3/21/19 Ben (see HERE)
The young man, Ben, late 20’s, had a lot in common with many
Christians I’ve met, being influenced by the faith of his family and coming to some
sort of faith through the sense of community he felt at a youth group in his
childhood. Only it was a Jewish youth
group, not Christian, and now years later he is searching again for a spiritual
foundation in life, especially after the recent death of his grandmother, one
of the few Christians in his family.
I asked how one goes about trying to find spiritual truth in
life, and Ben wasn’t exactly sure. He
hadn’t thought much about religion since he made his Bar Mitzvah in his early
teens, and the best he could offer at this point was that he does believe in “Something”,
and that he knows Something is out there.
But just what is that “Something”?
I found it interesting that the key scripture passage Ben
studied for his Bar Mitzvah was Exodus 32, the account of the Golden Calf,
which the Israelites had fashioned out of the gold jewelry they had received as
they escaped slavery in Egypt. Moses,
their leader and connection to God, had disappeared up on Mount Sinai for many
days, stretching into weeks. They felt
confused, like they had lost their spiritual foundation, so they decided to ask
his brother Aaron to fashion a god of their own, one they had probably become
familiar with back in Egypt. They said “Come,
make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up
out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”
Big mistake.
I wanted to help Ben avoid making that same mistake, so I
talked about the difference between allowing God to define Himself, and us taking
matters into our own hands and trying to define or create a god of our
own. On our own, we usually choose to imagine
a god we are comfortable with, a god who we think exists to serve us but, in
the end, leads us to destruction. For
the Israelites, God’s anger burned against them for their idol worship, and
even with Moses’ pleading on their behalf, eventually “…the Lord struck the
people with a plague because of what they did with the calf Aaron had made.”
In their rush to seek spiritual direction, the Israelites
had made the grave mistake of looking for and inventing a god of comfort and
self-indulgence, rather than the true God of Israel. Hebrews 11:6 tells us that “…anyone who comes
to him (God) must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who
earnestly seek him.” Defining a god for
ourselves is not what it means to “earnestly seek him”, but rather, to be
willing to actively look for God to reveal and define Himself.
I pray and have great hope for Ben, because he already
believes that a “Something” exists, and the promise from this passage in
Hebrews is that as he earnestly seeks Him, he will be rewarded.
Thanks for allowing me to record the conversation, Ben! It can be seen HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment