Context For Destruction

How stubborn are you? Will your stubbornness get you killed? Pastor Better talked about the martyrs of the faith and how ultimately their lives boiled down to their refusal or stubbornness to recant their loyalty to Christ. Their stubbornness was based on their refusal to yield to men. Submission to God was more important than conceding to man. Death under these circumstances was to their honor and to God’s glory.

What does my stubbornness yield? Would it bring glory to God? My defiance could get me killed but it wouldn’t glorify Him. Regretfully my stubbornness is most notably marked by my refusal to submit to God not man. I elevate myself and my way above God’s. This is pride and every sin can be traced back to this root.

Last week I wrote how God may create a context of failure in our lives in order to direct us. This is the ‘nice’ side of God’s context of failure that He can use to stop us from making the wrong decision in seeking His will. But God can also orchestrate a context for failure in our lives when we continue to sin, make unwise choices, reject counsel given, or to resist going in the direction where God is leading. God in His mercy gives us ‘wake-up calls’ to snap us out of our stupor of pride. God uses different levels of dire circumstances in the context of failure to rebuke us. This is how He corrects the naïve and the fool. I believe everyone can relate to a time in their lives that they have felt God’s context of failure when they have been naïve or played the fool.

But what happens when we fail to respond as we should to God’s context of failure? Does God just give up or look the other way? No! God will not be mocked. This individual in scripture is actually referred to as a mocker. “A mocker resents correction; he will not consult the wise (Proverbs 15:2).” He will not consult the wise because he has already determined to follow his own way. At this point, God creates a context for their destruction.

King David when confronted with his sin of adultery and murder repented. King Hezekiah is another example of one who responded rightly to the context of failure that God designed. But there are other kings such as Asa, Joash, Amaziah, and Uzziah who did what was right in the sight of the Lord only to suffer under God’s context for destruction later in their lives due to their stubbornness.

We can see from the life of Job that not every bad thing that happens in our lives is a result of God building a context of failure or destruction for sin. We must carefully examine the circumstances of our lives and determine what God is trying to reveal. We will all die someday. But don’t let your stubbornness to God be the match that lights the fire.

Bill McConomy