Good News Bad News Great News

Deuteronomy 4:25–31 (ESV) “When you father children and children’s children, and have grown old in the land, if you act corruptly by making a carved image in the form of anything, and by doing what is evil in the sight of the Lord your God, so as to provoke him to anger, 26 I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that you will soon utterly perish from the land that you are going over the Jordan to possess. You will not live long in it, but will be utterly destroyed. 27 And the Lord will scatter you among the peoples, and you will be left few in number among the nations where the Lord will drive you. 28 And there you will serve gods of wood and stone, the work of human hands, that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell. 29 But from there you will seek the Lord your God and you will find him, if you search after him with all your heart and with all your soul. 30 When you are in tribulation, and all these things come upon you in the latter days, you will return to the Lord your God and obey his voice. 31 For the Lord your God is a merciful God. He will not leave you or destroy you or forget the covenant with your fathers that he swore to them.

The Good news is God will never give up on His own. Israel is promised that God will never leave them or destroy them or forget them. They are indeed His very own possession and His blessing will be upon them. 

The Bad News is God will never give up on His own. Israel is warned by Moses that though they may live long in the land, it doesn't mean they won't be tempted to stray in latter days. Here he tells them what will happen if so. They will be driven from the land. They will be scattered among the peoples. They will be few in number in those nations. And God will give them over to the lusts of their hearts. 

Why does God do this? To chastise and discipline His own. He is a faithful and loving Father who knows that the rod of correction drives folly out of the heart of a child. Sometimes the only way to get our attention is for God to hand us over to the lusts of our hearts so that we come to the end of ourselves and run back to Him. 

I think of the great warnings of Hebrews about the rest of God and what He promised for us. Yet after the warnings comes the admonition to run to God through our Great High Priest Jesus so that we might find mercy and grace to help us in our time of need.

Yet, what makes us experience times of need? Running from the Lord. Here God clearly defines that the idols do not see, hear, eat or smell. There is no life in them. There is nothing they can do for us. They can only sap us of the goodness God has given us. An idol is truly a vain and empty thing because it is formed by a created being and not the Creator God. We can identify the idols of our hearts most clearly by considering what areas of our lives seem empty and desolate. What are we turning to other than God to give us the significance, status, value, worth and life that only God above can give us? 

The Great News is that no matter what our foolish hearts do that leads us down deceptive roads of destruction, our Father is working in all things for our ultimate good. So does that mean we should rush headlong in our own way knowing that God will forgive us anyway? Of course not! He has already given us the clear description of what we will find when we do so. Why would we use His mercy as an excuse to chase emptiness.

It does mean we are free from fear. We do not serve God because we want to avoid damnation. That would simply be serving our own benefit. We serve God because we know He saved us from damnation. He took us out of our foolishness and gave us Jesus. WE LOVE HIM because HE FIRST LOVED US. And that is what true Christian living is about.