“Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals I hate with all my being. They have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them.” (Isaiah 1:14)
When was the last time you thought of God as carrying around some sort of burden? If you are like most believers, the answer is most likely, “Never!” Yet the prophet Isaiah tells us that the all-powerful God of the universe does indeed become burdened, and the reason can be found in a single word: hypocrisy.
Omnipotence wearies when we worship Him with our lips while our hearts are wandering away from Him. To weary God — to burden our Beloved — is a serious matter that must be dealt with. Like any enemy that comes between us and God, we must take sword to this sin and cut it out at its root.
To be sure, we are all affected by the sin of hypocrisy. If we are honest, all of us would confess that there are times when our practice does not match our profession. We say we believe that the Bible is the Word of God, then we behave in a way that is entirely inconsistent with the inspired, infallible, inerrant, God-breathed Scriptures. But that is not the “burden” that the Lord says is wearying Him. God knows we are still sinners in need of a Savior; even after we have been saved, we need our Savior moment by moment. God knows the old sin nature is waging a constant struggle with the new saved nature (Galatians 5:17). This is simply the way of the Christian life, and we will fight this battle all the way into glory.
God’s burden is a believer with a heart that has grown cold, treating God as an unnecessary appendage, if you will, one to be jettisoned by a cool and casual commitment. I cannot find a greater statement of the evil of a divided heart than to read that Omnipotence grows weary and is burdened by it. This alone should cause each of us to examine our own heart to see what it is actually beating for. As we saw in Monday’s article, too many of us have hearts that beat for the good gifts God has given, not for God Himself. That sort of mercenary relationship with Jesus is one that has been reduced to a religion marked by empty ritual – “New Moon feasts and appointed festivals” conducted with no love, no gratitude, no sense of awe and wonder at the manifest goodness and glory of God Almighty.
So how do we ease God’s burden? We journey back to the day of our salvation, the day when our hearts burned deep within us for Jesus Christ, not the things He could give us. We remember that God will tolerate no rival and we turn back to our First Love . . . on our knees. We cry out to Jesus, knowing that He is faithful to forgive and forget. And we keep in view all the great saints who occasionally found their hearts beating for something much smaller than God.
Abraham struggled to believe God’s promise and tried to pass his wife off as his sister to save his own skin. David’s duty as king was to lead Israel’s army off to war, but he remained behind, seduced another man’s wife, and then arranged for the man to be killed in battle. Peter’s divided heart became malignantly manifest when Peter denied Jesus three times on the night He was betrayed. All these faithless actions wearied God and became a burden to Him. Yet God brought Abraham, David, and Peter through these dark valleys of disbelief with a deeper love for Him than they had before. Our gracious God transformed His burden into His blessing.
God never changes; He has attested to that in His Word. What He did for the saints of old, He will do for you today.
This is the Gospel. This is grace for your race. NEVER FORGET THAT . . . AMEN!
Grace for the Race 