Ok, I admit, part of my reason for adding that title was to pop your eyes out of your head and make you want to read on, but please bear with me. There is a valid point to be made.
How many times are we encouraged to bless God? King David said it several times.
Psalms 103:1 (HRV) – “Bless YHWH, O my soul; and all that
is within me, bless His set-apart name.”
And yet, the apostle Shaul/Paul had this to say about
blessing.
Hebrews 7:7 (HRV) – “And behold this no one
disputes: that the lesser is blessed by
the greater.”
So if we are to bless God, and the greater blesses the
latter, then this leads us to the obvious question and stunning thought. Are we greater than God?
Yes, we are. We
are greater than God by His design in one aspect and one aspect alone: Freedom.
Psalms 111:10a (HRV) – “The fear of YHWH is the beginning
of wisdom;”
To fear God means to acknowledge and respect who He
is. To fear is to bow. To fear is to worship. Fearing God is recognizing that He is King
and Lord and Ruler of all even if you hate that fact. To Fear YHWH is to come face to face with Him
and say, “You’re God. I am not.”
BUT this is only the beginning of wisdom. It was never meant to end there. YHWH wanted us to grow. He wanted us to become His true love. It’s one thing to acknowledge that He is God
and to bend your knee to Him. It’s quite
another to enthusiastically embrace Him.
1 John 4:19 (HRV) – “Therefore, we love Eloah (God) because
he first loved us.”
A friend of mine said once that he loves God because He is God and therefore deserves our love. I told him what I'm telling you now. That's not true. We bow because He is God.
We love because He chose to love us first. He didn’t have to. If we become separated from God, He continues
on, we don’t. He doesn’t need us, we
need Him. He gave us life and then He
gave us His life on the cross.
Everything He has done has been for the purpose of unifying us with Him. He never had to create us in the first
place. This is why we love, because He gave
us everything. He loved us first. We fear Him because He is God. We love Him because He first loved us.
In order to have true love, there needs to be the freedom to choose not to love. Without the freedom to disobey and walk away, there
is no love on our part. If I hold out my
hand and ask you to love me and you take it, that expresses love. If I hold out a gun to your head and ask you
to love me, and you concede, that fails to express true love. Love forced is not love at all. An atheistic friend of mine once asked me, if
God exists then why doesn’t He remove all doubt and reveal Himself. Why is faith required? The response was simple. Because if He did what you’re saying He
should do, our freedom to choose would effectively be taken away. You would no longer be able to truly love Him
if you had no other real option.
Having the freedom to chase Him doesn’t make all of our
choices correct. Even in our freedom, He
is still the King and His supreme authority has not gone away. We’re told we’ve been set free from the law
of sin and death, and yet Jesus/Yeshua said that He did not come to destroy the
law, so the law still applies. How do we
reconcile this?
Romans 6:16-18 – “Do you not know that to whom you
present your nefesh** for service, you must obey? You are the servants of that one whom you
obey, whether to sin or to the obedience of righteousness. But thanks [be] to Eloah, because you were
servants of sin, but [now] you have obeyed from the heart the form of teaching
to which you are committed. And when you
were freed from sin, you were made subject to righteousness.”
(** = Meaning of nefesh, quoted from Hebraic Roots
Version, Translation issues, page LX. “The Hebrew word NEFESH is a very ambiguous
word which simply cannot be rendered well into English. NEFESH can mean ‘soul, life or self’ and
often carries connotations of combinations of those meanings at the same time. In order to properly convey the real usage of
this word to the reader I have in most cases, in the New Testament,
transliterated the word NEFESH into the English text.”)
These verses speak of freedom from sin, and yet they’re
constantly talking about obedience. We’ve
been given the freedom to find Him, not the freedom to create our own way and
call it good. When the bible says that we
are freed from the law of sin and death, it is not a manifesto by God allowing
us to ignore everything or anything He has given us, but rather it’s saying
that by way of Jesus’ blood paying our penalty, the penalty of death no longer
can be required of us. In other words,
we’re no longer destined to die as a result of our sin, but we may instead fall
upon Jesus’ death and resurrection as having paid our burden.
Romans says that when we are freed from sin, we are made subject to
righteousness. This is why Paul, who
understood the freedom he had in Christ, continued to refer to himself as a
bondservant or a slave. We no longer
obey out of fear of reprisal, but we now obey out of love because it’s what He
wants and it makes Him happy. Think
about it this way. If you’re courting
the love of your life and he or she hates peas and you know this, then if you’re
having him or her over for dinner, you won’t prepare peas. You will not obey that “law” because you’re afraid of being beaten. You
will obey because you love them enough to avoid hurting them even if you love
peas. When God says, “This is who I am
and what I want done,” when we ignore that and respond, “That’s too bad, God,
because I’m doing it my way,” who are we worshipping? Who are we obeying? God or ourselves? We have the freedom to do it our way, but
that doesn’t mean every single choice we make pleases Him.
Have you ever heard of Preacher’s Kid Syndrome or Church
Kid Syndrome? This is the name given
when the children of the preacher or the kids who grow up in the church are the
worst behaved kids around. Why is this
happening? Of course it’s not an
absolute, but it happens often enough to give it a name. And the fact is that church attendance is
increasingly shrinking. If a church is
growing it’s usually not because of a revival, but because other churches are
closing their doors. Kids who grow up in
the church are not coming back to church when they’re out on their own. Why?
I believe that in part it’s because our churches are full
of platitudes and programs, but not an honest search for a living God. Our churches lack the true freedom to
genuinely seek YHWH and then to let YHWH lead us where He wants us to go. So we’re not finding a God of life. We’re finding a man-made God of platitudes
and rules. Our kids, and us too if we’re
honest, are hungry for life, and since they’re not finding it in our churches
they’re looking elsewhere. (And please don't feel like I'm saying every single church is a cookie-cutter version of every other church. This is a generality and does not apply equally in every situation.)
If you’re one of those “kids,” whether you're nine or ninety, my prayer for you today is
that you have the courage to follow your heart’s desire to truly seek His life,
His face and His love. There are many in
churches today who can help and want to help.
I’m not decrying everyone who attends church. But I hope you recognize that even the best out there are just
as imperfect as you are. A lot of bad
advice has been given to me over the years from very good intentioned people just as it has been given to you. I hope you understand that He wants to be
found. The journey was made difficult to
prove your heart’s desire. You've got to find His truth in the midst of all of the lies. If you seek
Him, and I mean if you TRULY seek him, he WILL be found.
Go for it.
Scott Snyder
Edgiscript3@yahoo.com