Do you get the feeling that the most offensive thing to God
is denial of sin? When Jeremiah
announces the Lord’s judgment on the nation their response is to ask what they
have done to deserve this. The response
is that it is due to their fathers’ going after other gods and their own
stubbornness in following their own desires, refusing to listen to Him at
all. It doesn’t seem fair to punish them
for their fathers’ sins and yet the problem is that the fathers’ turning away
to other gods has now caused this generation to be so far removed from truth that
they can’t hear or understand. I think
we see a great deal of that in our society today. Because my generation decided to do what felt
right we have then excused nearly everything and have no moral authority
remaining. Unless we repudiate our
philosophy and deal with the sin in our lives honestly and humbly, we cannot
recover any moral authority in the church today. We have to actually turn back the clock on
issues like divorce before we can have anything useful to say regarding
marriage. We can choose to repent or we
can choose the wilderness. The good
news, then and now, is that ultimately God will restore a remnant.
John says, “a large crowd was following him, because they
saw the signs that he was doing on the sick.”
He doesn’t say that they were believing Jesus to be Messiah because of
that but they were following because of the signs. Signs on the interstate tell us where to get
something, food, gas, lodging, but in order to enjoy what is offered we have to
commit to the exit. These people were
intrigued by the signs and looking for the next one, so Jesus had compassion on
them, they were seeking. After He feeds
them John tells us, “When the people saw the sign that he had done, they said,
“This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!” They interpret the sign and make a commitment
to Him but they want to make Him king and so Jesus withdraws alone. His popularity was never greater and yet
their interpretation is wrong, it is simply a temptation to what satan
promised, not what the Father wanted. A
king who takes care of my needs is what I would prefer but God gave us so much
more.
In an oblique way, Paul is pointing to the garden. Sin, he says, “seizing an opportunity through
the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.” The law doesn’t produce covetousness for
example, what it does is to connect with the sin nature of desire inside me and
causes me to focus on the prohibition in the same way it aroused the desire in
Adam and Eve for the forbidden fruit. It
causes us to think of the forbidden thing as good and desirable rather than God
as good. We have to make a choice, do we
believe that thing is good because it is forbidden or that God is good and
forbids for our good. When we begin to
choose the forbidden things we are going further astray from the true
good. The grace of God and the spirit of
God in us free us from the law that causes that sin nature to raise up within
us to desire the good, the true good, we see the prohibition as evidence of His
goodness. We can repent.
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