The Blame Game

Psalm 42:1-4

“As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God.  My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.  When shall I come and appear before God?  My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?”  These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival.”

Often, it is only in drought that one thirsts for God, and that is our shame.  Let your business go south, and we respond in one of two ways, one to blame God, and the other is to seek Him.  The same is right with a nation that has suffered destruction as we did in 911 and we saw people flock to houses of worship, but we also observed the blame game, those who are ignorant of the ways of God, and give no thought to Him in time of blessing, but are quick to accuse Him in times of trouble.  It happens in divorce, in the death of a child, and in so many areas, we thirst or blame God.

It makes one wonder why, and I believe the answer is like all solutions one finds in the word of God, the Bible.  But first let me make an absolute statement, only people who are indwelled by the Spirit of the living God will thirst for God.  Let me share 1 Corinthians 2:14, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.”   The natural man is any person who has not by faith invited Jesus Christ into their heart.  It has not one thing to do with church membership, your goodness, or your giving to help the poor; you can do all of that and be a natural man.

Jesus made this ever so evident in John 3:3, when He is talking with Nicodemus, a Pharisees and a ruler of the Jewish people.  Old Nick, he was a good and religious man without the Spirit of God living in him, and this is what Jesus said to him.  “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”  Do you thirst for God, we have a promise from Jesus, that as He was taken up He will come again, and He always keeps His promises.  Before He left He promised this, I will send a Helper, and your version may say a Comforter.  We will find that in John 14:15-21, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.  And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.

 “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.  Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me.  Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.”

From the Back Porch,

Bob Rice