No Excuses

Romans 1:20-21 (TLV)
"His invisible attributes—His eternal power and His divine nature—have been clearly seen ever since the creation of the world, being understood through the things that have been made. So people are without excuse— for even though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God or give Him thanks. Instead, their thinking became futile, and their senseless hearts were made dark."

Have you ever noticed that people who say they don't believe in God are the first ones that use His name in vain, and they're also the first ones that want prayer when something goes wrong in life? I'm not talking about just atheists but all non-believers, or at least all of those who profess that they don't really believe in God.

We are made in God's image. All human beings are made in God's image. A God-shaped hole was placed inside of us when we were created and the only thing that is going to fill the God-shaped hole within us is God Himself. We all have a natural instinct to run to daddy when something goes wrong. As children we run to our Earthly fathers but as adults that need deep within us to run to our father was put there by God for us to run to Him.

All of creation, including us, know there is a God. We have to work really hard to avoid God and to avoid our belief that there is a God. I remember back in my younger days when I was trying to "find" myself and figure out things, I started practicing Wicca, which is mostly just a bunch of tree huggers who refuse to believe that God is God, and want to believe in Mother Earth and all of that kind of stuff that's really just purely stupid. It took physical work for me to believe in this Pagan practice of Wicca. It didn't give me any sense of fulfillment, it didn't give me any sense of worshipping something greater than I am; and isn't that what we're all looking for -- Something higher than we are, something greater than we are, some meaning to our existence? I didn't find it by burning candles, or waving a knife around, or looking up at the full moon.

Psalm 42:7 tells us that deep calls to deep, that is, the Spirit of God calls to our spirit because there are things that only the spirit can understand. There are things that only the spirit can relate to, and the only thing that our spirit can truly relate to is the Spirit of God.

He is the vine and we are the branches, apart from Him we can do nothing (John 15:5). So is it any wonder that so many lives are in disarray? Is there any wonder that the world is as upside down as it is today? We try so hard to do things on our own when we weren't created to do things on our own. We were created to do things through the power of God. When Adam and Eve were created in the Garden of Eden, they walked with God and talked with God on a regular basis. We were created in God's image to be a friend of God, to commune with God, to be part of the perfect world He created in the Garden of Eden. With that failing, God created the perfect Sacrifice so that we would not have to do things under our own power; so we would not have to follow the ruined nature of man. He sent Jesus Christ, the fleshly embodiment of God Himself, to be a pure sacrifice for us so that we could come back to the perfect relationship that was originally created in the Garden of Eden.

God simplified all of the Law and the Prophets so that we would not have to do anything under our own power, except confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and accept Him as our Lord and Savior. That's all we have to do and Jesus Christ does the rest. Anyone who does not do that is missing out on the most basic part of human nature and that is God within us. We fill that God-shaped hole with everything except God, and when it doesn't fit we move on to the next thing. But nothing is ever going to fill that void because God is the only One who can fill that void.

God came to Earth in the flesh of Jesus Christ to fill that void, to be the propitiation for our sins, to be everything that we cannot be on our own. He came as a sacrifice for our sins against Himself, to keep our very souls until the day that we are in Heaven with Him forever. He is not looking for perfect people, He is looking for faithful people.

©Marie McGaha 2017
No reproduction without author's permission