Even on judgment day, when all is made plain, many will protest about how wrong God is.
As a kid I wondered at how easily Israel rejected God. When the prophets warned, the people ignored them or killed them. I figured they were just obstinate. It was so obvious they were wrong. We see obstinate people today who have goodness and truth staring them in the face and they don’t care. “The heart wants what it wants.”
But many were not obstinate. They just went with the trends, slowly piling lies in their noetic structure until they had turned the world upside down… in their heads. Truth became lies. Safety, danger. Danger, safety. Rocks were made into gods and faithlessness into community. How could they listen to a prophet who spoke the opposite of what they now believed? “He must be a psycho. God would never say such things to confuse and hurt us.” The world slowly turned upside down, over generations. It took an invasion of a mighty foreign power to re-orient. Pain does that. But better to learn it without the pain.
So when you speak, not from that relativist zeal called “conviction,” but from your experience of God’s reality, expect resistance. When you claim babies are people, expect Baal’s people to balk. When you wish for everyone to have a voice, to have protection from evil, to be fairly treated, expect the arrows to fly. Hold your ground. It’s the only ground there is.
Thanks for coming to my #sundaysermon.
