Jesus Brings Calm Consistency, Sin Brings Noisy Chaos
Word-Of-The-Day: ‘(25) Let your eyes look straight ahead; fix your gaze directly before you. (26) Give careful thought <and make level> the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways. (27) Do not turn to the right or the left; keep your foot from evil.’ (Proverbs 4:25-27); ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.’ (Hebrews 13:8)
Every time we turn on or read the news, it seems that you can’t escape the facts that people, in general, double down on their lack of common sense. It seems teachers, the majority of them females, are having improper relations with their students. One would think after the first couple of reports of this happening, along with the eventual publicized court cases and jail sentences that entail these stories, would stop these illicit acts. Instead, the frequency seems to be increasing, not decreasing.
The same can be said for people leaving their children or pet in the back seat of a car on a hot day. It is a terrible tragedy, but each one is communicated and should act as a warning, yet it continues to occur and seems to increase each year. It has been said the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result that never happens.
Yet, we find many people (and sometimes ourselves, if we are being honest) doing the same thing – perhaps not as tragic and terrible as leaving a child or pet in your hot car, but perhaps repeating the same mistakes in who we support politically and how we vote; how we act in our relationships or in building them; how we perform certain tasks in our household – we repeat what we do or what we say, and flounder though we never try anything new or listen to the counsel of others.
We stumble because we fail to see what is around us, a lack of situational awareness that causes us to repeat common mistakes. In 2 Chronicles 24 through 28, a series of Judah’s kings – having seen God bless them when they obeyed and follow Him – often decided, sometimes after the Lord would guide them out of trouble or provide for them a great need, to turn their back on Him.
It may have been a lesson that should have been learned the first time, when Joash turned away from God and the blessings that God provided gave way to the curses and woes God laid upon them. Kings Amaziah, Uzziah, Jotham, and Ahaz followed in procession; only Jotham was said to stay completely Righteous. (That’s why 2 Chronicles 27 is only 9 verses; the lack of chaos brought peace, which didn’t create headlines.) The others had some blessings given to them, but before their time was up would turn away from God and toward pagan worship or worse, worshipping themselves in selfish pride of their own power.
This failure to learn from others’ mistakes stem from a false reliance on self and of others, blindly trusting a flawed person or persons to make things right, especially one that has a track record of failing to be reliable. Amaziah defeated the Edomites, then decided to worship their gods, though through God, he defeated them. He thought he could have their false gods work in his favor, despite the evidence that their gods did nothing for them (and the obvious fact that a false god carved from a rock or tree by human hands would not be a god to begin with). His failure to see it was the God He had worshipped before, the one who blessed him and protected him in battle, who he should have relied on, not a piece of rock picked up from a defeated enemy.
Yet, this pattern of turning away from God continued over the course of the next several kings, save for Jotham. Despite the proven track record of God, always keeping His promises and always blessing those who are Faithful, gets ignored by many of us today. This slight of the Lord and His work, wisdom, and our worship of Him cause the sin that we stumble over, and creates the chaos we have in the world today.
The story of man is consistently one of sin causing chaos. The very first sin, the disobedience of Adam and Eve in eating the forbidden fruit in Genesis 3, caused them to lose the consistency of the Garden of Eden, a place where they had no problems, worries or illness; only God’s continued blessings. They lost that consistency and started (for us and them) the chaos of life we suffer with today.
Like the Kings of Judah in 2 Chronicles, the chaos of life can be troubling for us, and a lot more troubling without the leadership of the Lord. We need to focus on Jesus more and on ourselves and others less to reduce the chaos and gain consistency. Our Triune God is perfectly consistent; His Word is exactly the same now as it was in the time of the Judahite kings. If we can stay on the path as stated in Proverbs 4:25-27, and focus on follow the Lord who never changes as stated in Hebrews 13:8, we will be provided the greatest blessing of all, consistency.
If others would focus on living for Christ, it would not remove all sin or its consequences, but it would lessen the addition of consequences of sin upon our shoulders. Common sense comes from the Lord, doing the right things and the right times with Jesus as our Guiding Light. This is why witnessing for others to come to know Jesus as their Savior is so important; we introduce them to a path toward Salvation while, if they choose to accept Jesus as their Lord, is one less person who will minimize the chaos in their lives. A society based on Jesus and His Gospel is less chaotic and more consistent in moral character than one that is pagan.
Should the chaos be more than you can bare, pray for the Lord to bring His consistency back into the fold of our nation, and of the world. Pray for all of us who call Jesus our Master, and those around us who do not, to gain His common sense and morals, and to reject those ideas that fall apart outside of His support.
