Post by Cindy on Nov 18, 2023 12:48:03 GMT -5
I'd like to share what I was reading in Ezekiel with you. “The word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, set your face against the mountains of Israel; prophesy against them and say: ‘O mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Sovereign LORD. This is what the Sovereign LORD says to the mountains and hills, to the ravines and valleys: I am about to bring a sword against you, and I will destroy your high places. Your altars will be demolished and your incense altars will be smashed; and I will slay your people in front of your idols. I will lay the dead bodies of the Israelites in front of their idols, and I will scatter your bones around your altars. Wherever you live, the towns will be laid waste and the high places demolished, so that your altars will be laid waste and devastated, your idols smashed and ruined, your incense altars broken down, and what you have made wiped out.” (Ezekiel 6:1–6)
To me, those verses show that because the Israelite's didn’t do what God had commanded them to do, that He would do it Himself. Basically, He’d told them to kill all the people in the land He was giving them, and to wipe out all the idols and places of worship the pagans had there. Instead, they began to worship the pagans idols instead of destroying them. (Or, in some cases the idols were destroyed at first, but later rebuilt). Since the Jews insisted on worshiping idols instead of, or in addition to, the One True God, God decided to kill them right where they were sinning. I’m sure He will do the same during the Tribulation as well.
Just like back then, we don’t realize just how terrible and evil our sins are. In fact, many don’t even realize they sin, or if they do, think it’s just a “little” sin, kind of like what we call “a little white lie". They don’t understand what sin really is, and therefore don’t realize that there’s no such thing as a “little” sin, or even “a little white lie” to God.
We don’t need a list of rules. Jesus told us all we have to remember is to love God above everyone and everything else, including our self, and to love others the way we love our self. (When it says “the way we love our self," it isn’t a compliment, it’s an indictment of our selfishness!) For example, if we say or do something unkind we have not only sinned by breaking God’s law, we have rebelled against God. We also don’t realize how much sin hurts us. Most people think sin is fun and doesn’t hurt us at all. But God hates sin because it hurts us! He knows what it’s going to do to us and doesn’t want to see that happen. But over and over we choose sin over Him.
It's like Satan injects a numbing agent into us so we doesn’t realize anything is wrong until it’s too late. But in reality, we do that to ourselves, Satan doesn't have to do anything to us to get us to sin. Until we've been saved, it's our nature to sin.
That’s why Jesus, out of His love for us, chose to offer His sinless life in exchange for ours. He knew He would be quite literally tortured within an inch of His life before He was ever crucified and then would have to bear the crucifixion itself. But worst of all for Him, was having all our selfish, nasty, awful sins, dumped on His pure sinless being. We can’t even begin to imagine what that was like for Him! That alone should cause us to realize just how horrible and evil sin is. It's not until the Lord saves us though that we begin to see that. At first it's very slowly but as we study His Word daily, we start to see sin and our self much more clearly. After awhile, instead of noticing the sins of others, we start to see our own sins. And over time, those sins begin to seem worse and worse to us as we see them for what they really are. In fact, the better we see the sin in our own life, the easier it is to forgive others, no matter what they've done. It's kind of strange because while we do see our sin as much worse than we did at first, we also experience an amazing freedom from it. For Jesus not only forgives our sins, He also takes away our guilt and shame! He really does set us free! Our God is a great and awesome God!!!!