Category: Devotion of the Day

WHEN SELF-DEFENSE IS A SIN

And he, willing to justify himself, said…
Luke 10:29

Endless are the devices by which we try to justify ourselves. When Samuel faced Saul returning from battle and disobedient to God, Saul tried to argue the case and explain why he had not exterminated the Amalekites as God had commanded. It is a mark of the disobedient heart to defend itself. David, when confronted by Nathan, did not argue, he broke into the penitence of the Fifty-first Psalm. Saul said, “I have sinned,” but true repentance does not substitute sacrifice for obedience. The sacrifice God wants is a broken spirit. David offered that sacrifice. But Saul tried to substitute a burnt-offering.

When the voice of God confronts you with your sin, do not offer God an argument. You cannot justify yourself, anyway. One could finish the text above with dozens of alibis men offer to explain themselves. But when a man really does business with God all arguments and excuses are forgotten in the honest confession, “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned.” God justifies freely by His grace, and we are “just-as-if-we’d-never-sinned.”

THE CAUSE AND CURE OF ERROR

Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.
Matthew 22:29

For all our education today, we never had more ignorance and error. The root of it is revealed in this word from our Lord: we do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. For Scripture we substitute our own explanations, and for the power of God we substitute our own experience. God has said something to us in the Scriptures, His written Word, and He has done something for us in His Son, the Living Word; but we refuse both and live in error.

Like the generation of Noah’s day, this age lives eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, and knows not, and will not know until judgment breaks. But God has provided a cure for ignorance. Again and again He says, “I would not have you ignorant” (Rom. 11:25; I Cor. 10:1; 12:1; II Cor. 1:8; I Thess. 4:13; II Pt. 3:8).

The cause of error is plain: ignorance of the Scriptures and of the power of God. The cure is equally plain: knowledge of the Scriptures and of the power of God. The first leads to the second: as we know the Scriptures we may know the power of God. “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”