PRAISE & PRAYER PROMPT ••• I’m reading the book of Ezekiel right now, which follows Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Lamentations.
And I have to be honest—I start getting discouraged when I read these books.
They are full of prophecies about God’s judgment and while I understand why God was angry, I long for the hope of the Gospels and writings from the New Testament.
Don’t get me wrong—there are still verses of hope and God’s love there.
But it makes me tired and I feel defeated after a while.
I have to wonder, when I read these pronouncements of God’s anger and judgment, why?
Why did the one and only all-powerful and all-knowing God deliberately choose to create mankind if He knew how much we were going to break His heart?
After all, since God is all-knowing, the fall of mankind wasn’t a surprise to Him.
He knew Eve would be tempted and He knew she and Adam would eat the fruit.
And you don’t have to read very far into the Bible to know that by Genesis 6:6, God was sorry He’d made people.
It says, “And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (ESV).
Even after destroying the world with the flood, and starting over with the one righteous man, Noah, it wasn’t but a few chapters later that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because of their extreme sinfulness (Genesis 19:24-25).
And I can’t help but wonder, as I read our modern-day news headlines, how bad is our society compared to those?
I can’t help but believe we have to be worse than Sodom and Gomorrah because there are so many additional temptations to sin in our world.
And at the heart of all of this—from the fall in the Garden, to the flood, to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, to the judgments on the Israelites, to the depravity of our modern world—why did God make us when all we seem to do is break His heart?
And the answer circles back to the fact that He is our Heavenly Father.
Parents don’t stop loving their children when they make mistakes.
And while there may be times during particularly difficult seasons that it may seem easier to wish we’d never had children, the rewards are so great that the idea of not having them is inconceivable.
I believe that’s why God made us despite the way we’ve disappointed Him and hurt Him.
He loves us too much to not be willing to experience the heartache we cause Him.
What blows my mind is that with all His knowledge of what would happen before He created the world, He created us anyway, knowing that it would mean Christ’s death on the cross.
Romans 5:8 says, “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (ESV).
And it all comes back to the ultimate summation of God’s love for us—John 3:16-17. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (ESV).
Doesn’t that humble you?
Do you ever stop to consider that before the beginning of Creation, God knew He would create you…
You.
Not just a general population, but the one and only specific YOU.
And He knew what choices you would make…
And He chose to love you and make you anyway.
God is so good to us. So much better than we deserve.
Today, as you pray, thank God for being the Heavenly Father who loves us despite the ways we’ve disappointed Him.
Ask the Holy Spirit to help you honor Hods love through your thoughts and actions.
Ask Him for a grateful heart that He loves you in spite of everything.
Thank Him that His love trumps everything.
