Friday 31 Oct 2014

October 31: Isaiah 44:15-17

Key Verse: Isaiah 44:17
And the rest of it he makes into a god, His carved image. He falls down before it and worships it, Prays to it and says, “Deliver me, for you are my god!”

Devotion:
When put into words like these we look at the act of making statues to worship as pretty silly; but it still goes on and it still is the same as it was back in the times of Isaiah. We may not use chalk to draw the lines, we may not use the same piece of wood we used to light the house fire with, but mankind still makes idols out of useless stuff!

We may be making an idol out of something else create by God and not wood, carvings, mouldings, or other ornate art-work; but we still take so many things as being more important than God in our lives. Anything we take as being more important that God is something else we are lifting up instead of God, or in other words, we are idolising it. Just setting time aside for God in our busy schedules becomes hard as we try to fit more and more into our lives.

Squeezing out God because we think it will make us happier to do things than to be with our God is about as good as taking half the stick we light the fire with and carving it into a small statue we can call our god. Taking the scraps of metal we have and melting them down into a statue we can represent as our god is rather a big slap in the face for God. We are effectively saying that we think more of scraps of metal than we do of our God! “But I don’t do things like that” I hear you all cry…

God has warned us over many things in our lives that we do without thinking. We shout out to our brothers and call them names. We look lustfully at others. We withhold food from the pour and starving. We go out and polish the car instead of coming to church. We take our Lord’s name in vain. There are so many things we could list that we think are not as bad as bowing down before a statue we have made, but in reality there are so many big things in our lives that we do ignore because everyone else does them – so why can’t we!

Points to Ponder:
Will you give in and have a go?

Or will you lift up the name of Christ?