We Do It Every Day

“Will you discredit my justice and condemn me just to prove you are right? [Job 40.8] 

We do it every day.

We do this every time we turn to an idol to remedy God's justice. Oh, we don't do it flagrantly, but we do it nonetheless inadvertently.

When we encounter lack, experience a loss, suffer sickness or disease, or simply find ourselves inconvenienced, we are in Biblical fact experiencing "curses." Let me list here some curses described in Deuteronomy 28.15-68:

• Towns and your fields cursed
• Fruit baskets and breadboards cursed
• Children and your crops cursed
• Offspring of your herds and flocks cursed
• Wherever you go and whatever you do cursed
• Curses, confusion, and frustration in everything you do
• Diseases
• Wasting diseases, fever, and inflammation, with scorching heat and drought, and with blight and mildew
• Skies above will be as unyielding as bronze
• Earth beneath will be as hard as iron
• Rain that falls on your land changed into powder, and dust will pour down from the sky
• Defeated by your enemies
• Corpses will be food for all the scavenging birds and wild animals
• Boils and tumors, scurvy, and the itch, from which you cannot be cured
• Madness, blindness, and panic
• Oppressed and robbed continually
• Another man will sleep with your wife
• Build a house, but someone else will live in it
• Plant a vineyard, but you will never enjoy its fruit
• Ox butchered before your eyes, but you will not eat a single bite of the meat
• Donkey taken from you, never returned
• Sheep and goats will be given to your enemies
• Sons and daughters taken away as slaves
• Foreign nation eat the crops you worked so hard to grow
• Constant oppression and harsh treatment
• Go mad
• Covered head to foot with boils
• Exile
• Object of horror, ridicule, and mockery
• Plant much but harvest little
• Worms will destroy grape vines
• Olives will drop before ripened
• Lose sons and daughters
• Insects destroy trees and crops
• Foreigners living among you become stronger and stronger (you become weaker and weaker)
• Left hungry, thirsty, naked, and lacking in everything
• Iron yoke of oppression on your neck
• Foreign invasion (no grain, new wine, olive oil, calves, or lambs, and you will starve to death)
• Cannibalism
• No compassion
• Indescribable plagues intense and without relief, making you miserable and unbearably sick
• Diseases with no relief
• Every sickness and plague there is
• Torn from the land
• No peace or place to rest
• Heart will tremble, eyesight will fail, and soul will despair
• Life constantly hanging in the balance
• Live night and day in fear, unsure if you will survive
• Offer to sell yourselves to your enemies as slaves, but no one will buy you

Whether we admit it or not, we encounter some form of these curses every day. But, instead of admitting we are experiencing curses, we just call it "life" for the most part and immediately set about to remedy the affect of these curses with man-made solutions: idols.

In our remediation of life's problems with man-made solutions, we inadvertently discredit God's justice. In so doing, our man-made solutions justify our dominion over our own lives (in our own minds) thus effectively condemning and invalidating God and His Word. 

Yes, we do this every day without giving it as much as a passing thought.

But I am here to tell you, the flagship idols of debt, insurance, medicine and technology (there are many more including religion) have lulled modern society (including the so-called Church) into a deadly idolatrous sleep. All the while, man is increasingly "going mad" with the festering disease of society without God - "God's people" included.

Why? Because we will not admit that our troubles and difficulties are indeed curses from God calling us to repentance (not self-remediation).

Again, from a previous article, Saying It Isn't So Doesn't Make It Isn't So.

Father, I have never been more convinced of our gross idolatry than I am today. It is overwhelming to my human mind. But! Your Holy Spirit encourages me on, confirming Your Word with increasing conviction. May Your light of truth shine brighter in and through me every day. May I live this out in giving up my own way, taking up my cross, and following Jesus daily. So be it.