Legal, Who Cares?

There was always a competition between my brothers and me while we were kids and maybe still today. I felt like the dummy of the group, because my grades were always lower in school. My little brother was always on the honor role and getting the bumper sticker for mom to put on her car, when with my best efforts I never came close. At times I still feel like the wimp of the three, after all their married and I'm not. My brothers live within fifteen minutes of my parents, and I live eight hours away. So at times I wonder why my parents love us all the same.

My parents acknowledged good behaviors, so I found myself comparing my good behaviors to theirs, in a never ending battle to receive more good acknowledgements then my brothers. So in one hand I had my bad behaviors, and the other the good, then another set of hands weighing my brothers' good and bad behaviors. Each day I spent weighing the good and bad, always hoping that mine were heavier on the good side then they were.

In our stages of life my brothers each made different decisions. I would compare myself to them on this level too. Surely mom and dad loved me more because…but maybe their love is not based on my performance but instead an unconditional love, a love that Paul tells us about in 1 Corinthians 13. Later I came to realize this was the way my parents loved us, and not by this comparison system based on performance.

God is the same way, loving unconditionally. Many Christians would say this but how many live it? In life is our relationship with God based on how our life is going? A series of ups and downs, good days and bad days, it is all a matter of how we are "feeling" that day. Then we get this assumption that God is the same way, changing His view of us and/or His love for us.

We set up this system of comparing our good deeds to our bad deeds. This process is commonly called Legalism. We weight in our deeds, and feel that we have God's approval, and love, so long as our good deeds out weigh our bad ones. The only problem with this kind of thinking is that it is totally unbiblical.

If this legalism system were the way God is then we would see it expressed, throughout the bible, or at some point. Throughout the bible we see God acting totally different from this system.
Ultimately if we accept this system, we deny why Christ died on the cross. Christ died to wash away our sin, so that we may have a relationship with God. If God was concerned with our goods deed outweighing the bad, why ever send Christ to wash the bad away? If God only cared for those whose good deeds outweighed the bad, then why did Christ walk and heal the sinful?

Mom and dad do not weight my good behaviors and bad behaviors; instead they focus on one thing loving. It does not matter how many times I have disobeyed them, they still love us. God does not care about the "good" we do, but instead what is in our hearts. After all that's why Christ came, to show that God does not operate by this Legalism system.

Who's King

“Give us a king to judge us like all the other nations have.” 1 Samuel 8:5b Why does Israel want to be like all the other nations? The other nations loose to the Israelites in battle, so long as they follow God’s commands. Why by like the guys that loose in battle? Why request that a king, a man, judge them? Isn’t God supposed to be our judge? God is constant and will judge by the same rules every time. A man changes his focus, had mood swings, and spurts of anger. Why have a man judge you? Do we still live like that today? I would say we do.

The Popes and priests of the Catholic religion, as I see it, function as the kings of the Old Testament. At confession the priest tells the confessor what they must do to make things right with God. You must do… who are they to judge what the person must do to be right with God.

Even a pastor, at times, can act as kings. Have you ever had a pastor tell you your going to hell? Who are they to judge? Some people only communicate with God through their pastor, that’s not what he is there for.

Why do I say all this, because God wants to be our King. God is to be the judge, not a man. Pastors bring us together, and encourage us to keep progressing in our relationship with God. But we so often choose the easier, defiantly not the best, way of letting God into our lives.

If you only let a pastor or priest teach you everything you need or should know about God, at the most that is an hour a week. That’s 52 hours a year. The rest of the week we hear what everyone else says about God. We spend approximately two hours a day, fourteen hours a wee, 730 hours a year. That is a conservative estimate, not accounting for the hours of TV we watch with their views. So which view is influencing us more?

I spend at least 730 hours a year hearing others views about God. A thousand might be a more realistic estimate. How easy it might be to let others sway my view? But I spend a minimum of two hours a day focused on God. Also I talk to fellow Christians about what they are learning and going through a minimum of one hour a day. I spend ten hours on Sunday in the presence of some amazing fellow Christians. That’s a minimum of 730 hours of personal time a year. 365 talking with Christians, and 520 on Sundays communing with them. That’s a total of 1615 hours a year focusing on God. This is one way how I stay constant in my view of God. 1615 outweighs the time I spend around people that would try to down play my view of God. But this time means nothing if God is not my King.

Israel went through many kings, some followed God, and some did not. No king followed God like David did. Many times David is called, “A man after God’s own heart.” David’s will was that of the father. There was a relationship there between God and David. Solomon let his desire for women get in-between him and God. There were many kings like Omri, who made idols to worship gods.

Why do so many people want a physical representation of what God looks like? Why do so many images of God or gods look like us? Zeus looks like he could be my Grandpa. Why did they desire a golden cow, or a statue of a fat man, an elephant with human hands and other stuff, or a god for everything like the Egyptians had? Why do we elevate a pastor to the level of a king?

So many of us want God to be like us, so we feel like we could be His equal. We see ourselves as the masters of everything we see. We study, study, and study more so that nothing would be impossible for us to do. Cancer is a big problem now-a-days, and we want to cure every kind of cancer. Space we see no boundaries. We are currently trying to get ready to send a group to Mars, because space has no boundaries except our own thinking. In our view there is nothing we cannot do; we just have to figure out how to do it. And we get this thought that God is just farther down the line of intellectual development then us, but this is not true.

God is not just more intellectual then us, He is more then we could ever be. We are not His equals we are His creation, and yet He desires to be our king. God gets jealous every time we let things come in-between us and Him. In Deuteronomy it says that God is jealous about His relationship with us.

Through out 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles, and 2 Chronicles we see this common phrase when a king chooses to not follow God, “…did what was evil in the Lord’s sight.” Those same kings “provoked” God’s anger. Why did God get angry when these things happened, because they let something come in-between them and Him.

Pastors and Priest, sometimes, are held to the level of the O.T. Kings. Just like the O.T. kings these pastors and priest will mess up. I am studying to be a minister, and even though I don’t want to admit it, I will mess up at some point. The Catholic Church has had to face the problem of priest doing things they shouldn’t. Pastor’s let things come in and damage their personal relationships with God, and the church acts as if they are surprised that the pastor or priest cannot live a sinless life.

What one person will not mess up, God. That is why He wants to be our king. Another man should not be the one telling you what God has to say to you all the time. We get this perception that God is so big and amazing that our mind could never fathom Him or commune with Him, but we let another person do it of the perception that they will tell us all we need to know.
You can talk with God. You can understand some things about God. You can rely on Him to guide you through life. He is not so big and distant that only our priests and pastors can communicate with Him. Ultimately there can only be one king, one that permeates through your life, to provide you with guidance. The choice is friends, parents, siblings, a grandparent, a pastor, a priest, the pope, or a perfect all knowing and all loving God, the choice is yours.