STAYING THE COURSE
Exodus 32:1 When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us a god who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”
It had not been an easy thing for Moses, or God to get the Hebrews out of Egypt. Not that God couldn’t have gotten them out right away. God could have simply killed all the Egyptians just as easy as he killed their firstborn on the night of the Passover. God had been trying to show the Hebrews, and even the Egyptians that he was the one true Almighty God that could be trusted in. Sad to say not only did Pharaoh see Moses as a magician, but so did the Hebrews. The reason I say this is the way both reacted to Moses doing the miracles. Even after the Hebrews had been forty years in the desert, they still blamed Moses for taking them out of Egypt only to find large fortified cities with powerful armies. If they really thought that God was leading them, they wouldn’t have blamed Moses! This points me to the fact that they really didn’t believe or trust in the God that Moses said he served. Now that Moses had been gone so long, they must have assumed that he was dead or not coming back. They thought that they needed a new leader, so they turned to Aaron who had been helping Moses. They needed a god they thought, so they returned to the god they probably believed in while in Egypt. The god of the calf.
Have you ever come to the point when you thought about just giving up on your
Christian faith and even God in general? Of course you have! At one time or another Satan always whispers in our ear, “You can’t trust or believe in this can you?” Most often we shrug it off, and go throughout the rest of our day down and dejected as if we really deserved God’s full attention and blessing.
People fall away or turn away from Jesus all the time. It certainly isn’t new. We see where many of Jesus’ disciples turned away from him in John 6:66. I personally believe that this is the mark of the antichrist. Oh, I do believe in the mark the the beast being placed on the back of the right hand or on the forehead, but the real mark is in the person's heart that has turned away from Jesus. And it can happen to the best of us. It even became a possibility for John the Baptist. We see it in Matt 11:6 where John the Baptist’s disciples came to Jesus and said that John wanted to know if Jesus was really the one that was to come, or should they expect someone else. This was the very John that declared Jesus to be the Son of God and the Savior of the world. He saw the Holy Spirit descend on Jesus and even heard the Heavenly Father say that Jesus was his son and was well pleased with him. Yet now, alone in a jail cell with death facing him, he begins to listen to Satan’s lies and question Jesus, the Holy Spirit and even the Heavenly Father.
Our faith, salvation and pilgrimage here on earth is a marathon and not a sprint so to speak. We live our faith, hope and love for Jesus every moment of our lives. We spend our days walking and talking with him as friend to friend with each breath we take. The thing is we are still in this world that has trials and temptations just like non-christians. We will have prayers that are not answered the way we hoped they would be. We have friend and loved ones that are unChrist-like to us. We see sin in our church, and even at times in the leadership. We see our own sin, and it cuts deep into our heart, to our very soul as we think we will never be all that Jesus saved us for. We fear for the loss of God’s mercy and grace, as well as his patience. Then worse of all sometimes we succumb to Satan’s taproot of lies, and that is we can no longer trust God any more.
Colossians 1:22-23 says, “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation - if you continue in your faith, established and firm, not moved from the hope held out in the gospel. God will always respect our free will. It is a universal and eternal plan for his creation that enables us to be able to love him. Without it and a show of affection no matter how appropriate would not be the same. God has given his angels this same free will. This is the reason that Satan and ⅓ of God’s angels were able to leave him, and even tempt us to rebel from God. to turn from This is why any time we want we can turn from Jesus. We will give up going to heaven for all eternity, but if we no longer want Jesus in our life he will not make us go to heaven or love him. It is a scary and sobering thought, but true none the less. While the word if is small it can have great consequences! We will have problems, prayers that are not answered the way we may have wanted, challenges to our love for Jesus and his love for us, but we can not become like the Hebrews that gave up the one true living God for anything let alone for a gold covered calf. We must be like Peter as we read in John 6:68, “Simon Peter
answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.
We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God’.”
Prayer: Lord Jesus, you know that there are times when all of us are under Satan’s attacks and the tribulations of this world weigh heavy on us. Please help us to not turn away from you, but to always love and trust in you no matter what. Please bring us unto our salvation, so we can be with you for all eternity. We love you Lord Jesus and ask it in your holy name.
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