Price of stubbornness

There are so many times in scripture where we see God "turn them over to their own stubbornness" or "remove his hand from them" or "allowed them to walk in their own devices." This happens over and over again, and it is striking to realize this characteristic in God the Father. He will as often in Scripture say things like "Oh that my people would listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways."

This is not the "Old Testament God", as if God goes away to summer camp between testaments to really work on Himself. This is Almighty unchanging God we see here. Jesus does give us an access to God and His grace we could never give to ourselves, but let us realize God's action toward our stubbornness has not changed.

There come times when we choose to disobey God enough times that He will just let us go down that road to experience the pain and the brokenness He would have protected us from if we had only listened and obeyed him in the first place.

This is sobering to our hearts that are prone to wander. We must intentionally keep our hearts focused, open, and obeying, or we may very well see God remove his hand from our stubborn hearts.

Disobedient children and God's love

When you ask a child to do something, and they do it immediately there is a strong sense of joy and respect that you feel.  In fact, you even feel loved by that child because they have OBEYED you. Now imagine children were basically robots without a choice.  Suppose you only had to push a child's nose like a button and it would just operate without any further prompting.  Initially, that may sound great.  That sounds wonderful in fact...until we remember back to the joy and the love we felt when the child CHOSE to obey what we asked of them.  If children were only robots, there would be no sense of love.  There would be no real obedience; there would only be programmed response.

Sure kids make choices that frustrate us as well, but there is great love in their obedience.

God could have created us as programmed robots who just need to have the "ON" button pushed to go on doing what we are supposed to do.  But God created us with a choice and a will, because our choice to obey God is loving.  When we CHOOSE to obey God, I think he feels loved and respected and honored at a much more multiplied level than I do when my child obeys me.