humbled, and all will be brought low—do not forgive them.  Crawl into caves in the rocks.  Hide in the dust from the terror of the Lord and the glory of his majesty.  Human pride will be brought down, and human arrogance will be humbled.  Only the Lord will be exalted on that day of judgment.  Isaiah 2:5-11

It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.  Hebrews 10:31

The Psalmist and the Prophet both tell the tale of Israel’s political prowess and her inclusive diversity of religious tolerance; they also pity both, because all that power and prayer will come to nothing…they are to be pitied on the day they fall into the hands of an angry God.

Shows of religious piety are despicable in Heaven.  The Psalmist, praying for God’s strong arm to come defeat their enemies is hardly more than a show.  You cannot hide motive from God.  Times used to be good when Israel was the strong new kid on the block, fresh from the concert of Jericho’s walls crumbling, and Philistine heads rolling.  Now the worm has turned, and Israel is falling apart on every front.

The prophet points to warhorse military solutions, and idols made of stone and wood Israel counted-on in any crisis.  Isaiah warns the time was at hands to dump the idols, and ride the horses to a caves to hide from their real enemy…God! 

And the New Testament preacher to God’s beloved Hebrew nation reminds them it’s a bitter pill, being on the wrong side of God’s history.  Once they were the humble slaves released from Egyptian bondage, blessed with the might of God’s covenant in a land flowing with milk and honey; now they are back in bondage, supposedly God’s chosen, chosing pagan ways and means to chart their lives, proud, arrogant, and a stench in God’s holy nostrils.  It only takes a brief look at the history of Abraham’s descendants to see how judgment falls over and again, when people forget God to go their own way. 

In this country we have a 246-year history.  Compared to Israel’s 4,000 years since Abraham, we are merely toddlers.  But there is a parallel between the two nations that is obvious.  We have our warhorses (nuclear armed drones) and flag waving parades to sing God Bless America (in place of shrines and carved idols), but our motive is identical – invoke the name of God, and, like a magician’s spell, all will be well again.

In the words of all the other fools of history….yeah, sure…that’ll work!

For You Today

It seems our prayers for God to bless us for our righteousness haven’t worked all that well.  All that’s left is the plea of sinners for mercy.  Time to bend the knee, Amercia.

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these:  Falling Into the Hands of the Living God and A Dangerous Freedom      

[1] Images:  Pixabay.com     Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©   

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