Thoughts for another day

Dec. 16, 2013.

Today's verse: Job 5:17, 18. Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole. (KJV)

(Pls. read the above before you read further.  Thanks)

God made us lovingly and He intends we dwell eternally with Him.  But there’s a hurdle in this plan of God and that is sin.  God has given us free will and though He can control our will, He doesn’t because He is holy and any shift in the blueprint of what He has ordained will prove Him otherwise and can never happen.  Therefore, we use our will the way we want to and in doing so, many times we stray away from God, knowingly or unknowingly; mostly knowingly.  This straying can make us lose our eternal life. But God in His mercy and love for us, has devised a method of bringing us back and that is called chastisement: a punishment in our bodies which aims to bring us back to Him.

When a person suffers from a sickness, the first thing that person needs to do is to repent of the sin he has committed and turn toward God.  That clears the path for God’s healing to come in and heal.  Let me clarify that all sickness may not be because of sin.  Now, when a Christian is given the ability to understand that the sickness is because of sin, he must move into repentance and ask for God’s Grace and God being our good Father, will always heal; that is the crux of our Scripture today.

You may think God is cruel in that He punishes with sickness, but when you have a reasonable understanding of God, you’ll know that His justice demands punishment, either here or in our next life and it’s better to be punished here rather than there, for that will be eternal; therefore, God as I said earlier, in His mercy chastises us but while He does it, He doesn’t leave us just like that, He also sends Grace in abundance, both to bear the chastisement and also come out of it, for you can be sure that God will not leave His people with the pain, after they have repented from their sin.