Pushing God Away?

Voltaire said, "It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere." Isaiah reminds us, "The Eternal One’s reach is not so short that He cannot save you. His ear is not so deaf that He cannot hear you. Your persistent wrongdoing has come between you and your God; since you constantly reject and push God away..." (Isaiah 59:1-2 VOICE) There is a constancy to sin, isn't there? We are pulling against it, but it is pulling us into it repeatedly. The fool is never free from the bonds of those chains - from the repeated pulling toward the unwise choice. The wise will call out, realizing they are pulled beyond their strength to resist. Their call will be heard - not by human ears, but by the ears of a God who delights in setting the captive free! Their bondage will be broken. Their freedom is assured!

One must realize the need for freedom, though. We have to recognize the bondage of sin - the pull that is beyond our ability to resist with mere willpower. The priority of the sinner is to please self. Satan's hope is that we will never realize our willpower is insufficient to resist sin's bondage. We will constantly reject and push away from God's grace as long as we keep believing that lie. We must recognize the pull toward sin is not ever broken with 'self-help measures'. It is only broken when we lay down our fight and allow God to take its pull away.

A fool reveres the chains that holds him captive. Think on that one for a moment or two. The fool actually sees the chains that hold him in bondage as nothing to be resisted. In the time he wrote, he saw both the customs of the day and the demands of religion as chains that held a man captive. Men and women were holding on to misguided beliefs - ignoring truth when it was presented to them. They refused to consider there could be any other way to live. The fool holds onto those chains as much as they are holding onto him!

The way to break free is not with willpower. It is in submitting our will to one's whose power is greater than our own. Some think Satan has a power greater than their own. I would daresay he might exert influence, but he isn't powerful! He merely appeals to our desire to 'revere those chains' that hold us captive. The lusts and desires of our own heart can exert a 'power' that ends up in compromise and foolishness. It isn't until we recognize the 'power within' is at work in cahoots with the spiritual powers of darkness that exist around us that we will actually be open to breaking free of those chains!

God's delight isn't in that we hold onto those chains, but that we drop them at his feet. He is the one to break their hold and he will be the one to destroy them completely. The more we push against his movement in our lives to break the bonds of those chains, the more we will push away from his grace to be free. The sooner we drop those chains, the sooner we will be free of their power over us. Just sayin!