Day 4267 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

2 Chronicles 36:15 NIV

Not for lack of trying

But rather simply due to lack of interest in hearing, in seeing, in believing even. Indeed, all throughout time itself we’ve all managed to prove time and again a people who seek not friends with attention given unto anything which doesn’t give us only exactly what we want in return for our sullen willingness to turn toward it or they whom begs a moment of our acknowledgement. It’s truly as if we’ve become so impressed with ourselves that we’re now instantly depressed whenever another asks we bother to focus on anything or anyone other than us.

We love us some us and, well, it takes a literal act of God to change that.

Thankfully said acts of God are what God’s the very best at. He’s in fact been acting in and on and for our behalf ever since He determined that we should be here. It’s like a person who decides they want a puppy. They go looking to get one knowing that they’re bringing home with it the responsibility to feed it, to protect it, to give it water and shelter and the love that they’re looking to get in return.

Sadly we seem rather insistent that He eventually learn that we’re not interested in loving Him back as rather, like some mongrel filled with misunderstandings and mayhem, we just keep snapping at Him, biting constantly at the very hands which exist to keep us fed.

All because He wanted a creation that was enough like Him that they would look to Him with what were supposed to be grateful eyes and thankful hearts, pouring out praise every single day for every single thing that He continues to do for all of us.

Alas, not really what He gets most days, is it?

No, instead He gets to sit again in Heaven and watch His creation drift further by the hour. And He’s been watching us float toward the very end of all hope since the very first of us got it in all our heads that we could both be Him and then do better than. Indeed, we love this idea that has us lost inside this belief that we don’t need Him since we are Him and are living then, or at least vastly capable of doing so, lives that are far and above anything that He in love calls us to experience and enjoy.

In fact, we’ve wandered so far off from the simplicity of a childlike faith placed in only our Father that we now find no enjoyment whatsoever in anything that even remotely resembles faith.

To us the whole ordeal is about as foolish as it gets as, to us, it seems nothing but a bunch of rules carried out by a handful of clowns but only those with their smiles turned upside and lives seemingly lived always only the same.

Indeed, inside of this place those who adhere, not verbally or for visual recognition only but who legitimately agree to abide by faith in Christ seem to live such disappointing and unhappy and thus unfulfilling lives that nobody who considers themselves to be in their right mind (that which considers always only that they’re the only who are right all the time) wants anything to do with it.

And in all actuality this vast and clearly diverging difference of opinion in regard to how best to live these lives we’re both living and losing seems to be summed up within what is another difference put on deposit within the very Word that not many seem to have read nor have any interest in reading.

On the one side you have God asking what is arguably the central point of the Gospel’s purpose in seeking to turn us from what have been lives clearly lived to please the flesh in that He asks us in Matthew 16:26, “what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?”

Yet on the other side of this eternal dividing line you’ll often find most of us living as if we’re rather happily lost within the wonder as to “what do we gain by carrying out his requirements and going about like mourners before the Lord Almighty?” Malachi 3:14

This simple example of what are two very similar questions, both of which are actually asked in regard to our gain, a topic which we all absolutely love, manages to display for us the diverging difference in direction as has come to be demanded by our thinking always that our ways are better and that simply because they often help us to gain all that we’ve come to want in and of and from this world.

God’s question considers rather what we stand to gain by here gaining everything unto the loss of our soul and thus the having of nothing left to look forward to when we’ve left here.

His is focused on what’s to come. Our worries are usually only about what’s happening right now.

And He’s done everything possible to help break down this wall that our wants and lack of worry over them has kept building higher and higher all through the whole of human history.

Alas, not even the death of His Son has proven enough to get through to some.

What more must He do if literally dying for us wasn’t enough?

Because the point is that in His doing so He has now proven the very cost and consequence of our each having lived these lives as if our every choice never had neither. He has shown us the very real death and danger that are promised in His anger unto all of those who so treat Him the stranger that they go on doing, perhaps forever as far as it seems as though we’re all concerned in what are lives in which we all go on all but entirely unconcerned about much of anything at all, all that He at first asked us not to do and then literally suffered because we’d done anyway.

Friends, how much more loving could a Father prove Himself to be than to take on the full brunt of the punishable lack of responsibility that His creation had chosen to so adore that they found themselves so very low as to happily murder the very One who had done nothing but help them, heal them, give them hope then?

God loves us so much that He at first told us what He expected of us and then sent messengers to remind us of His commands and then even sent Christ to pay the ultimate price for what still continue to be lives in which we still continue to live as if life itself is only a matter of sheer happenstance within which we’re only here to do always only whatever we want as if none of it really matters as only our happiness and enjoyment and pleasure are all that can ever possibly mean anything.

He died to open our eyes to the realness of the message He’s been trying to send us seeking to help us turn away from our sins and back then toward Him who willingly died to save us from the penalty of them.

And still the vast majority live this life as if they either know nothing of Christ or simply don’t really care that He died.

And it’s because of this that there is coming a time in which God, though having spent millennia at this point trying to get through to us, will stop trying.

Because, as we’ve been talking, at some point the realization that someone wants nothing to do with you no matter how good you are to them nor how angry you may warn you’re becoming with them becomes simply unavoidable.

And thus He’s promised us that the day shall come when He shall “send a famine through the land— not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD.”

Yes, at some point in the up ahead He is going to stop talking. He’s going to stop trying. He’s going to give us what we continue asking Him for and leave us alone to do whatever we want as if there is no price to pay, no consequence to face, no punishment promised in response to any of it.

Because, well, that is the last thing that He can do.

For again, all these years that humans have been here He has been there trying to get through to us via every manner and message imaginable. He’s worked His kindness and glory in the goodness of miracles that saved us, set us free, literally brought some of us back to life. He’s picked us up, brushed us off, gave us the courage and audacity to try again, the gall to imagine better every now and then. And so too then has He worked His will within the warnings given us literally in watching Him destroy people and places who lived so boldly against Him and His Word and will that He wiped them off the map.

He has done everything He could to show Himself to us through things done for us, to us, through us.

If none of that has been allowed by us to accomplish the task, all that’s left is for Him to so remove Himself from us and this place that this place will be pretty quickly all but destroyed by us.

Just look at how wonderful we’re doing already!

Indeed, doesn’t take much to imagine that things will only continue to get worse as we all continue to push Him further and further away toward and until that day when He finally agrees and just walks off.

He is going to take Himself away from us and leave all of us to do as we please.

And when that inevitably dissolves into such horror and darkness and danger that people, filled with hatred for one another already, resort to basically just destroying each other, some will finally get the picture.

Yes, His last attempt to get through to us will be to remove Himself from us so that, lacking His goodness and glory, we’ll finally be the ones determining the story.

And it will get so bad so quickly that none of us will have reason or rationality to refuse Him or reject Him or deny Him anymore.

Not that many won’t as the Word promises instead that most still will.

But because He is so kind and loving and patient and generous, He’s giving us all every opportunity possible to come to our senses and then unto the Savior who is our last train out of here alive.

Problem is that most here still go on living their lives as if they don’t care to take that ride. Instead most just keep ignoring His trying to open blinded eyes and bring their dead, stone-like hearts back to life. And that all because, though blind, we think we can see. Though refusing to listen we still claim we can hear. Though living in the death that is sin we continue sinning again and again, stacking up guilty verdicts higher and higher as we close in closer and closer to the coming disaster that is His saying, “Be gone from me.”

Something that most seem to be asking Him to do.

And, again, He’s so loving and kind that He will give us whatever we ask of Him.

If we don’t wish to know Him then He won’t dare pretend He’s known us either. If we go on refusing to hear Him out, He won’t hear us when we shout in horror from the depths of hell for someone to help. If we ignore His message and mock His messengers, eventually He’s just going to stop sending them as, again, at some point the message we’re sending and how it’s simply never changing proves that, well, we’re not interested in changing.

And one day He will stop arguing and agree to leave us unchanged.

Meaning then that we’ll stay but dead men so lost in sin that we win what is an eternity in which we baste in the fullness of every single opportunity that we chose to waste to turn from our wicked and worthless ways toward the life that He came to offer in their place.

That’s been the message He’s been sending all this time.

It’s the offer of the great exchange given us in what is referred to as “substitutionary atonement”. It’s the process of another taking our place so as to endure our punishment so that we could take their place and receive our prize instead. And we see the only perfect example of this in the Gospel of Christ Jesus in which He came to free us from the debt that is our death that we’ve all earned within all of the sin we’ve been joyfully living in, dying on our cross exchanged for the chance we now have to live by simply carrying ours with us rather than ultimately dying on them.

Indeed, He came down to take our place and square our debt so that we could take His place which has no debt as He’s done no wrong.

He has washed us clean by His blood so that, if we’re in Him and He in us, then when God looks at us He sees His Son whom He loves rather than the sinners whom He hates.

Because He wanted it this way.

All along He’s wanted to love us. And, well, as any good parent would, He’s then always wanted only what’s best for us. And what’s obviously best for us is the gift of eternal life and peace and joy found only in Heaven. Problem is that we’ve all come to live as if what’s best for us is living in the fun that we find within sin.

And all along He’s been sending us all of these messages and prophecies and warnings trying to help us see the difference for the danger that all sin has us all living in.

Most continue to ignore those messages and thus refuse His attempts to help us turn from them.

How much longer will He send what is a help that is only refused?

Friends, the point is that He’s done more than He ever needed to do. None of this should have ever gotten so bad as we’ve all insisted it become. But it has. Things here have gotten worse in terms of sin and our then chosen negligence in regard to His call unto at first righteousness and then unto repentance when we’d failed the first one.

And it’s obvious that things will continue to get worse seeing as how it’s He alone who is good and thus so long as this world continues to push He who is good further and further away, so too then shall good be pushed further and further away.

Up until that coming Day when He will stop trying and simply get straight to judging all of us in accordance to whether or not we did as He’s called us to as will be determined by a clarity in regard to whether or not we gave any credence to His attempts to reach us, to save us.

Will that day find us among the few who in humility chose to listen and in doing so heard a message that turned their lives toward striving for Heaven?

Or will it rather find us among the many who continued choosing only to ignore His offer of help and healing and hope and there having all of the above forever removed?

For now the choice is ours, at least however much we’re given in His grace to make.

One day we won’t have a say anymore and then we’ll have no longer the ability to change anything either as rather He will speak the final judgement upon our lives in regard to how we’ve lived them.

All this time He’s been calling us to die to this world, to ourselves so that we can live in Christ so that on that Day He will see Him in us rather than the sin in us. And we will want Him to see Jesus instead of us because, well, there’s nothing good to see inside of what we’ve all become. If we refuse that message then the outcome is on us.

He’s warned us how that will go.

If we don’t listen then we’ll simply be shown to what we spent our lives asking Him for:

A life lived without Him there to bother us with His help and healing and hope.

He won’t make us accept anything we don’t want.

But He will give us whatever it is that we think we want.

Choose carefully my friends because His message isn’t changing and nor will the eternity we find whenever it’s found whether we ever paid any attention to His every attempt to get us to the good side of forever or if we rather just ignored His offer to so help.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold