Michael I feel your pain. I am also tempted as you are. Jesus was tempted as we are. But to Messiah Jesus, Scripture never rang hollow. Perhaps we can say that there was one hour when scripture did seem hollow—when for our sakes, on the cross, he cried “My God why have you forsaken me?” Yet he trusted God and triumphed. So must we. The last thing we should do is to hold God responsible. Study Jesus.
Nobody’s experience . . . ? Really? Sometimes we can actually ignore the tremendous evidence of God at work in countless men and women. Their experience exceeds with what I have said here—I can refer to thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Almost daily I am informed by trustworthy sources of God’s saving and healing demonstrations throughout the world. It is extraordinary! Would you like me to lay it out for you?
We are without excuse. Absolutely.
Listen, even if we had NO such affirming evidence, God’s promises would stand firm. “Let God be true though ever man be a liar!”
We all who enter the Kingdom of God struggle sometimes to come to terms with a loving God who has graciously allowed us to choose to love him back. Yet his offer to us, his new covenant, is such a good deal. Amazing grace. Unbeatable. Where else can we find such salvation but from this ever-loving God?
Have you got a better deal?
It is the enemy who tells us we are empty, frustrated and joyless and that it is all God’s fault. We must hold the enemy responsible, not God. We have a formidable accuser who will not stop muttering to us that God cannot be trusted. Satan enlists others in his wretched project which is to destroy God’s kingdom of love, health, freedom and joy.
This enemy will do anything to stop our inheritance even to urging us into religious practices—‘exhausting prayers, fastings’ which can just end in emptiness and, God forbid, the shipwreck of our faith. We must turn from his lies to the clear word of God.
Satan began with our first ancestors and has continued ever since. He asked the woman “Has God really said don’t eat it?” She knew the word of God, “don’t touch that tree or you die.” Yet incredibly she believed the lie “No, you won’t die . . . . . in your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God . . . . .” (Gen 3).
The awful result is we begin to accuse God, to hold God responsible, if we listen to such filthy trash. Stop it!
You would think by now we would learn the lesson that we humans continually try to shift blame from ourselves to others and worst of all, on to the One who lovingly created us and has done the ultimate to show us his character of love. Study Jesus again. And again.
Our enemy is a liar from the beginning and continues. You know how the accuser has infiltrated the minds of many religious people to try to turn the glorious family of the New Covenant into a tangled mess of self-opinionated, self-righteous, self-justifying commercialised competing corporations.
As always, the way forward is to turn from unbelief to trust, despite any prevailing circumstances. Help is at hand from your many fellow-travellers.
Ian Thomson 