Day 3247 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Judges 2:10 NIV

Among our greatest abilities is found this adamancy to hasten just how soon we might forget that which our pride says we need not remember.

And yet a strange thing happens the more you read through Scripture. The first time or two through those stories are met with excitement as these tales we've all heard are read within their context, finding for them a fullness that we'd not known before. But then as you keep going, keep learning, keep insisting upon delving into the dividing designed within those dictations, you start to see that it's even beyond alive and active.

No, you begin to realize that our lives have been reflections of those stories, a personal retelling if you will, but not just those lighthearted enough for Sunday School.

It's a terror to tear through the trials and tribulations that our ancestors sought and subsequently settled for, because as it turns out, history never stops repeating. What has been has been again, but not in a sense of a broken world remaining in pieces nor a calamitous culture creating for themselves, of themselves these chaos creatures via idols and ideals. No, those lessons unlearned have remained as such within our own choices made still going forward.

We are every bit those before us who've forgotten God despite endless reason to live in both honor and reverence of all He's given us. And thus the culmination of this misfortune made manifest inside of us despite the Messiah making a way to avoid such calamity is that we still have eyes that cannot see, ears which will not hear and minds that we simply refuse to use rendering us an utterly reprehensible resolve to lose our souls to the wrong side of everything.

All because we've always remembered to forget the Father if for no other reason than we want to be our own sources of everything good, even though we know we're nothing but eternally bankrupt.

The unraveling of creation is quite stark within the opening books of the Bible. We sure get to having our way in this thing as soon as possible. From that first whisper of an idea which planted this seed that continues to grow that continues to steal by continuing to convince that surely God won't mind if we don't mind His commands. Surely He won't be all that surprised at our opting for the demise designed by the ones who started our fall for us and taught us how to keep it going south.

No, God won't be hurt nor upset nor offended nor agitated or aggravated or angered in light of our dancing in the dark. He won't care all that much if we allow others, ourselves upon His place in our lives. No big deal. Nothing to see here. Nothing to worry about as He's nothing but goodness and benevolence and blessing, just a being who's been kind to the point of dying so that we might live against His grace.

He doesn't care that we deny Him, debate Him, dilute Him and lose Him behind this great host of unholy matrimony inside hearts so cold that love isn't found within these relationships we form and foster with only all that keeps us so very frigid and foolish. Souls so stained we find no fault in these failures found lightyears away from the light He offers still. No, He's okay watching us walk away as He's always known we would, because as we talked about yesterday, He's seen our every day before we began the first one.

And so He knows that we'll let Him down. He's aware of our as of yet unchosen disappointments. He realizes the many prizes that our eyes and minds will treasure and turn toward. Yes, the very cross of Christ of whom we deny despite wearing the gold image of His work made an idol wrapped inside an ideal we wear to boast most proudly of our audacity to proclaim the Name without bearing any of the fruit for which we were made, it stands yes, but mostly for most as merely a missed message.

Truth lost in translation as we assume the right to keep changing the game as if He’s apt to play along in accord with our arrogance.

I wonder if the question even needs to be asked but, do we truly have no basement to our debasement of ourselves? Because that we can even make faith an idol is a truly amazing accomplishment, and by amazing I mean that it's amazing that we can become so far gone as to go all the way to using His Word against ourselves still today.

We do this in this egregious cherry-picking of passages that point to the promises in which we rely without daring upon the discussions that designate our being undeserving of any of them. We rehash the rejection of Jesus as it frees us from the burden of responsibility, leave Him hanging, not waiting, but in agony as we allow our feet to continue rushing to evil, souls cloaked in the assumption that He will happily pay the costs we continue to charge.

A forgotten faith is no faith at all. No, we've always found a way to force the fall from faith as such demands of us all we're unwilling to give. Reverence. Remorse. Regret. Repentance. Responsibility. Reason. A stepping into reality armed with an awareness that we've never been there before as we've known only to live within the lies we've loved to our death.

But yet we feel so alive out here apart from the Life! Making our way toward our wants wanting our wishes to envelop our world and win for us every wrong we've wondered for a way to make right. Yes, that's all we are, because that's indeed all we've sought to know: How to find the bar only to slink as far below it as we possibly can.

The Israelites taught us well. Our formers formed for us a furthering of their favorite failures, a forfeit of our future found before we found the folly that's formed us so fatally foolish. We're copies, replicas of the spiritual retardation of every nation under God that refuses to lose the losses that we've found in living apart from God. Because that's all we anymore know to want to be.

Outside His reach, thinking that that's where we're too far from His risk.

See, we know the danger of denying our Maker. Don't live like it. We don't wear shirts that say as such, well, not many at least. We don't have holidays that we spend in celebration of our detestable declarations of freedom from the Father's offense oversight. No, we don't make a big deal of our dealings done with the devil. Don't want to because I think we know we don't need to.

Because He knows.

That's the danger in this disaster of our design. It's a realization from which we've been running since He fashioned our legs and let us loose. It's the reality that we've fallen so very far that we couldn't find our way back to hope if we have a map and He Himself put us there. Which we do because He did. Indeed, we have the Bible which is the map which paints for us the portrait of the perfection that is the Way that points the road which leads us home.

But yet we wait. We hesitate. We consider instead a further measure of hating His way simply because it isn't ours. Forgetting Him still while still remembering the parts we know we need to pay our way. I'm telling you, this sense of entitlement we've been given and then found ways to fortify is truly something to behold.

Because it has us beholden to the belittlement begotten of the engagement of a begrudging defilement designed alongside the one who seeks still to devour whatever we're willing to discount. The devil seeks endlessly to steal and kill and destroy all remembrance of the reverence we ought to offer endlessly unto the One who saved us from such billowing blaspheme.

But we've forgotten to fight back. Lost our voice, gave away our guard, fired our present and forfeited our future all for this fellowship with danger that tells us to not worry as God won't care. Oh how incredible the lies we believe when we choose to forget the God who is truly the only reason we're here!

This verse hit me like a hurricane the other night as I read through the hurried downfall found in Judges. You go from reading about Moses and Aaron and all they did to lead this people through impossibilities made miracles inside of God's plans for them. Then once inside the Promised Land, Joshua takes over and gets to work clearing the ground of those who had to go.

But then the car crash comes when the people finally find themselves without a leader sold solely to serving their Father. That's all we want, just a way, a loophole, a faint little flicker of freedom from His rules and requirements, not because His burden is hard nor His blessings not worth the work. No, we just don't want to answer to anyone other than these wicked ideas always working in our hearts asking us to focus on ourselves and what we want.

Yet we see the warning against such selfish stupidity over in Galatians 5:17. "For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want."

It's not our place to plan our lives, to want our plans, to prize our promises or confuse how our ideas are better than His designs. Our lives are not ours to plot nor perfect however we may blindly see accordingly. Because to give any gravity to our gratuity of vain-glory is to steal the pen and try to re-write this story without God being the goal.

No, we've become the goal. We're the spoiled losers convinced we're winners deserving of the spoils of having spoiled our souls with the stains of sin that in which we've found our very best friend. Because that's what the inhumanity of this fallen humanity has always fought for. Freedom from responsibility. A laxity of learning the truth that would otherwise set us free from what we've come to believe we can't afford to lose.

A people lost inside the sinful cells we've made, afraid to walk free because we know that freedom has a price. And yet, even now knowing that that debt has been absolved by Christ's death in our place upon our cross, still we can't see reason enough some days, most days to die to the self that we've learned to serve.

Does He ask too much? Is His way truly so narrow that we can't even try? Is righteous responsibility such a burden that it would crush the life out of us? And even if it did, what is this life we've to lose if it has been lived in the death of these sins that have held us separate from our Savior? What do we have to lose that isn't worth losing if it means we can gain the mercy that makes the only way to live in peace for eternity?

Yes, God knew our every day before we made the first mockery of one. He knew we’d walk away, but that doesn’t give us the right to do so so very boldly. Because while He knows who are His and what we’ll do in light of that differentiation, still our hearts are the vessels made to seek a foundation upon which we build tomorrow a better version of today. He still greets us every morning with a renewed measure of grace offering to lead us to where the grass is actually green and life is finally lived.

Each of us have walked away from God for no reason other than we've always heard we could do this our way, and thus long wondered at that freedom we could find outside the need to humble ourselves to wanting nothing but God's will instead. What might we find if we didn't have to limit ourselves to light or love? What is there around us that might drown for us this awareness of our failures and flaws?

No, maybe the question is what more do we need than the blood that let us back?

Friends, life in this world will continue raging away from God. And walking alongside all these backs turned to their Savior will offer us endless opportunity to turn and run back into hiding as well. But what have we hidden from? From what have we strayed, and to what have we found in replacement? Can we say that our way is worth never knowing the peace that Christ provides?

I can't. Not anymore. Because I've wander so long into so many mistakes that I struggle to see any reason He'd want me back. And yet that's one of those miraculous kindnesses strewn throughout the stories of our ancestors denying Him.

"If my people." "Then I will hear."

Friends, while what's happened before does indeed pose a problem, and dire one at that, it's where we go from here that matters most. No, we can't go back and undo all the mistakes we've made. And bearing those scars will always serve as evidence that we've got no business asking for His forgiveness. But here's the thing, He didn't wait for us to ask. He didn't wait for us to realize we need His mercy.

He just came. He did what we needed, and in that, He finished it. All of it. Every mistake. Every wrong turn. Every day spent in denial. Every decision upon disaster. Everything we done was finished, forgiven in the Son. Please don't keep walking away. I know our sins tell us to hide and this world agrees to live on the run. But where can that lead? Where will it go? Where will we be if we continue to be only all we've been taught to remain?

We hear often this triplet that exists to inspire in us a measure of difference that leads us toward something different. Death, burial and resurrection is the point on purpose. And just like we see as we read ourselves inside those mistakes they made back then, perhaps we might now dare to see for ourselves the necessity of sharing something in common with a very different story found in Scripture.

Perhaps we can find the courage to die to sin, to bury our pasts, to allow Him to bring us back to life, but instead now a life lived to honor Him rather than to avoid what we’ve long seen as that hassle.

In the end, the choice is ours. But please know that while it is much easier to continue walking away, going away, going our way, that path leads back to God too. Just with a very different outcome. I pray we come to the humility that refuses to accept that risk. But I guess that even that audacity can only come should we adventure to accept that maybe we really have been really wrong.

The Bible shows us that the forfeit of eternal peace is only a generation away, but so too might come in return the revival of repentance that inspires us to turn away from where we’ve been and to return again to He who we’ve always left hanging.

I think we each know the power of single choice made when we know we don’t deserve the chance to make it. Maybe that’s enough to ignite in us a willingness to walk that crippling mile in a prodigal’s steps. Because perhaps while that is a crushing outcome for sure, maybe it’s the only way that might separate us as the few who fall upon that Rock and embrace the breaking rather than the many eternally decimated when upon them that Rock soon falls.

Because while He indeed has seen all our days, it descends upon us to decide whether or not we'll see days ahead that are better than those past, or if the up ahead is yet a furthering of that failure to find faith worth enough to forget everything else and follow Him home.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold