My thoughts humbly offered...
It took some years for me to finally come to the understanding that God’s laws and commandments aren't just simply the authoritarian edicts of the endlessly powerful ruler of the universe. He IS the omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God, but those laws and commandments all represent something deeper. There's a divine, passionate and holy desire, an omniscient and compassionate goal behind them ... all to our benefit and motivated by love.
Amos 5:21-24 (NLT)
21 “I hate all your show and pretense— the hypocrisy of your religious festivals and solemn assemblies. 22 I will not accept your burnt offerings and grain offerings. I won’t even notice all your choice peace offerings. 23 Away with your noisy hymns of praise! I will not listen to the music of your harps. 24 Instead, I want to see a mighty flood of justice, an endless river of righteous living.”
The spirit of our God's laws and commandments present us with an opportunity to attempt to understand something about His heart if we're willing to look a little deeper. For example: Remember all of the burdensome details that God gave the Israelites to observe in their sacrifices, etc. in the Old Testament? It wasn’t because He wanted the sacrifices or even the etc.. Those things weren't His goal or what He really wanted from them. There was a spirit and a desire, a motivation for the good of mankind behind them. Through those arduous and costly requirements, He was making the price of disobedience and sin a heavy personal burden in order to discourage that kind of behavior - behavior that carries a more tragic and often more widespread cost to the people that God loves than that of the sacrifices and ritual that He required. Sin always has a price and to bring that fact more to the practical forefront of their daily lives, He instituted a required regimen that made that cost more apparent to the offender. No one can hide their misdeeds from God and the Israelites knew that. The Lord had already made Himself and His divine power known to them, so their compliance with His laws generally wasn't something that they dared to toy with. But it appears that the sacrifices and the rituals themselves became the more prevalent focus than the true spirit behind them...
Jeremiah 7:21-24 (NLT)
21 This is what the LORD of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: “Take your burnt offerings and your other sacrifices and eat them yourselves! 22 When I led your ancestors out of Egypt, it was not burnt offerings and sacrifices I wanted from them. 23 This is what I told them: ‘Obey me, and I will be your God, and you will be my people. Do everything as I say, and all will be well!’ 24 “But my people would not listen to me. They kept doing whatever they wanted, following the stubborn desires of their evil hearts. They went backward instead of forward.“
The word sin seems to have legalistic connotations as it's discussed by some today. Personally, I think that takes the context on a tangent that completely skirts the intended spirit of the word and frames it in a way that opens it up to endless worldly debate and argument. As I personally continue to learn more about our God's heart, I'm inclined to think of sin through my own interpretation as something that someone does, thinks or says that causes... undeserved harm. It might be harm against one's reputation, authority, household, heart, physical person, etc. Whether against God Himself or man, sin/harm has a price and whether it's paid immediately by an innocent victim, the guilty perpetrator, or left unaccounted until it's brought to the day of final justice before the ultimate judge, ... someone God created and loves is going to suffer.
Zechariah 7:8-10 (NLT)
8 Then this message came to Zechariah from the LORD : 9 “This is what the LORD of Heaven’s Armies says: Judge fairly, and show mercy and kindness to one another. 10 Do not oppress widows, orphans, foreigners, and the poor. And do not scheme against each other."
Our Creator's righteous, loving perfection reviles evil and the carnage and pain that it gives birth to. The things that He's spoken against hurt people that He loves - and He loves them all. So He gave us commandments, instruction and guidance that if we collectively chose to follow completely, would allow us to prosper and flourish peacefully without conflict in an environment that could only find us content, healthy and blessed far beyond anything that we've likely seen in our current society. The choice to follow is and has always been ours, both collectively ... and individually.
His desire is for good for all that He's created and that no one of them should suffer because of bad choices or the actions of another. But given the freedom of men to make their own choices and the sinful nature of man's flesh, we see a world that's far less desirable than what the adherence to God's desires would have yielded.
A just and righteous God cannot be untrue to His own character and declarations regarding the painful evil of sin and its' punishment. He can't allow sin go unpunished and He's declared that in advance. So our fate is created not by our righteous God, but by our own choice. And while we navigate that path, our Father God's most powerful and cunning enemy is very aware of the weaknesses of our flesh and continually lays traps in our path to exploit them. So we can't just wander through life oblivious to the fact that we have an enemy and that the choices we make about where we place our feet have consequences.
For all of the push back against Father God's governance that can be found in secular society, it's interesting to me to note that when they're seriously considered, the obvious intended goal of every law, commandment and teaching given to man by God sets the stage for peace, purity, joy and contentment among the human creatures that He chose to create. They're all good! The only arguments that can be made against them can really only be made by someone with a different set of intellectual values than God's seeking to satisfy their lusts or their desire for personal contentment in a way other than what He's knowingly ordained from the beginning. Looking around honestly, it's not real hard to see that despite any appearances, those alternatives don't honestly work - in the end someone always gets hurt.
There are all kinds of arguments made in the world, but the evidence contravening man's alternative methods and thinking as opposed to our God's is all around us and yet they're still continued and repeated endlessly. So why do some fight against what God in His omniscience has declared as the pathway to find what we're all looking for? After you've shaken it all down to the very basic, root desires of our hearts, one of good heart may begin to realize that the intended goal of our God and the pathway that He's laid out for us has always existed to answer them perfectly. The choice to follow our God and His love driven ways... is always ours.
We may not always comprehend His ways, but at the root of all that He is to us, our God is in fact always motivated by His love for us.
Again, just my thoughts humbly offered.
It took some years for me to finally come to the understanding that God’s laws and commandments aren't just simply the authoritarian edicts of the endlessly powerful ruler of the universe. He IS the omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God, but those laws and commandments all represent something deeper. There's a divine, passionate and holy desire, an omniscient and compassionate goal behind them ... all to our benefit and motivated by love.
Amos 5:21-24 (NLT)
21 “I hate all your show and pretense— the hypocrisy of your religious festivals and solemn assemblies. 22 I will not accept your burnt offerings and grain offerings. I won’t even notice all your choice peace offerings. 23 Away with your noisy hymns of praise! I will not listen to the music of your harps. 24 Instead, I want to see a mighty flood of justice, an endless river of righteous living.”
The spirit of our God's laws and commandments present us with an opportunity to attempt to understand something about His heart if we're willing to look a little deeper. For example: Remember all of the burdensome details that God gave the Israelites to observe in their sacrifices, etc. in the Old Testament? It wasn’t because He wanted the sacrifices or even the etc.. Those things weren't His goal or what He really wanted from them. There was a spirit and a desire, a motivation for the good of mankind behind them. Through those arduous and costly requirements, He was making the price of disobedience and sin a heavy personal burden in order to discourage that kind of behavior - behavior that carries a more tragic and often more widespread cost to the people that God loves than that of the sacrifices and ritual that He required. Sin always has a price and to bring that fact more to the practical forefront of their daily lives, He instituted a required regimen that made that cost more apparent to the offender. No one can hide their misdeeds from God and the Israelites knew that. The Lord had already made Himself and His divine power known to them, so their compliance with His laws generally wasn't something that they dared to toy with. But it appears that the sacrifices and the rituals themselves became the more prevalent focus than the true spirit behind them...
Jeremiah 7:21-24 (NLT)
21 This is what the LORD of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: “Take your burnt offerings and your other sacrifices and eat them yourselves! 22 When I led your ancestors out of Egypt, it was not burnt offerings and sacrifices I wanted from them. 23 This is what I told them: ‘Obey me, and I will be your God, and you will be my people. Do everything as I say, and all will be well!’ 24 “But my people would not listen to me. They kept doing whatever they wanted, following the stubborn desires of their evil hearts. They went backward instead of forward.“
The word sin seems to have legalistic connotations as it's discussed by some today. Personally, I think that takes the context on a tangent that completely skirts the intended spirit of the word and frames it in a way that opens it up to endless worldly debate and argument. As I personally continue to learn more about our God's heart, I'm inclined to think of sin through my own interpretation as something that someone does, thinks or says that causes... undeserved harm. It might be harm against one's reputation, authority, household, heart, physical person, etc. Whether against God Himself or man, sin/harm has a price and whether it's paid immediately by an innocent victim, the guilty perpetrator, or left unaccounted until it's brought to the day of final justice before the ultimate judge, ... someone God created and loves is going to suffer.
Zechariah 7:8-10 (NLT)
8 Then this message came to Zechariah from the LORD : 9 “This is what the LORD of Heaven’s Armies says: Judge fairly, and show mercy and kindness to one another. 10 Do not oppress widows, orphans, foreigners, and the poor. And do not scheme against each other."
Our Creator's righteous, loving perfection reviles evil and the carnage and pain that it gives birth to. The things that He's spoken against hurt people that He loves - and He loves them all. So He gave us commandments, instruction and guidance that if we collectively chose to follow completely, would allow us to prosper and flourish peacefully without conflict in an environment that could only find us content, healthy and blessed far beyond anything that we've likely seen in our current society. The choice to follow is and has always been ours, both collectively ... and individually.
His desire is for good for all that He's created and that no one of them should suffer because of bad choices or the actions of another. But given the freedom of men to make their own choices and the sinful nature of man's flesh, we see a world that's far less desirable than what the adherence to God's desires would have yielded.
A just and righteous God cannot be untrue to His own character and declarations regarding the painful evil of sin and its' punishment. He can't allow sin go unpunished and He's declared that in advance. So our fate is created not by our righteous God, but by our own choice. And while we navigate that path, our Father God's most powerful and cunning enemy is very aware of the weaknesses of our flesh and continually lays traps in our path to exploit them. So we can't just wander through life oblivious to the fact that we have an enemy and that the choices we make about where we place our feet have consequences.
For all of the push back against Father God's governance that can be found in secular society, it's interesting to me to note that when they're seriously considered, the obvious intended goal of every law, commandment and teaching given to man by God sets the stage for peace, purity, joy and contentment among the human creatures that He chose to create. They're all good! The only arguments that can be made against them can really only be made by someone with a different set of intellectual values than God's seeking to satisfy their lusts or their desire for personal contentment in a way other than what He's knowingly ordained from the beginning. Looking around honestly, it's not real hard to see that despite any appearances, those alternatives don't honestly work - in the end someone always gets hurt.
There are all kinds of arguments made in the world, but the evidence contravening man's alternative methods and thinking as opposed to our God's is all around us and yet they're still continued and repeated endlessly. So why do some fight against what God in His omniscience has declared as the pathway to find what we're all looking for? After you've shaken it all down to the very basic, root desires of our hearts, one of good heart may begin to realize that the intended goal of our God and the pathway that He's laid out for us has always existed to answer them perfectly. The choice to follow our God and His love driven ways... is always ours.
We may not always comprehend His ways, but at the root of all that He is to us, our God is in fact always motivated by His love for us.
Again, just my thoughts humbly offered.
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