“What does it take to convince us?
Seeing is believing. But is it? The Bible records many instances of people coming face to face with God’s miracle power and still turning the other way.
Remember the one million who died in the wilderness after witnessing the Ten Plagues on Egypt, the pillar of cloud and fire, manna, water-from-the-rock, and the parting of the Red Sea? Do you recall reading of the evil in Israel’s King Ahab during the miracles of Elijah and Elisha? How about the people who were asking for a sign after Jesus had fed the five thousand?
What’s going on here? Just what Jesus Himself told us in His story of the rich man and the beggar (Luke 16:19-31), namely that if people refuse to hear and believe God’s Word, they would not believe even if someone came back from the dead! Jesus did arise from the grave, and yet the religious leaders did not repent, instead attempting a great cover-up.
We fool ourselves when we think that God needs to do more to persuade and change us. He has created the vastness of the heavens and the complexities of sub-atomic particles and DNA. He has birthed and preserved the nation Israel, from whom Messiah has come. He has raised that Messiah from the dead after He died for the sins of His people. He has formed the Church from nothing. He has recorded His story in the book we know as the Bible.
But when the wonders of Creation are reduced to science, our Bibles ignored, and our hearts drawn away to the next wave of entertainment and distraction, need we ask why God seems so distant and His commandments so irrelevant? The fault lies not in the One who has pursued us, but in the ones who are running away.
Hope is never far from the one who tires of things that do not satisfy, and turns instead to the Rivers of Living Water. What we know in our hearts we can experience in our lives.
What does it take to convince us?
“He has given us his great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.”
2 Peter 1:4