Theological Commentary: Click Here
Discipleship Focus: Up
- Up: Up is the word we use for what we worship. If we are following God’s will, God will occupy the Up position. Our life, our identity, our mission, our family on mission is all derived from Up. This is why God needs to be in our Up position.
Today we
read about the northern kingdom’s captivity.
Assyria has enough of these Hebrew people. They take them into bondage and lead them
away from their homeland. What’s
somewhat disturbing is that this is God’s will.
God desires that the Assyrians be the means through which the Hebrew
people fall into bondage.
But why
do they fall into bondage? If they are
God’s chosen people, why do they end up in bondage only a few hundred years
after the glorious reign of the likes of David?
The Bible
is clear on this point. They went into
bondage because they lusted after the gods of other nations. They worshipped foreign gods. They even offered their children as
sacrifices to those foreign gods. They
set up foreign gods in their own houses.
They erected places to worship foreign gods in the land that was
supposed to be devoted to the one God.
In a
nutshell, their Up wasn’t God.
Israel
goes into captivity because their Up is somewhere it shouldn’t be. Israel goes into captivity because their
hearts are focused elsewhere than upon God.
They go into captivity because the essence of their life is derived from
the world rather than God.
That’s a
scary conclusion to draw, isn’t it?
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