Joshua Grubbs
But after they had rest, they again did evil before you...
This brief, unfortunate sentence from Nehemiah’s story sums up Israel’s existence. The people led out of Egypt by God’s mighty hand, the people chosen to be set apart and shine as a light to the nations, and the people who witness firsthand the might, and love, of God. That Israel, is the Israel who seems to forget about God as soon as a raincloud appears in their otherwise sunny sky.
Consider the account of the Exodus, at a time when God was physically and tangibly performing miracles day after day. The God and creator of the universe made water stand in heaps so Israel could escape a coming army for crying out loud! And I’m sure that Israel loved and praised God during those times, the Song of Moses being one such example. However, it is also clear how quickly Israel began to grumble, complain, and even abandon the God who so recently saved them.
Moses goes up on Mt. Sinai to speak with God, and, wouldn’t you know it, he takes too long (I mean how long do you really need to converse with the Almighty) and Israel turns away from following God in 40 days or less as we see in the beginning of Exodus 32. These people knew what God did for them and how God loved them, and yet they still turned to a golden idol made by human hands to cry, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”
It’s easy to be happy with God when things are going well. On the other side of the coin, it’s even easier to lose sight of why things are going well in our lives when they are and quickly fall into an attitude of asking, “Well what have you done for me lately, God?” The nation of Israel did it throughout the Old Testament, the early Church as we see it in the New Testament was constantly losing sight of the Gospel, and today we can easily walk out of our church services on a Sunday and forget it all by Monday morning.
All we had, have, and ever will have is solely because of God. But we get comfortable, we get lazy, and we forget this crucial fact of our existence. We have a light but, like fools as Jesus says in Matthew 5:15, we let it end up under a bushel basket. I don’t think that we often do this as an overt, defiant act of abandonment, but rather we allow ourselves to forget how bright and beautiful that light is because we are too used to it.
We must never let the reality of our relationship with God, and our salvation through Jesus Christ, fall from the forefront of or minds. We must never allow the peace that surpasses understanding to be something we take for granted. When things are bad, we praise God for all we have. When things are good, we praise God for all we have.
No matter what, we praise God for all we have.
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