Sunday Reading: Isaiah 44:14-17
Key Verse: Isaiah 44:17
17 And the rest of it he makes into a god, his graven image; he falls down to it and worships, and prays to it, and says, Deliver me! for you are my god.
Devotion:
There are many things in our lives that continue to draw us away from God and so many of those things we take as being very important, not realising that we are making them more important that God in our lives. These words from Isaiah are looked at as being the extreme case where man makes his own god out of wood and then worships that; those people would say that they worship the god that the figure represents... but how do they know what God looks like when nobody has seen Him. Yes we know that Christ was a human being but that is all. The big issue here is not really what we make our gods look like but the fact that we have other gods...
The example is simple. The man takes good wood and cuts it up. Part is used for fire for warmth, part is used for heat to cook and part is used to make an idol. Surely they are missing the point somewhere! He may well have planted the seed for the tree to grow, or at least his parents or grandparents may have. Who supplied that seed? Who supplies the warmth and rain for that seed to germinate and grow? Who is the one who has created all these things that that man is now going to lift up higher than God? Did not God create it all in the beginning? Are they not then worshipping the created thing rather than the Creator Himself?
We do need to take note of the things that we lift up in our lives too because we sometimes get carried away and lift up the created items rather than the Creator. Whether it is money, possessions or even one’s self, we have to make sure that God is the one who comes first in our lives. He was first. He is. He will always be. How can we then take something with a time limit and worship or lift that up that instead? Nothing is as important as God in your life!
Points to Ponder:
What is important in your life?
Where does God actually come?
