May Help Lower Blood Pressure
I normally like cinnamon. I put it on everything from ‘opeyno’ to popcorn. However, as I was making breakfast the other morning, I accidentally opened the wrong side of the container. (If cinnamon is said to lower blood pressure, I had enough to stop my heart.) After I shoveled off as much excess as possible, I tried choking down what I could palate, suddenly realizing that what I’d once always liked had become abhorrent to me.
We are not unlike that in our relation to sin.
Numbers 11:18-20 details a fairly vivid example of a nation who had demanded of God the food they thought they were craving in the wilderness (see Ps. 78:18-20). What they ended up with was a great dissatisfaction over their sinful appetite.
“‘Say to the people, “Consecrate yourselves for tomorrow, and you shall eat meat; for you have wept in the ears of the LORD, saying, ‘Oh that someone would give us meat to eat! For we were well-off in Egypt.’ Therefore the LORD will give you meat and you shall eat. You shall eat, not one day, nor two days, nor five days, nor ten days, nor twenty days, but a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you; because you have rejected the LORD who is among you and have wept before Him, saying, ‘Why did we ever leave Egypt?’”’”
How often our insistence is to our undoing. How often we test God (Ex. 17:7) in our hearty efforts to satisfy ourselves above all else.
And yet perhaps it is one of God’s furthest-reaching graces that He gives us our way, and lets us ‘taste’ with disgust the how our plans play out. Wretched as it seems to us at the time to have to endure our folly, there is a gift, in that He teaches us, masterfully, poignantly, with a rugged finality – that we are to our own greatest harm; that we are ignorant of our true needs, and incapable of meeting them ourselves; that we cannot circumvent dependence on Him without running ourselves back into the bondage from which we’ve been freed.
Second Chronicles 12:8 outlines well His method of instruction: “‘But they will become his slaves so that they may learn the difference between My service and the service of the kingdoms of the countries.’”
How dogmatically we dash headlong into our own demise, enslaving ourselves voluntarily – not to God, but to unrighteousness. How shameful a human condition it is in which we willingly forfeit the dignity He bestows on us (Gal. 4:7), and hastily forget the purification He has already accomplished as ours (2 Pe. 1:9).
And yet it is grace, sheer and undefiled, that we are permitted a time of ‘misery and chains’ (Ps. 107:10), where we cry out to Him in our distress (v. 13), and firmly perceive how gravely we erred in fleeing to anything apart from Him to fulfill us. For it is in our being glutted on our own devices, ‘filled to the measure of guilt’ in our self-glorifying schemes, that He teaches us how He alone is our life and satisfaction.
Praise be to Him, that He would sooner we experience the depravity of our ways than live deluded by the lie that we could be satiated without Him (Ecc. 2:25). Praise be to Him, that He would minister to us with the ‘bread of privation and water of oppression’ (Is. 30:20), in order for us to finally understand: His desire to free us from disobedience is even more overwhelming than our need to be delivered from it.
We are not unlike that in our relation to sin.
Numbers 11:18-20 details a fairly vivid example of a nation who had demanded of God the food they thought they were craving in the wilderness (see Ps. 78:18-20). What they ended up with was a great dissatisfaction over their sinful appetite.
“‘Say to the people, “Consecrate yourselves for tomorrow, and you shall eat meat; for you have wept in the ears of the LORD, saying, ‘Oh that someone would give us meat to eat! For we were well-off in Egypt.’ Therefore the LORD will give you meat and you shall eat. You shall eat, not one day, nor two days, nor five days, nor ten days, nor twenty days, but a whole month, until it comes out of your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you; because you have rejected the LORD who is among you and have wept before Him, saying, ‘Why did we ever leave Egypt?’”’”
How often our insistence is to our undoing. How often we test God (Ex. 17:7) in our hearty efforts to satisfy ourselves above all else.
And yet perhaps it is one of God’s furthest-reaching graces that He gives us our way, and lets us ‘taste’ with disgust the how our plans play out. Wretched as it seems to us at the time to have to endure our folly, there is a gift, in that He teaches us, masterfully, poignantly, with a rugged finality – that we are to our own greatest harm; that we are ignorant of our true needs, and incapable of meeting them ourselves; that we cannot circumvent dependence on Him without running ourselves back into the bondage from which we’ve been freed.
Second Chronicles 12:8 outlines well His method of instruction: “‘But they will become his slaves so that they may learn the difference between My service and the service of the kingdoms of the countries.’”
How dogmatically we dash headlong into our own demise, enslaving ourselves voluntarily – not to God, but to unrighteousness. How shameful a human condition it is in which we willingly forfeit the dignity He bestows on us (Gal. 4:7), and hastily forget the purification He has already accomplished as ours (2 Pe. 1:9).
And yet it is grace, sheer and undefiled, that we are permitted a time of ‘misery and chains’ (Ps. 107:10), where we cry out to Him in our distress (v. 13), and firmly perceive how gravely we erred in fleeing to anything apart from Him to fulfill us. For it is in our being glutted on our own devices, ‘filled to the measure of guilt’ in our self-glorifying schemes, that He teaches us how He alone is our life and satisfaction.
Praise be to Him, that He would sooner we experience the depravity of our ways than live deluded by the lie that we could be satiated without Him (Ecc. 2:25). Praise be to Him, that He would minister to us with the ‘bread of privation and water of oppression’ (Is. 30:20), in order for us to finally understand: His desire to free us from disobedience is even more overwhelming than our need to be delivered from it.
posted by Purple at 10:11 PM
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