“In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Judges 21:25 ESV
I’ve always been fascinated with flight. And so, when Margie and I were living in West Texas years ago, I decided to take flying lessons. And what a joy it was. To be suspended in invisible nothingness gazing out at the endless expanse in front you, you realize that with enough fuel you could simply fly in a perfectly straight line and end up exactly where you were as you circled the entire globe. But therein lies the rub, without a beautifully striped highway lane to guide you, a straight line in the great chasm of the earth’s troposphere is anything but simple. Of course you have gauges and GPS to aid you, but by far the easiest method to fly straight was to simply choose a singular point upon the horizon and aim for it. You see, the horizon is straight, it is easily visible, and most importantly, it never changes. And when you are flying, you need a point of focus to guide you that will, and forever will be, constant. Folks, living life on the surface of this planet is no different than flying in the air above it…without a fixed, Godly moral compass to set your sights upon daily, your sinful human nature is sure to take you well off course.
The curious thing about us humans is that even if we don’t have that Godly fixed point to guide our lives, we will find another. And sadly, the most common second place to God is one that is destined to corrupt us, pollute us, and see us stray ever farther from that Godly point we are intended to focus on. And the answer might surprise you for it hits awfully close to home…it is ourselves. You see, ever since that corrupted crunch in the garden of Eden, mankind has lost the ability to guide itself in a righteous direction. When we look to ourselves instead of to God’s righteous point on the horizon, we find ourselves chasing our own selfish rainbows, running in directions that seek to please only ourselves, and seeing both tainted by that nasty sin nature that corrupts everything we say, think, or do.
Another human curiosity is that as much as we tout ourselves today as a superior generation both intellectually and morally, it is simply not the truth. Yes sure, we have fancy computers and the internet today, but did you notice that the Egyptians engineered the single biggest structure ever erected and it is still standing some 4,500 years later? And note they did it without electricity, power tools, computing strength, or construction vehicles. So much for modern intellectual superiority. And as far as our moral and spiritual superiority today? I see shocking stories of immorality scattered throughout the Old Testament that scream aloud as if they were from last night’s local news. You see, human morality has not changed in over 4,000 years because the human heart has not changed in 4,000 years. The human heart, left to pursue its own way, will forever lose its course and stray away from God. (Isaiah 53:6)
As I close my study of the book of Judges, I find one of the most chilling lines in all of God’s Word, “everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” If there has ever been a better parallel to today’s world from the Word of God, we find it right here. You see, during the 400-year span of the 12 judges of Israel, there was no king or unified leader to guide the people. Instead, God used 11 men and one woman empowered by the Holy Spirit to deliver the Israelites from the trouble they perpetually found themselves in as they followed self in lieu of God. The period of the Judges therefore follows a very repetitive recipe…the people look to self and fall into idolatrous sin, God gives them into slavery as punishment for rejecting Him, the people eventually cry out to God to save them, then God uses a judge to recuse them from their slavery. This pattern occurs 12 times in the book of Judges and countless more times throughout the history of the Israelite nation. And before you get too quick to dismiss the ol’ ancient Israelites as weak kneed, milquetoast followers of God, stop and look around. Our world today is filled with people that have only one focus point on their horizon…and that is self and all that self demands.
Friends, looking to and relying on self will never get you where your heart wants to go. Sure, today we are sold just the opposite message. We are peddled such sayings as “follow your heart” and “let your heart be your guide” but these are lies issued from hearts that are only seeking justification to do what is right in their own eyes. You see, when you are flying your own plane, you cannot follow 2 different horizon points to get where you want to go…there can be only one. And when it comes to what is truth in our world today, the same principle applies, there can be only one truth. For if there were two truths, there would be none. For those of you that are seeking for this one genuine truth today, I challenge you to make the Word a God a resource for your journey. It is in this exact way that God revealed to me His truth and His way 30 years ago. And it is this one truth that I have pledged my life to. To see the peoples of this world have the opportunity to hear it and believe in it.
May you today deny the deceit of self and find and believe in the One truth, the One way, and the One life that never moves, never changes, and will never leave those that call Him Savior…the Alpha and the Omega, Jesus Christ.
Blessings on your journey to ever draw closer to Christ ~ Dan
“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? I the Lord search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.” Jeremiah 17:9-10 ESV
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