The Devastation of Disobedience

"Yet you would not go up, but rebelled against the command of the LORD your God. And you murmured in your tents and said, 'Because the LORD hated us he has brought us out of the land of Egypt, to give us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us.'
Deuteronomy 1:26-27

A selfish stream of thinking led to a miserable and dangerous theology and that brought about God's judgment that defined a generation in Israel. The Exodus generation had so much promise, so much potential to believe God. They experienced so much directly from the hand of God. You'd think it would have strengthened their faith. They had been slaves in Egypt under awful treatment. They saw God defeat a political superpower while they did not lift a finger. God secured their freedom. God literally fed them in the wilderness. He led them visibly. They received His law... a document unique to them. But they ended up believing that God was the exact opposite of Who He was. That was a problem... a big problem.

The result of their tent rebellion was that God saw it, was angered, and acted (Deuteronomy 1:34). And an entire generation was cursed to depend on Him solely in the wilderness for the next forty years. They were spiritual toddlers who would die never having really matured in their faith, but nurtured by God nonetheless. That was the result of a theology that disbelieved God's love and refused faith. It disobeyed God and would not follow Him.

Fruitlessness and judgment follow in the wake of disobedience. Even if that disobedience still has some kind of belief in God. These Israelites believed there was a God. They did not believe what He revealed about Himself. The result is very tragic and is painful to read. But God still loved Israel. He prepared a new generation during that 40 year time period. That new generation would boldly and gladly claim His promise.


- Posted with my iPad. The Apple Kool-Aide tastes fine.

Believing There is a God is Dangerously Not Enough

At that time I will search Jerusalem with lamps, and I will punish the men who are complacent, those who say in their hearts, 'The LORD will not do good, nor will he do ill.'
Zephaniah 1:12

This verse show us that the heart of God is not tender toward His people when they become apathetic toward Him. These folks are theists. They believe God does exist. They just cannot ascribe any clear activity in the world to Him. But God is about to change their theology.

The climate that created that kind of complacency in Jerusalem was one in which Israel had slowly let the worship of God decline. It began by allowing idolatry to coexist. Then they became syncretistic in their religion, acknowledging every kind of pagan god around them. That is the danger of an accommodating religious tolerance that things all religions are equal. All religions do not teach the same thing and do not lead to the same place. And God gets our attention when we disobey Him or replace Him or deny Him.

God was going to demonstrate His judgment on people who doubted His activity in the world. It would eventually come very swiftly and brutally to Jerusalem. Eventually Babylon would totally sack the city, kill thousands, and lead the survivors in humiliation to a captivity far from their familiar home. There the Jews would abandon idolatry never to return to it. But the hard lessons would come because believing there is a God is never enough to enter into proper relationship with Him. Good theology leads to robust worship, obedience, and the awareness of His activity in the world.


- Posted with my iPad. The Apple Kool-Aide tastes fine.

Location:Thompson Dr,De Soto,United States

The price we pay for theological sloppiness…

C. Michael Patton over at reclaimingthemind.org has a great blog post on the inevitable consequences we pay for the subjectivity and theological pigheadedness that sadly is becoming more prevalent in the evangelical church. We want preachers and teachers who are celebrities and make us feel good. We eschew the hard truth. We are emasculating Christianity, in my opinion. My favorite lines:

“Sadly we have an epidemic of theological discipline in the church today. People think that they can believe and teach anything based upon a subjective experience or a provision of hope. This epidemic is caused due to lack of theological accountability. We don’t think we need people to tell us we are wrong. We don’t have any system of checks and balances; in fact, we often avoid them. We think that if we have the Bible and the Holy Spirit, we have license. There is no way to be humiliated so that we can be humbled.

Because of this lack of discipline we have people out there believing and teaching based upon wild hairs. They are prescribing spiritual medicine that they invented. Sadly the average person is the spiritual test rat. I wonder what the “faith-is-a-force” people did when they first got the idea that faith was a force that we could control. Did they consult anyone about this? Did they have theological advisers? Did they have someone who would tell them that they was wrong? Did they consult church history or biblical exegetes? Did they even have a method for validating their beliefs?”

Read the whole thing yourself here.