Rebellion, discipline, and grace

Many times, when people think of God, they think of him as someone that’s ready to zap them as soon as they do something wrong.

I suppose passages like this don’t do much to take away that image.  But I think there’s one thing we should keep in mind as we read this passage.

God is not talking here about a person who loves God, and is trying to serve him with his or her whole heart.

Instead, he’s talking about people that are willfully setting their faces against Him.  People who “do not listen,”  who “reject my decrees, and abhor my laws,” and who ultimately are “stubborn and hostile toward me.”

It is to these kinds of people that God is addressing.  And when we set our face against God and become hostile to him, he takes action.

But there are a couple of things that I think we should note here about God’s discipline.

One of the main things God is saying here is that by setting our hearts against him, we remove ourselves from his protection, and that is the reason that so many bad things happen to us.

How many people have faced the wasting disease of AIDS because they’ve rejected God’s teaching on sex, for example.

How many times do we live in fear, even without cause, because we are no longer relying on God, but on ourselves?

How many times do we find ourselves attacked by Satan, and are helpless to fight him because we’ve taken ourselves out from God’s protection?

And yet so often, when all these things happen, we blame God.

But another thing to note is God’s reason for allowing all these things to come into our lives.  It’s not to destroy us.

Satan wants to destroy us.  God doesn’t.  Instead, he simply wants us to repent, and turn back to him.

Even in our darkest times, when our lives are falling apart because of our sin, God never completely abandons us.  We may break faith with God.  God never breaks faith with us.

And if we’ll just repent, he’ll show his grace to us once again.  He will forgive our sins and restore us, just as he did with the Israelites. The whole reason for God’s discipline in our lives is so that he might show us his grace once again.

And that’s how we are to live every day.  Under his grace.  Even on our best days, we are in need of his grace.

God is not looking to zap us.  Instead, he’s looking to give us more grace.

So don’t live in fear of God.  He loves you.  Instead, let us keep a heart that’s softened toward him and open to the grace that he longs to give to us.