Day 2562 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.
Zechariah 7:13 NIV
Yesterday we discussed how we cannot serve two masters. Yet so many seem to be trying. They want the world to like them, yet they want to follow Christ at the same time. They want to experience peace and fulfillment both in this life and in the next. They want to appeal to the world, yet we're carrying a message that the world doesn't want to hear. So I left yesterday's post asking who or what you intended to serve with the knowledge that we can only have one master.
I've wondered for quite some time why so few seem willing to serve or even believe in Christ. Why does the God of love, mercy, and salvation that I've chosen to follow and have faith in seem to be so unappealing to our world? But when I read this verse a few days ago, something clicked. Our world doesn't know how to think clearly. People, as we talked about yesterday, want it all their way. We want our will to be done. We want what we want, how we want it, and when we want it. And anything that goes against our elementary understand of how things work simply isn't acceptable.
We hear this question all the time whenever something bad happens in this place: Where is God? Why does God let bad things happen? If God is supposed to be so merciful and loving, then why is there so much suffering in our world? The foundation for those questions all the others like them that people come up with to discount the love of our Father and question His very existence is built upon this misunderstanding of fairness.
You see, here lately in our society we've heard a ton about equality. People want equal outcomes. People want everything to be even. But they only look at the end result. They don't seem to consider what gets put into the equation. They want equal results, but they don't worry about equal input. They just want everything to work out perfectly according to our will and our desires. But they don't consider what's actually deserved based upon what people put in.
The truth is that God is the very definition of fair. He is the author of equality. Just read this verse again. We chose to not listen to Him, so He stopped listening to us. What could possibly be more fair, more equal than that? We ignore Him, He ignores us. We shirk His desires, His commands, His path in preference of our own, so He lets us go do our thing. How is that not equal? How is He not fair? Well, only because the end result isn't what we wanted, which is only because we didn't do what was necessary to attain that result that we had in mind. We've acted unfairly and expected God to overlook our unfaithfulness.
We look around our world and we do see a lot of hurting. A lot of negative things happen. A lot of people are suffering, miserable, angry, and lost. And yet people have the gall to ask where God is in all of this downfall. Folks, He never left! We did. Bad things happen in this world. Bad things happen to "good people". But what we seem to always conveniently forget is that there aren't any "good people". We're a fallen creation. We're a broken humanity. All of us have been born into sin and have selfishly chosen the broken ways of this world over God's calling for His creation as He intended it to be.
So bad things don't happen to "good people". Bad things happen to people. The truth that nobody wants to consider, let alone admit, is that none of us deserve anything good. Nobody deserves this life of peace and tranquility that our world has grown to equate with our self-image of these flawless people who have never made any mistakes. Nobody deserves to never suffer, to never hurt, to never endure hardship. Friends, our choice to leave God behind and ignore His very presence deserves more suffering than this world has seen. We collectively turned our backs on the very definition of love, and yet we still think we deserve that love anyway.
Truth be told, in all fairness, in all equality, in all reality, we all deserve what Christ endured. We all, through our own choices and actions, have earned a ticket to an eternity of suffering for having forsaken God and ignored His perfectly beautiful design in order to do what we wanted instead. But, in His infinite mercy, unfailing love, and impossible kindness, He offers forgiveness. He extends His love to us even though we've rejected it countless times before. He offers us what we don't deserve because He cannot stop being the loving God that He is.
To break it down into the simplest way that I know to put it: We need to get over ourselves. We need to stop looking at the fallen world and blaming a God who didn't make our choices for us. We need to stop looking at the bad that happens in light of what we arrogantly think we deserve. We need to stop this foolishness of asking where God is and start asking ourselves where we've gone. Where did we go wrong? And how do we start fixing it?
We claim to want equality. But we should be very careful what we ask for because God is as equal and fair as it gets! We need to stop running away from Him and still expect Him to be there to catch us when we fall. Things just don't work how we want them to work sometimes. But they always work how they're supposed to work. So maybe rather than expecting something we don't deserve and blaming God when we don't get our way, maybe we should humbly turn back to Him and allow ourselves to see how incredible His forgiveness really is. And just how much we don't deserve it!
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