Nowadays, believers and unbelievers alike enjoy picking and choosing scripture to the convenience of their fancies. They seek moral support for their arguments via scripture and for the most part, they are often confident in their arguments while ignorant to the connotation, history and context of the passage they base their arguments upon. If you’ve lived long enough, you would find that we have all been guilty of protruding this type of self-righteousness.
There is another type of self-righteousness that is widespread and invasive in today’s society. The type of self-righteousness where we believe we bring God so much more merit than others that we should be spared from calamity. We see where we measure and weigh our sins on our own deluded scales of righteousness and we measure our sins as miniscule keeping them hidden in the dark while we shine the light upon the sins of the ones we frown upon. People frown upon homosexuality while they are guilty of abuse, gossip and deceit. They are vocal against domestic violence while practicing necromancy, bribery and sexual immorality.
The truth is none of us are good and while our sins may differ, there is one sin that is common among us all: disobedience. It’s the offense that sentenced mankind to death and it’s the offense that we must overcome to be in the right standing with Almighty God.
As I peruse through the Scriptures, I can see where God has a trend of saying “if” before pronouncing His declarations, commands and promises. That “if” always signals the prerequisite of obedience for one to gain the promise because disobedience is programmed to strip you of your crown. God always guarantees you His blessings if you do whatever He commands you in total obedience to Him. He always guarantees you victory over the circumstances and storms that are bound to pass your way if you walk right in His eyes. You can therefore never be defeated if you live by God’s principles and within the parameters that were prescribed for your life by God.
God is busy carrying out His sentence on earth with speed and finality as He saves His remnant who He prepared in advance for His glory. While doing this, He is also preparing those who have been hardened by unbelief and disobedience to His Word for destruction, a calamity from which their eternal lives cannot escape.
You see even while King Solomon was bestowed as the wisest man, he too fell into destruction when he did not respect the “if” given to Him by God. In disobedience, he intermarried with foreign women from whom he was forbidden and in turn they turned his heart away from being fully devoted to God. He began to do evil and ignored God’s command against idolatry and sought to please his wives. Maybe Solomon thought that he was such a prized possession as David’s wise son that God would turn away his eyes from what he did in honour of the promise made to his father. As wise as he was, he was not wise enough to know that God would never go back on His Word or compromise the integrity of it.
There is always an “if”!
1 Kings 9:4
“If you walk before me faithfully with integrity of heart and uprightness, as David your father did, and do all I command and observe my decrees and laws, I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever, as I promised David your father when I said, ‘You shall never fail to have a successor on the throne of Israel.’”
Because of King Solomon’s disobedience, he was stripped from living out his fullest potential and from the full promise of God even though he was greater in riches and wisdom than all the other kings of the earth. Our disobedience arouses the anger of God and causes God to stir up adversaries who are available and obedient to His will to take the promise that was rightfully ours. God would honour his promise to David by not taking the whole kingdom out of Solomon’s hand; however, he would strip him of ten tribes and bestow them unto an adversary.
It sucks when God gives your promise to someone else!
While God’s grace and mercy abounds, there is always a sin that will lead to your ultimate destruction. God will not strive with your disobedience forever. The good news though is that God humbles his destruction when we can humble ourselves, repent and obey.
There is hidden glory inside every human being on this earth and a particular path assigned to us by God. We all have promises assigned to our names and identities as the sons of God. Let us not become so self righteous that we forget the one we have been called to serve and obey. Let us not become so wrapped up in our own self-delusions that we miss out on the promises we were created to fulfil.
