WHAT GETS YOU IN TROUBLE WITH GOD (PART 3)

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

“In you they have oppressed the foreigner and mistreated the fatherless and the widow.”

Ezekiel 22:7b

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Think about the Lord for a moment and ask yourself this:

Is He a Lord who favors anyone of His children more than another or is He a Lord who loves and cares for His children all the same?

Of course, the right answer is the latter and as we will see in our devotion today, the Lord shows additional love and concern for those who find themselves in places of loneliness and difficulty, an additional love and concern displayed first-hand through the life of His Son, Jesus. Look at this verse from the Book of Deuteronomy:

This is what the Lord says: Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place. Jeremiah 22:3

Note that these exhortations are not optional. The Lord doesn’t say, “I recommend that you do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, fatherless, or widows.” Rather, He commands that we are to do no harm to those who are often marginalized by society and through His statement, He validates the words of the psalmist who had this to say about the Lord:

A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in His holy dwelling. Psalm 68:5

When a child would lose parents, the Lord was and is always ready to step into the gap and fill the void, a heavenly Father to the orphan. Likewise, when a man or woman would lose their spouse, they could always count on the Lord entering into their life to compensate for the loss of companionship caused by death.

Given all this, you can ascertain that the Lord would not look kindly on anyone who mistreated foreigners, orphans, or widows. For anyone doing so would be opposing Him, as disobedient to His directions as those who murdered or disrespected their parents, the two prior sins we looked at in our first two devotions of this series.

So what would happen if someone decided to not heed the command of the Lord to not wrong foreigners, orphans, and widows?

Well, they would certainly find themselves in trouble with God and as we continue to look at the words of Ezekiel 22 and God’s indictments against His people, we find that the Israelites had done just that, put themselves in trouble with the Lord. Look again at our verse for today:

“In you they have oppressed the foreigner and mistreated the fatherless and the widow.” Ezekiel 22:7b

Now, we don’t know the nature of the oppression or mistreatment but it’s not really important here. What is important is that God told His people to behave in one fashion and they chose to disregard His will to follow their own, an action that drew His anger and wrath as well as His judgment as He sent the Babylonians to displace His people from their homeland and take them into a seventy-year captivity.

If the people wanted to wrong foreigners in direct disobedience to God, then they would get to experience what it would feel like to be oppressed in a foreign land.

If they wanted to mistreat those who had lost someone dear to them, then the Israelites would find out how it felt to suffer loss and have no one care about it.

It was a hard lesson to learn but a necessary one because had that lesson not been learned, then James, the brother of Jesus, would never have penned these words in the New Testament:

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. James 1:7

In sum, there is no doubt that the Lord wants us to make a special effort to care for foreigners, orphans, and widows, those who He has defended, is defending, and will always defend.

When we do so, then we make a difference in the lives of those who are often overlooked and forgotten in our world today and show them the truth that God does love and value them greatly.

To not do so puts us in the place of the Old Testament Israelites of Ezekiel’s time and in a position where we will be in trouble with God, a trouble that might just lead to Him putting us in a place where we find out what it feels like to be abandoned, oppressed or mistreated ourselves.  

Amen

In Christ,

Mark
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