Following God is hard. After all, He’s invisible. You never know when He’s going to show up and intervene, or when He’s not. His work is constant, but the vast majority of it is hidden from our sight, underground, behind the scenes.
He would spring up when conditions were bad, when the people were being oppressed by some foreign power, and raise up a leader, call out an army and vanquish the foe. But then He would disappear again, waiting for the next crisis.
That’s how it seemed, anyway, and it made the Israelites more than a little nervous.
Never mind the fact that they always brought the crisis upon themselves. Never mind the fact that God always came through and always responded when they cried out to Him. Never mind any of that, they wanted something a little more tangible and visible.
They wanted a succession of leaders they could point to, great kings in the history of a great nation. They wanted a dynasty, a royal household with all the trimmings. Pomp and circumstance and high visibility. And a standing army, you know, just in case.
But God hadn’t given them any of those.
From God’s perspective, He was their king. He was their fearless and tireless leader. He could trump any of those earthly kings in all ways except one. He wasn’t very visible, very touchable. It took something more than a glance at the palace if you wanted to trust Him. It required actual trust. You had to believe in something you couldn’t see, based on what you had seen in the past.
That’s a critical point, God doesn’t just ask people to take a blind leap. The Israelites had 400 years’ worth of history with YHWH. They had 10 plagues and a Red Sea crossing, manna every morning and water in the wilderness. They’d seen the walls of Jericho come a-tumblin’ down. The very fact that they had managed to survive as a nation for over 350 years without a visible king should have given them a sense of security and enabled them to trust God even more.
But the people wanted something else. They wanted following God to be easy.
God never said following Him would be easy. Following Him requires a willingness to do what He asks even when it doesn’t make sense. Following Him requires a person to do things that appear counterintuitive: Give stuff away. Turn the other cheek. These things don’t make sense in an economy where what you see is what there is.
But we live in a different kind of economy, God’s economy, where there is more afoot than is apparent to the eye.
Following God is hard. After all, He is invisible. But the people who please God are those who make a decision to follow Him even when He can’t be seen.
O Lord, keep me from the folly of following what the world tells me to clamour for. I realize that biblical faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. And I know that it takes a great deal of trust and risk to pursue the invisible over the visible and the not-yet over the now. But hope that is seen is not hope, and if I hope for what I do not see, with perseverance I will wait eagerly for it. I will welcome Your promises from a distance and confess that I am a stranger and exile on the earth. May I trust You enough to treasure Your invisible promises over the visible promises of the world, knowing that only Your promises will endure in the end, and that the world is passing away. You have been faithful to me in the past and I will hope in You for the future.
In Jesus’s name, Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment