Hard Lessons Learned

If you have children, you are no stranger to the reality that raising kids can be very difficult. As a parent, I am given the responsibility by God to teach my kids obedience, and in turn teach them about being obedient to God. Sometimes, kids do foolish things out of ignorance, and sometimes they do them defiantly. An effective tool that we use periodically in discipline, we call natural consequences. Simply put, when the child insists on ignoring warnings, sometimes experience is the best teacher. Sometimes, experience teaches regardless of the circumstances, for example, when we learn the reality of death when we lose a loved one. Those are hard lessons in life. When we fall, we learn not to climb where we do not belong.

This morning in my reading in 1 Chronicles, I was reminded of this truth. In a narrative that begins in chapter 13. David, recently made king, begins the process of bringing the Ark of the Covenant back to where it belonged -- with God's people. In it's transport, one of the animals pulling the cart that was carrying it nearly over turned it. One of David's men who was nearby reached out to keep it from falling. He stopped it by putting his hand on it, and the man was immediately struck dead. Wow! The first time I read that, I tho't to myself, "that seems a little extreme! He was trying to keep it from falling." David felt the same and scripture recorded the fact that he was mad at God about it. However, the harsh reality is that God had established His standard for moving the Ark, and David and his men had not followed those instructions.

They pulled back and regrouped and did their homework, and God began to bless them in battles in chapter 14. This was a message repeated all through out the Old Testament, obey God, He would bless them, disobey God and He would curse them. Later, when they finally did move the Ark in chapter 15, this time they followed God's instructions to the letter.

Funny, how we so often get upset when we fail to follow God's standard because we either want to do it our way, or rather we just go about things haphazardly, and things fall apart. we mishandle money, and we go broke. We marry someone who doesn't love the Lord, and surprisingly they get mifted when we want to go worship. But had we consulted the Lord to begin with, we could have saved ourselves much grief. This is a hard lesson that I know I am still learning. It gets easier with maturity, but I cannot say that I have mastered it. The awesome thing is that God is a gracious God and he doesn't destroy us when we mess up. He allows us to get up and try it again.