August 27

“Dear friends, if we deliberately continue sinning after we have received a full knowledge of the truth, there is no other sacrifice that will cover these sins. There will be nothing to look forward to but the terrible expectation of God’s judgment and the raging fire that will consume His enemies......It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:26&27, 31). The apostle Paul tells us that God allows us to keep on living in our foolish disobedience if that is what we choose. “God let them go ahead and do whatever shameful things their hearts desired” (Romans 1:24). “God abandoned them to their shameful desires” (1:26). “When they refused to acknowledge God, He abandoned them to their evil minds and let them do things that should never be done” (1:28).
God is wise enough to know that forcing us to follow Him is not really a relationship at all. A relationship exists when two people feel a mutual connection and make a mutual commitment to one another, and not when one does while the other doesn’t.
Jerusalem’s destruction was not simply because of God’s fury and anger. The leaders of the Hebrew nation, “deprived people of their God-given rights in defiance of the Most High. They perverted justice in the courts. Do they think the Lord didn’t see it?” (Lamentations 3:34-36). A lot of the burden of what happened to Jerusalem fell on the shoulders of Israel’s leaders. “Your ‘prophets’ have said so many foolish things, false to the core. They did not try to hold you back from exile by pointing out your sins. Instead, they painted false pictures, filling you with false hope” (2:14). The fact is, “the unfailing love of the Lord never ends! By His mercies we have been kept from complete destruction. Great is His faithfulness; His mercies begin afresh each day.....The Lord is wonderfully good to those who wait for Him and seek Him” (3:22-25). When we know from the lessons of the past and from our own personal experience that God is wonderfully good to those who wait for Him and seek Him, and when we know from the lessons of the past and from our own personal experience that God is angry with those who refuse to acknowledge their sin, why would we even think about continuing to sin?