Tuesday 11 Sep 2012

Tuesday Reading: Deuteronomy 13:1-5

Key Verse: Deuteronomy 13:3
3  Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.

Devotion:
One of the things that many people struggle with is that evil and horrible things happen in our lives. They will ask things like “if we have a God that is jealous then how is He going to allow anyone else to love us?” or “if He loved us that much how can He allow anything bad to happen to us?” It is a difficult one to answer without upsetting people because they want to hear their own ideas rather than the simple truth much of the time. They have already made up their minds that God should not be allowed to allow bad things into our lives and anything that says He can, will get shot down in flames in their minds!

God does not want us all to act like robots or automatons that automatically and faithfully do His bidding without choice. God wants us to choose to follow Him and to choose to do what He is asking of us. He loves us enough to allow us to make our own choices rather than being forced into doing what we do not want to do. If we choose to follow after other gods and other things then He is going to allow that. But that does not mean that He is going to turn His back on us and forget us. Because of that same love for us He is going to turn toward us and do many things to try and get us to turn back to Him. If the only way that we will turn back to Him is by finding things out the hard way, then He will allow us to find out the hard way!

God has not let us run off in every direction to go and test every circumstance before coming to Him. He has not given us to evil and bad things just so that we come crying to Him for comfort and peace. He has firstly given us the truth, Word and love so that we can know the truth before we get involved with things we don’t need in our lives. He has given us every opportunity to follow Him first. He continues to uphold the truth and to make sure that we do get to hear about it… we are the ones who choose to run off and test other things out. He has even given us warnings like this (over many years as well) that we should not just take other peoples words but rather prove those words that others tell us by comparing it to His Word. God’s Word does not change. It has never changed. It will remain the same today as it was in the beginning so we can know the truth when we hear it!

Points to Ponder:
What do you trust as the truth?

Do you compare other things to that or just believe?