Daily Devotion

August 5, 2006

Psalms 106:21-22 They forgat God their savior, which had done great things in Egypt; Wondrous works in the land of Ham, and terrible things by the Red sea.

This is an image of the decadence of man’s spirituality, a tragic picture of the conditioning of the human spirit; a satire to the pride of mankind mixed with a warning to future generations.

When we are given a chance at betterment in our lives, we all too often complain  that it comes through those who seem to know more about things than we do: through people like us, our peers, who have gone through and graduated from something we are still gripped by. This challenges our sensitive pride and leaves us with the humbling feeling that we are not valued at our true worth. Our complaints are then transformed into a cynical vilifying of the personality of our wise counselors, which in our own eyes brings them down to our low level, and excuses us from listening to their wise counsel. Sad to say, we also do that with God. We don’t like his wise control over our lives; his obvious superiority gives us an inferiority complex which is really a ‘superiority complex’ born of pride.

While at the Mount of God, the children of Israel were asked to agree to God’s laws before they even heard them (Exodus 19:3-8); they were to wait on Moses’ return not knowing if he would even return (Exodus 32:1); they were in a total state of dependency to God, and faced with the most basic of all elements of faith: the fact that none of us as nations, societies, communities or individuals are self-sufficient.

We obviously are unable to govern ourselves and, except by the grace and mercy of God, we make an absolute mess of our personal lives. In spite of empiric historical evidence to these facts, we insist on wanting to know “better” than God. We certainly do not want a God who will lead us, poor dumb sheep, in the pastures of His great wisdom (Psalms 23:10.) We want a God in the similitude of an ox that we can lead about to serve us in our own pleasures; a god that we yoke to go our ways, one whose love for us is proven by his answering our way our every whim of prayer. How parallel to the picture of the “loving god” many of us are tempted to imagine, what a blatant picture of man’s pride.

Let us now, humanity even in the person of each one of us, kneel in our prayer closet and affirm to him who created all things our utter dependence on his wisdom as nations and individuals. Let us yield to His yoke and let our soul receive the rest it desperately needs.

Matthew 11:29-30 Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

P.Lumbroso
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