The Best Rebuke Can Be Aid Withheld

Compare God’s presence in the bible to how little divine will is witnessed in the world at large today.

Gone are the days of red seas parting and burning bushes. The more we develop as humans the more it seems that God steps back and lets our lives be the lesson.

Many prayers are sent up and many of those prayers are denied or go unanswered. Increasingly God’s greatest and loudest answer to us is no answer.

This is fitting for the way we live our lives. We are not the humans of old who lacked the knowledge of the world to do for ourselves what we would otherwise otherwise call on Godly assistance for. We are and continue to grow in our role as the chief if not sole architects of our own situations.

In this environment God’s lessons on righteousness are best taught through the consequences of our unrighteousness. Lessons on greed are taught through the consequences of obesity and financial meltdown.

A large part of teaching this lesson is not bailing us out of suffering these consequences. The lesson sticks to us through the way that the subsequent struggle stays in our memory. There’s little need on God’s part to actively dole out rebuke. The rebuke is in the consequences.

And so it should be with us. We don’t need to come on strong with rebuke or feel obligated to bail people out when they fall victim to themselves.
Like the Lord we can be a base of support spiritually but not a negative voice or an enabling source of aid.

Learn a little from God and step back from trying to erase people’s mistakes. Imagine where our spiritual self reliance would be if we called on God to rectify every mishap we brought on ourselves. From financial rescue to being locked out of the car, how much would we lose of ourselves for the sake of convenience? How long before we’d start the day with prayer to pre-empt any consequence we’d brought on ourselves?

Something to think about next time the temptation to get involved in someone’s self created calamity kicks in.