Daily Readings and Thought for July 26th. “WHY HAVE YOU DESPISED THE WORD OF THE LORD”
Today the great majority of people “despise the word of the Lord,” it means nothing to them. Less and less people own Bibles – and if they do, how regularly do they use them? Is this affecting us?
The godless ‘spirit’ of life that surrounds nearly all of us is surely affecting us all in some degree. We must try harder to push ‘the world’ completely out of the range of our mental vision. Jesus poses the question (see Luke 18 v.8) – asking “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
James was inspired to write, “Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord….Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.” [ch. 5 v.7,8] The coming of the Lord has always been as near asthe day the believer falls asleep in death. Remember what Paul wrote, “Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.” [1 Cor. 15 v.51,52]
This future is for those who have not “despised the word of the Lord”! Yet even if there is a situation in which we have – there can still be a future. We learnt this today as we read 2 Samuel ch. 12. It reveals the message the prophet Nathan brought to David. David had had a ‘blind spot’ in his life – and this led to his adultery with Bathsheba. God’s message via Nathan was ” Why have you despised the word of the LORD, to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and have taken his wife to be your wife. [v.9]
What do we mean by ‘a blind spot.’? We mean we are so carried away by some situation that our awareness of the all seeing eye of God gets blotted out in our thinking for a time. As a result we are – for a time, long or short, swept along by fleshly thinking! This is a tragedy that is going to have its after affects in some way – it certainly did on David as we are going to read in coming days.
We can be guilty of despising “the word of the lord” every time the fleshly temptations of the world provoke us into fleshly thinking – a prelude to fleshly actions. An appropriate final thoughts jumps out at us, as it were, from Paul’s words of warning in his letter to the Romans ch. 2 from v,4.
“Do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience … God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. He will render to each one according to his works “ Do we really know the condition of our heart?
Those whose “works” are ungodly show by their actions that they “have despised the word of the Lord,” What do our actions show – has our daily reading of God’s word really influenced all that we do each day?
