Reading the bible sometimes I often wondered why some people
didn’t ask God for forgiveness after God passed a judgement on them, they just
accepted it without any attempt to beg or anything. How will you feel if you
scolded your child and told him he was grounded and he said very casually ok no
problem, will you not feel insulted that the punishment didn’t even make him
apologise? Take another instance if you worked in an organisation and the boss
queried you and passed judgement on you because of your poor performance and
you know that organisation has a very good reputation people hustle to work
there, the pay is fantastic and the boss is known to be the most generous boss
ever , he has a reputation of being extremely loving, caring, kind , generous
,and good, he likes excellence and hard work and you know you obviously didn’t
do a great job, will you get offended with that boss and leave the job instead
of humbling yourself and apologise promising such will never happen again?. I
believe that is the proper way to go about it and this is also the proper way
to go about it if the judgement or rebuke comes from God. We need to be still
and know that he is God and that he has the power to kill and to make alive, he
cannot be queried, and he does as he pleases, so what profit is there to ignore
the one who has the full authority and power over everything and who has the
final say in every matter.
Many people have lost their jobs this way, they have lost
the best job they could ever have, because they left in anger thinking they
could find a better job, or maybe a better boss but they never did. By job, I
mean God’s divine will and purpose for our lives, many people God has sent into
our lives we have either run away from them or been too proud to accept their correction,
but it wasn’t really them doing the correcting it was God doing the correcting
it was Gods way of steering us into his perfect will for our lives.
I am reminded of King Belshazzar after Daniel had
interpreted the writing on the wall, I expected that after he heard the judgement
of what the writing on the wall meant, to cry to God for mercy or ask Daniel what
he must do so that the judgement will not come through and Daniel would have
told him, but the bible didn’t state that he made any move to do so and that
night he was killed (Daniel 5: 1-30). When God told Eli through a man of God
and then through Samuel all he had done wrong not bringing up his sons properly
and the judgement that would come upon his family, Eli said let God do as he
pleases, no begging for mercy, no trying to make amends, nothing. Eli and his
two son died shortly after (1 Samuel 2: 12 – 4: 11).
It is safer to kneel down and ask God for forgiveness, it is
also better to come to God in your sinful state than to run away from him in
that state because the devil will be pleased to deceive you even more. This is
usually the difference between one individual and another, not that the other
is more righteous but the wise one recognises that he needs to humble himself
and ask God to help him, the foolish one thinks ‘I can do it all by myself’. We
are carrying too much load that Jesus didn’t ask us to carry, he said we should
cast our burdens on him, and that we can do all things through Christ who
strengthens us. (Psalm 55:22; Phil 4: 13)
So before we walk away in anger, before we decide ‘it is not
our business they can say or do what they like’, be still and know that it is
GOD for God is not a man that he should lie, the son of man that he should
repent. Many have gone off course, truncated their destinies because they failed
to realise that in all the criticism, mocking, humiliation it was God at work.
God has everything worked out from the beginning, he knew that man will
disappoint you after he promised to marry you, he knew your close friends would
turn their backs on you when you really needed them, he knew your marriage will
be a testing ground for you to build up your faith in him, he knew and knows it
all because he created it all.
In the midst of the storm be still and know that he is God,
in that situation God is trying to bring new wine out of you, trying to make you
the woman or man he originally made you to be in the beginning. Nobody has got
it all together, and so if anyone tells you or makes you feel he or she has got
it all together without Jesus it is clearly a big fat lie, it is only Jesus
that makes us truly sane. How can we run the Christian race without Jesus? It is
impossible to do it in our own strength. When we are being rebuked or going
through challenges, it doesn’t matter who God is using to rebuke us, or what
the challenges might be, it is wisdom to be still and take time to ask God if
he is trying to tell us something. With all the chaos going on around you,
before you start making wrong judgements and making nasty comments that will
make the situation even worse be still and know that God is at work.
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