2 Minute Devotional, Cheating on God – October 13th

Song of Songs 8:6

Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.

We were created for intimacy with God. This is our main purpose. Intimacy with him. Deep, shear, honest, bare before his eyes intimacy with him where we are worshipping him with all of us. We were created for this. 
Have you read how God feels about unfaithfulness to him in some sections of the prophets? He is extremely explicit in how he describes our unfaithfulness (and faithfulness) to him (Ezekiel 16, 23, Jeremiah 2, Hosea 2…). When our hearts turn away from him, he reacts in the same way that a husband would recoil in abject disgust and anger and jealousy  upon finding his wife in bed with another man. He rails with a fury that makes us quake reading his words. Just listen to several excerpts here (as John Eldredge wrote once, it’s like listening to a couple fight through the apartment walls): Ezekiel 23:17-21,

 Then the Babylonians came to her, to the bed of love, and in their lust they defiled her. After she had been defiled by them, she turned away from them in disgust. When she carried on her prostitution openly and exposed her naked body, I turned away from her in disgust, just as I had turned away from her sister. Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled.

Jeremiah 2:20,

 “Long ago you broke off your yoke and tore off your bonds,  you said, ‘I will not serve you!’Indeed, on every high hill and under every spreading tree  you lay down as a prostitute.

Hosea 2:2, 5-7,

 Their mother has been unfaithful and has conceived them in disgrace….She said, ‘I will go after my lovers  who give me my food and my water,  my wool and my linen, my olive oil and my drink.’ Therefore I will block her path with thornbushes; I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way. She will chase after her lovers but not catch them; she will look for them but not find them. Then she will say,  ‘I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I was better off than now.’

We are pursuing oneness with Jesus. This is a depth of intimacy that all other intimacy is a mere reflection of, most specifically that of a husband and wife. When we entire into this deep love relationship with Jesus and then our hearts are seduced away from Jesus by one of the million worldly and satanic things that we get inundated with, the reaction God has is one of furious jealousy, like a Lover that has been cheated on.

As we walk through our days, cultivating intimacy with God, we also have to be on guard against anything that would seduce us way from our Beloved. We have to take captive those thoughts which our hearts may lust after. We have to choose God, not choose anything else. Because to him, when our hearts willingly check out of our relationship with him, it’s adultery. And honestly, as we mature out of being merely physical beings and grow into the glorification that God is doing within us, the seed as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15, it becomes much more obvious how an addiction to anything other than Jesus is adultery, we literally are crawling into bed with something other than him, we are engaging intimate parts of the desires of our hearts with something other than our God. In a phrase, we worship idols. And idolatry is spiritual adultery.

We are made for intimacy with God. To enjoy his Spirit indwelling in us, our bodies his very temple, being one with him the pleasure of which is greater than anything one can experience in this world. But we, like Eve, can have our hearts tempted. We must resist and remember the pain we are causing our Beloved. Idolatry is sin, it is adultery to our Lover. Worship is reserved alone for Jesus. Everything else must be put below him in our daily lives.

Exodus 20:5,

You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God

I’m not there yet myself, none of us are, but we striving for perfect oneness with Jesus and worship of him at all times 🙂
God bless you my sisters and brothers. Hope you have a WONFERFUL Thursday!!! 🙂

Joel

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