What, is God Crazy?!?! – 6/4/2017

WARNING PREACHY…

Have you ever had the experience where you are assessing your life and you wonder what the heck God is doing?

Unfortunately I do, and too often – even though you would think that I know better.

There are situations in each of our lives that cause us to question God at times, and even question His judgement.  Or worse, we don’t question Him at all because we don’t truly believe that He is there or that He even cares.  Both situations are completely human and are understandable when our world doesn’t make sense.

In Exodus 14, God had done the miraculous by causing Pharaoh to release the Israelites from their enslavement.  Do you remember the 10 plagues?  God turned the water into blood, and then he plagued Egypt with frogs, and then with gnats, then with biting flies, then he caused just the Egyptian livestock to be inflicted with disease, and then to have an epidemic of boils on their persons, then a devastating hail storm, and then He sent a swarm of locust to destroy what was left of the crops, and a bitterly deep darkness, only to be completed with the death of every first born mail of both man and animals. 

By the end of these 10 plagues, Pharaoh had relented and told Moses that the people could leave – so they did.

God directed Moses to lead the people out of Egypt in a confused circle forcing them to camp by the Red Sea.  This caused Pharaoh to see them as lost and helpless so he changed his mind and went out with his army to force them to return as slaves.

Exodus 14:10-12

¹⁰ As Pharaoh approached, the Israelites looked up, and there were the Egyptians, marching after them. They were terrified and cried out to the Lord. ¹¹ They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? ¹² Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians’? It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!”

It was at this point the people started complaining and questioning Moses, the man of God’s judgement.

As much as you and I, as outside observers, would like to believe, the Israelites are not special in their ability to complain and fear about their life’s situations.  We may not be as obvious as portrayed here in the Exodus account but you and I will worry and complain to our friends and family effectively proving that we are not happy with our own life’s situation and that God is somehow not in control.

I want to be clear here and observe that there is a stark difference between situations that God is placing upon us to bring Him honor and glory and situations that we get ourselves into by our own poor and sinful choices.  I am referring to the later as I observe the situation of the Israelites in Exodus 14.  It is this later situation that causes us to sink into dark places and begin questioning what God is doing.

Job 7:20

²⁰ If I have sinned, what have I done to you,
    you who see everything we do?
Why have you made me your target?
    Have I become a burden to you?

We all know this dark place where we understand that God is in control but we just cannot figure out how our current situation can possibly resolve with a happy ending.  We may feel as though God has forsaken us and we are being punished unjustly for a crime that we haven’t committed.  Our eyes just simply cannot see that God is even noticing our plight, except to pile more on.  In this, we can understand and feel the fear and confusion that the Israelites were feeling as they watched the armies of Egypt approaching.

Exodus 14:21-22

²¹ Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and all that night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land. The waters were divided, ²² and the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left.

Verse 22 tells us that “all that night the Lord drove the sea back.”

The Israelites were literally in a pinch: Egypt’s army was coming upon them and the Red sea was preventing them from fleeing.  This was the Rock and the Hard-Place and we’ve all been there wondering how it could work out.

But I want to encourage you that God is on the job, he works in ways that are greater than our own and when all we can see is hopelessness God is at work; “all that night the Lord drove the sea back.”  Even while we are sleeping, though we cannot observe it, God is pushing back the situations that trap us in.

And even if we don’t believe these words, even though we don’t believe that He is aware, we have a choice to make.  Will we trust Him with whatever pinches us in?  Will we trust the One who raised Jesus back to life from the dead with our plight?  For this is true faith.  To trust in the God who IS and not our own ability to reason out what we can observe is the point of faith.  We trust in God and not ourselves.  

Faith is difficult but it’s how we as Christians roll.

John 6:68-69

⁶⁸ Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, ⁶⁹ and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.