“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as you did in
Meribah,
as you did that day at Massah in the
desert...”
— Psalm 95:7d,8a,8b (NIV)
CHRISTIANS will know that ‘close to God’ is good, but ‘far away’ is danger,
yet God is ever close. When we see the Lord
for who he is, for what he has done, and for what he is doing, and for what he is about to do, we don’t stray
far. Yet, we are human beings – broken almost in our entirety – and we do
stray. It would exasperate God. But God knows us. He knows our degrees of
partiality. He knows we cannot stay on course so long as to prevent the
eventual drift away from him.
We have our knowledge and we don’t get far without it. But our knowledge
also compels us into the wrong areas, into wrong thinking, and into destinations
of stubbornness and folly.
Our knowledge has been influenced so much – inherently so – by our
experiences – by our perceptions of our experiences. We have developed
partialities almost without knowing it. The stains on us from our hurts, our
hang-ups, and our habits have taken us far from God – until we have seen them
for what they are, and have repented
(turned back to God).
The
Girded Stability of ‘Knowing’ the Lord
When we consider the created majesty of Earth extending to the created
universe, we see God, for nothing so majestic could ever just ‘be’.
Not only was the physical world created, but a spiritual world underpins
such a creation. Laws undergird the entire realm of life; that which we know
and that which we have no idea about – both.
Psalm 95 is a prayer of remembrance, acknowledging that it is right to sing for joy to the Lord; to shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation (verse 1) –
and that it’s not right, otherwise, to harden our hearts so as to resist God.
Such knowing of God is a
fundamentally blessed thing. The moment we recall our folly of resistance is
the moment we turn back to safety.
***
Ending at the start, having worked
our way through the whole psalm, we see that it is right to sing for joy to the
Lord; to shout aloud to the Rock
of our salvation.
Knowing God is about knowing we
are nothing without him. He who conceived us, who knows us better than we even
know ourselves, is the God of all creation. He created us to depend on him.
Life runs well when we know the truth. But life turns south rapidly when we harden
our hearts and do our own thing.
© 2013 S. J. Wickham.
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