Obedience

Adam Easterly

Junior-year Home-school Student

Why are the most Christians today so naive, shallow, and "tolerant" of ungodly worldly prospects? Hosea 4:6 says, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children. I traced several words in this verse using Greek and Hebrew dictionaries to discover the literal meaning of the words in the day Hosea wrote them. The first part of the verse is extremely simple when the key words are defined, as follows:

Destroyed - to be dumb or silenced; hence to fail or perish.

Lack - failure, nothing, or destruction; without, not yet, corruption, unaware.

Knowledge - knowledge; cunning; knowing; aware; witty.

Forgotten - to mislay; to be oblivious of; far from want of memory or attention.

When you take a straight forward approach to the verse, Christians are silenced (perished to the lies and traps of the world) because they are without awareness, in both knowledge of their enemy and God. Through recent generations, and continuing today, they have rejected knowledge and therefore have no cunning (shrewdness) with their Sword (the Bible, the only Truth in this world, and the only thing capable of standing against Satan's temptations). Unfortunately many Christians don't seem to genuinely want to hear the Truth, nor do they want to be attentive to It and live by It. Personally, I also believe several faulty translations of the Bible can be attributed to corrupt what little Truth they might get, even if they read their Bible.

Why is that happening? Is it because obeying Truth is harder, not as fun as living as you want, and obeying God’s ways might make them appear weird to their friends (and many times even their own family). Or even worse, they are content to just sit on the sidelines of battle and “not sin”, but also have decided to not obey God.

From my experience, churches today are not helping this situation. They desire to save a lot of people, but that's as far as it goes. Discipleship in the typical youth group is non-existent, and frequently not even the preaching of the church pastor is attempting to disciple the Christians. Think about this: If you say you saved 100 passengers on a run-away train, but don't teach anyone how to stop the train, WHAT DID YOU ACCOMPLISH? You only prolonged the inevitable demise of this group! Salvation is essential, and deserves due attention and effort, but, if all we do is “secure” passengers onto the train, but don't train them up to be engineers, what will these passengers do once the first engineer is gone? Obviously, they won't know how to do anything for themselves, nor can they help anyone else!!

Matthew 15:14 says, “Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.”

Isn’t this exactly what the modern church is setting people up for? The next generation of churched Christians will be so foolish (unwise) that they won't be able to keep their own lives straight, let alone help others!

Listen carefully: you cannot and should not rely on “a church” to be your spiritual insight. Your Christian walk must be one of on-going effort throughout your lifetime. Your relationship with God must be consistent and firm. We need to use our time, our life, to grow closer to God. Going to church once or twice a week doesn't cut it. Rather that breeds ignorance, and a false sense of security. I'm not saying to not go to church but your walk with God should not stop at the church exits.

Now let’s look back to Hosea 4:6,

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.

Notice it says that God will forget your children if you forget His law. This is not saying He will deny them salvation; but He cannot bless sin. And even if you think you aren't “sinning”, if you aren’t obeying God and His Word, that actually is disobedience. You can sin by doing what is wrong in the sight of God (commission), or you can also sin being not doing what is right according to God (omission). Certainly, God is a loving, merciful, and forgiving God; but He hates sin, is just & all-powerful, and reigns absolute. The laws He has laid down, like natural laws, have consequences when they aren't obeyed. Thus, you will reap the just consequences of every wrong action you sow, and every willfully omitted action you don’t sow.

You cannot be neutral with God. You are either all in, or all out. There is not such a thing as a partial, on the fence, and tight-rope balancing act in walking with God. You must choose whether you are obeying God or disobeying Him. God cannot bless sin. While He can bring good from it, if you repent and allow Him to conform you, He can never work the BEST that could have been. Simply stated– God can work all things for good, but he can never work sin for best. Those are the stakes. God will reward and bless every act of obedience and your reverence toward Him, whether you are rewarded in the next ten minutes or within the next ten years. No good goes unrewarded, just as no sin goes unpunished.

Here's the punch line. You could be sinning right now; you could have sinned and not even known to repent. Why? Because we can't fix a problem if we don't know it's there. The key to knowing it's “there”, is learning what to watch for -- and that can only be done one way: by READING YOUR BIBLE. Sharpen your sword! Open your eyes. You can't hit what you can't see, and you can't cut with a dull piece of metal.

These are three things you can get from the Bible:

Knowledge - knowing what to do.

Wisdom - knowing how to use that knowledge.

Understanding - Knowing why we do this, and what the results & consequences will be.

Without all three of these, you cannot be all God created you to be.

I am passionate about the fact that we are soldiers of Christ; therefore everything we do reflects Him to others (both Christians and non-believers). We should be instructing our children in early years and throughout school-years. If we are untrained, unaware, and no different from the world, then what's the point in calling ourselves Christians? Frankly, there is none! A Christian, who is Biblically ignorant and distant from God, is like a soldier who can't even load his gun. He is a liability to fellow Christian soldiers, and sadly, wastes the power, benefits and blessings Christ gives in His gift of salvation! That solider will be left beaten on the battlefield, and God won’t be able to use him for His greater glory and plans. In the end, the unprepared solider hurts himself by never knowing the fulfillment in life of being all God desires him to be.

As for me and my life, I choose obedience.