The saying “God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow” is as true today as it was yesterday. In our transient world and lives, we must remember this truth: God is our only constant. The same is also true of His ways, His methods, His commandments. What the Lord required in the past, He still requires today; What the Lord was concerned with in the past, He is still concerned with today; what the Lord celebrated in the past, He still celebrates today. As believers, we need to remember that we still have a response and a responsibility before our Maker. God still expects us to display His attributes such as love, kindness, justice, self-control, etc. Our status as children of God does not exempt us from giving God the honour, glory, respect and obedience He is due. Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross does not give us permission to neglect the ways of the Father, instead, at minimum, it provides us the tools to be pleasing in the sight of the Father and remain in that pleasurable state. Today’s post is about remembering what we are called to be before a Holy God: obedient.
One of the recurrent themes of the bible is obedience. When God created Adam, He gave him a commandment that was meant to be obeyed. In the commandment God gave, we understood something particular about the order of creation, there is a creator and there is a creation and the creation answers to the creator, not the other way around. Commandments can only be given by an authority, one must be in a position of authority and complete rule to set ordinances to be followed. The purpose of a command, a law, a rule or a statute in general is to maintain order and keep citizens from acting according to their own desires. Through the use of commandments, or laws there is a judicial system that is impartial in giving sanctions to transgressors of the law. Laws are never set in place without the consequence for not applying them so that everyone is clear on what penalties will befall them when they do not obey the law. This is transparency at its best. In applying laws in a society, we are promoting the common good vs the personal good. Our societies today have taken this idea from God and how He set rules for His kingdom. In the Garden of Eden, there were laws to be kept and failure to obey them led to consequences. For example, Adam disobeyed God and was chased out of the Garden of Eden and from the presence of God. Similarly, when God appeared to Moses, He gave him commandments and laws that His people were to follow in order to live well in the Promised Land. In addition, God gave Moses different sanctions as well as difficulties that would become the portion of the people if they did not obey God’s laws. So, from the get go, the people of Israel knew what was awaiting them in case they transgressed the law of God.
Fast forward two thousand years since the coming of Christ, God’s laws are still meant to be obeyed by His people. Jesus obeyed his Father, he obeyed God’s laws in everything; so we too, despite being redeemed and clothed with the righteousness of God still have to obey Him. Indeed, Jesus allowed us to obey from a regenerated heart, from a position of sons and daughters. Many believers might think to themselves, “well, Christ has taken the punishment that I deserved and the more sin I commit, the more grace is available to me”, true, however, it is not because more grace is available to you that you need to indulge in lawlessness as someone who has not received forgiveness before. This reminds me of what the apostle Paul said to the Romans “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!” (Romans 6:15). As Paul will go on to explain further, we are no longer slaves to sin which leads to death but we are slaves to obedience which leads to righteousness. Obedience is still required of us and the laws of the kingdom we now abide by are completely different from the ones of the kingdom we were redeemed from. Before Christ, we could not obey God, we did not even want to obey God, we were completely at odds with each other but Christ came and gave us a new heart, a new desire, he gave us the Holy Spirit and we now know the mind of God. Just as the laws of God were written on the tablets of stones in the past, today, these commands are written in our hearts. The Holy Spirit himself teaches us the laws of the Kingdom of God and points us in the direction of obedience so that we would do what pleases the Lord. It is important to understand that in Christ, we are indeed a new creature, the old has gone, the new has come (2 Corinthians 5:17). We do not answer to the old man anymore, in fact as redeemed people we are not to dwell on the old man ever again. We now belong to a new kingdom, with new sets of rules. We belong to the kingdom of God, a kingdom where our Father delights to give good gifts to His children, a kingdom where the King rejoices over his children. God has not changed, just as He created the Garden of Eden with many delights so that man would enjoy them, He has continued to have man’s best interests at heart. His plans for us are still plans to prosper us and to give us a hope and a future. Indeed, Jesus Christ came so that we might have life and have it to the fullest (John10:10)! The fact that the Father’s love for us has not changed is simply marvelous. I pray we commit ourselves to fully obedience to God. May we commit ourselves to righteousness, justice, love, kindness, self-control, basically everything that the Father approves. Let us commit to live lives that are filled with the Spirit!
A Word Aptly Spoken 