Sunday Sermon

 

Resisting God

Isaiah 57:4

Of whom are you making fun? Whom are you insulting? At whom do you stick out your tongue? You turn against God, and you are liars.

For me one of the things that makes scripture work is the idea that God does not use perfect people but He uses people who are willing to listen and live as God calls us to. Abraham comes off as a regular human with real issues and struggles. When we look at David we find a flawed man who seeks to live by faith as best he can. Then there are the son’s of Zebedee or better known as the son’s of thunder. In one instance they wanted Jesus to call down fire from heaven and another one they had a little talk with some people who were not part of their group. And yet John would be the one who was loved by Jesus the most and James would have clear influence over the early church. Let us not forget people like Naomi who loses her husband and sons and is so completely lost she tells people to call her Mara which means bitterness. The human condition is not lost on God and it helps me with my faith to understand that. If God can use angry people like Jonah to save the great city of Nineveh God can use me in my failures and my flaws. God is not confused by how broken we as humans are. As a matter of fact it is that brokenness that has God calling to us to come and find healing in Him. All of the commands and laws God gives are not meant to constrain us but to guide us in to the way of life that brings healing and real meaning to our lives. The ultimata statement of this is Jesus coming as both God and human and living as we live. No one can say that God does not know how hard it is to live as a human because God did it even to dying on a cross like a criminal. When we cry out to God we have a God who responds to us and knows our pain and already has a plan to deal with it. That we as humans reject God because we don’t want God to interfere in our lives is so stupid. God pours out wisdom to us like it is water and instead of drinking deeply we turn our noses up at it because what God says can some times be inconvenient. I do not know why people hate the Ten Commandments because all God is doing is explaining how reality works and still people want to avoid those ideas because they might get in our way. We have a God who explains the basic fundamental moral laws of the universe to us and we think they are foolish or we just plain ignore them and then we wonder why we have so many problems. These concepts are given to us not to make our lives hard but to make our lives better. There is nothing that says God has to explain things to us but God knows the pain and hurt that flows from not knowing these basic ideas and so God hands them to us for free because God knows we as humans need this information. Our faith should be built on the idea that God knows what it means to be human and wants to make being human as good as possible. This is the God I want to worship and serve, the God who loves me and cares about me.

The thing that astounds me about God the most is why does God cares about us. If you measure things in the scale of time and space properly we see that humans are nothing really. In the scale of time we live so briefly and we are gone. Then there is how small we are. There are eight billion people on this ball called earth and there is room for more. Our sun is a small star of which there are billions of them stretching further then we can even understand. I think about all of this and then ask why would God care about all of us let alone any one of us and yet based on what God tells us He knows more about each of us then we know about ourselves. And God does not just know us but He loves us and calls us His children. When we think about God’s love we often think about how we feel about people but in reality those feelings are called affection or fondness. Paul in I Corinthians thirteen makes clear that love is not about feelings but about making choices and deciding to act in a certain ways. This is what God does. God’s love is a choice that God makes about how He is going to deal with us and those choices have real effect on us. People talk about God being loving and accepting and that is true but Jesus makes it clear that the love God has for us is not soft or easy but tough and demanding. God loves us enough to accept that we are sinners and in need of help but God does not accept that we should stay in sin because God knows sin destroys us. We have a God who loves us enough to tell us the truth and to make it clear that we need to embrace the morale law God gives us for our own good. God’s love for us is so deep and powerful that Jesus goes to the cross to die for our sin and then steps out of the tomb to tell us we can have life instead of death but we have to admit we are sinners and that we need God. What we need to know is that God does not have to deal with our sin. If God wanted to He could leave us to the death and destruction sin brings but God cares about us to much for that. This is the God what we encounter and that we find waiting for us to come to for healing and peace.

The proof of God’s love for us is so powerful and real that it only takes a little bit to grasp how much God loves us. At the top of the list is Jesus, if there is anything more powerful then God becoming human to take on our sin I don’t know of it. Second to Jesus is the fact that God lets us choose Him. This is such a intriguing concept that it deserves a little consideration. God could force us to obey Him but to do so would mean that we do not respond out of love but force. Thus God calls to us and invites us to come and find in Him all the things that really matter in life. But God never forces us to live by His ideas. If we choose we can let sin destroy us but that is not what God wants. In our verse we are looking at we find the tension between the God’s morale laws of the universe and those who would reject those ideas. In this verse God is asking why people would reject His wisdom and you can feel the pain God has as He knows that rejecting Him only brings death. We have God desperately trying to save us from the destruction we have caused in our lives and we reject it because is means we would have to submit to God instead of our own selfishness. In the verse we have three things that after all the years between when they were written and now they still resonate. These things troubled God back then and still trouble God now because God knows the price of sin and it is not Him who will pay it. People who are making fun of God and who insult God and who stick their tongue out at God are throwing away the only real hope they have and it distresses the God who loves people and does not want them to suffer the pain they are stepping to. God is trying to save people and those people reject Him. We find in this verse what is so sadly very basic human behavior. To resist God is to choose death and that is not something God wants for us and the proof of that is Jesus. The evil that lives in the human heart is so terrible and despicable that it would have us make fun of the only hope for life and peace that we could have. And God still lets us choose one over the other, that is love.

Because I am a historian by training I notice things from a historical and cultural perspective. An interesting thing is that every culture we know about has a worship of god or god’s. We also know that humans are prone to want God in their lives. People have to be taught to say there is not God. Recently we have even learned there is a place in our brains that when simulated it feels like you have had an encounter with God. Humans were made to be connected with God and we want God but there is a problem, God is inconvenient. Wanting God and obeying God are two different things and so there is this tension that we as humans have. Resisting God arises from the evil that is in our hearts that is opposed to God. Our verse puts it so cleanly when it says, “we turn against God.” Just like Adam and Eve we choose to ignore God not because we hate God but because God gets in our way. This is the entire point of the Bible. God is always calling to us to come to Him but we don’t want to because it means we will have to submit to God’s authority instead of ours. Here is where the last phase makes a great point. We are made liars because we will not admit we need God and come to God and live by His ideas and concepts. The truth is this sets up a system of battle between us and God. God is the truth. All things that are real, true and right come from God which means rejecting God turns us into people who are false and who are not connected to reality. I love that God makes this plain because we are the problem not God. We are the people who turned against God and we are the ones who tell lies so we don’t have to face what is real. Once we go down this pathway it is hard to come back and that is why God has done all He has to make it clear how to fix what we have rejected. That we have a God who loves us and longs to make things right even though it is our fault is such a hope for us but we must confess we need God and then bow to His authority in our lives.

One of the things I have learned over the years in my reading and studying of scripture is how God thinks about our rejecting of Him. Yes, God is angry about that but it is not for what so many people think. We have an angry God because God knows what happens when we choose not to listen and learn from Him. Just as a parent gets angry with his child because the child is choosing to do destructive things does not mean that the parent hates the child or is even angry at the child. The parent is angry because he knows the price of those choices will bring pain and hurt that the parent does not want the child to suffer. When we resist God instead of submitting to God there is a cost and God knows how bad that cost is and does not want us to experience it. God loves us and longs for us to come to Him and find peace instead of fear and healing instead of brokenness. Let us accept the invitation form God to come and become the people God wants us to be.