Have you been on an unfamiliar freeway, missed your turn-off, and had to go 3 miles before exiting and returning? It might have made your trip easier if it were like Disneyland’s Autopia where cars travel on a guide track that doesn’t allow any wrong turns! After writing yesterday’s post on the divine prohibition against making “right or left turns,” I wanted to make sure you know about God's 'return policy.'
God is not about prohibitions and heartless commandments. His path is meant for our good, immediately and ultimately. It gives Him pleasure when we choose His straight path. But the highway to holiness doesn’t have guide rails. We have choices. In the Bible, ‘turning to the right or to the left’ always implies man’s unfaithfulness (Deut. 2:27; 5:32; Josh. 1:7; 1 Kings 22:2). But don’t worry; God waits for us to ‘straighten up’ before He graciously steps in to ‘straighten us out!’
“The Lord waits for you to come to Him so He can show you His love and compassion. He will be gracious if you ask for help. He will surely respond to the sound of your cries. So whenever you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a word behind you, ‘This is the [straight] way, walk in it. Only in returning to me and resting in me will you be saved’” (Is. 30:18, 21, 15, edited). Like the prodigal’s loving father, He patiently waits for us to come back. He has a very generous return policy!
God says "let us make man in our image." Man says, "let's make God into our image!" How does he do that? With his “fallen” imagination, he projects his ideas and feelings onto God, in effect, “humanizing” Him. Through Isaiah, God says, “You thought I was just like you.” (50:21)
For example, we think God's anger is like ours. But while ours is a mixture of impatience, retaliation, and self-defense, God’s is righteous: it is anger against sin. God hates sin; hates the pain it causes; hates how it separates us from Him. But He loves mankind (Jn 3:16). For that reason, "God demonstrated His love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Ro. 5:8).
The story of the prodigal son illustrates this beautifully. While the son sat in a pig pen of sinful choices, imagining his father's anger, he projected punishment where there was only love and forgiveness. He could not imagine his father was waiting and longing for his return. After times of disobedience, the Jews would distance themselves from God. The prophets tried to tell them God was not mad at them: “God longs to be gracious to you; and He is waiting on high to show you mercy; the Lord of Hosts says, ‘Return to Me; I love you with an everlasting love.’" (Is. 30:18; Zech. 1:3; Jer. 31::3)
After the attempted shoe bombing 10 years ago, TSA made everyone remove their shoes. Then last year, someone put a bomb in their underwear: the underwear bomber. Thank God for ‘body scanners,” or who knows what new rules TSA might have implemented. But alas! This weekend, a 95-year old woman was made to remove her underwear—an adult diaper! And last month a 5-year old was given a pat-down. Everyone is wondering “what happened to common sense?” (Apparently, it got thrown out with the dirty diapers.) But this matter is not limited to TSA. What about the common sense of our elected officials? On what planet does it make sense to borrow and spend our way out of debt?
Considering the aforementioned, “common sense” seems to have been replaced by its alter ego, “collective insanity.” Let’s hope it is a temporary condition. But “temporary insanity” is not uncommon to fallen man. Adam had a spell of temporary insanity when he agreed to eat the “poison apple.” Wasn't David temporarily out of his mind when he slept with Bathsheba and tried to cover it up. Centuries later, Paul asked the Galatians, “Who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth” (3:1). And even Jesus gave witness to this malady in His story of the Prodigal son: “After he came to his senses, he returned to his father “(Luke 15:18). The prodigal had a bout of temporary insanity.
Satan’s strategy has always been to cast a spell of deception on the unwitting. I don’t have much hope for our nation’s “collective insanity.” But I do hope and pray that we in the 21st century American Church won’t wake up one day (come to our senses) and find that we’ve been deceived into a “pig pen” mindset, “just as Eve was deceived by the cunning ways of the serpent” (2 Cor. 11:3).
