Rejection and Redemption
Wednesday (January 7)
Rejection and Redemption
1 Samuel 10:17-19
Now Samuel called the people together to the LORD at Mizpah. And he said to the people of Israel, “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘I brought up Israel out of Egypt, and I delivered you from the hand of the Egyptians and from the hand of all the kingdoms that were oppressing you.’ But today you have rejected your God, who saves you from all your calamities and your distresses, and you have said to him, ‘Set a king over us.’”
I’ve been sitting for a while by the flowing Cape Fear River, mulling over a wide range of interpretations of 1 Samuel 10:17-19, carried as it were on a mental raft down the currents of divine mystery, this way then that way, left then right, unable to rest on a single thought for more than twenty seconds before being swept up again. This is the entire story of mankind consolidated into brief sentences. The story of our collaborative effort to abandon our Creator and set ourselves upon the throne of the cosmos. The story of our perpetual rejection of a God and Father Who deserves so much better.
Friend, Almighty God, the Creator and Sustainer of all there is, the Father Who fashioned you and me from dust, knowing the upheaval our sin would cause yet still loving us anyway, understands what it is to be rejected by His own. Don’t take that lightly. From the very beginning of this cosmic story, from Eden to the Golden Calf to the anarchist days of the Judges to the hill of Golgotha, our God has born in His sacred body the curses and bruises and stinging abuses of our many rejections, all while remaining steadfast in His holiness and at the same time steadfast in His love for us. So, remember those wounds on His hands and feet the next time a father or a mother or a brother or a sister or a pastor or a mentor or a friend rejects you due to your godly stand.
Our Savior and King is a God Who gets rejected every single day, over and over again, moment after moment, vice after vice, choice after choice, yet He still desires to redeem us for His glory!