Because the Lord Hated Us

“Yet you would not go up, but rebelled against the command of the LORD your God. And you murmured in your tents and said, ‘Because the LORD hated us he has brought us out of the land of Egypt, to give us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us. – Deuteronomy 1:26-27

If there is one thought that separates the Christian from everybody else, it is the constant and painful acknowledgement of not being a good person.

Every single person spends most of the minutes and hours of a day comfortable in the knowledge of his own rightness and everybody else’s wrongness. I haven’t done anything so very bad, not nearly anything like the person next door, or on Twitter, and so, while I’m certainly not perfect, in the whole scheme of things, I’m going to be fine. When something goes very wrong, it’s because of circumstances, or the badness of another person. I don’t share very much of the blame.

This thought–of being basically good–is the human condition. And so you can see why the way would be narrow and rocky that leads to eternal life. Because God doesn’t think that any of us are “basically good”. He knows that all of us are rebellious, in an ugly way, not a cute toddler way. Our rebellion is the problem, the reason that things are so bad. Given a choice between good and bad, we pick the bad so often that there’s no amount of good to counteract the alarming mountain of sin.

It’s a depressing reality, and why Christians, as I said before, are not many in number and not particularly loved by the world. First, the Christian has to acknowledge that he is the problem. Then, he has to go around and share the “good news” that everyone else is also the problem. It’s a painful and unhappy task, and why evangelism suffers so much on the local level. It’s easier to bring in a speaker and drag a friend along to hear this news, than swallowing hard and saying something so unpleasant oneself.

The Christian has to be constantly saying both, I am the problem, and, I don’t even want to do what I know I should do. These two continual confessions should keep the Christian in various levels of mournfulness. The Christian Life is likened to the Wilderness Years, where the Israelites, who had been rescued by God, struggled and wept and continued on in sin. They didn’t go from the Red Sea to the Promised Land in a couple of days. They endured one generation’s worth of their own sin. God showed them the law, and then over and over and over and over he showed them that they couldn’t do it, they couldn’t keep it, that they didn’t even want to. And so they wept, and moaned, and died, and their bodies were covered by the sand.

The absence of sand, the abundance of water, the proliferation of every manner of food, and the ease and comfort of our ordinary lives might often trick us into thinking we’re not really in the desert, that we’re in some sort of preliminary promised land. The expectation of life being easy and good creeps in, and we fall back into thinking that we are not that bad and the world is bad, and yet so comfortable, and so not that bad.

But the badness of the human person is only one single note of the Wilderness. Other other stronger note is the goodness of God. And this is where the Christian cheers up considerably, and doesn’t feel quite so mournful after all. The sand is so irritating and hot, but God is close, and communicative, and providential, and desirous of giving good things. For every single time the people rebelled and sinned, God provided a way out for the ones who repented. For every time they were thirsty, he gave them water. Whenever they were hungry, he gave them bread. Whenever they sinned, he chastised them, even with death, so that they might not fall into greater rebellion and trouble.

Indeed, the chief goodness of God is his patience. If the people had gone straight from the Red Sea to the Jordan River, they would not have discovered the ugliness of their own hearts. Because, there in the depths of the disappointing wilderness, look what they learn. Moses reminds them as they are about to go into their rest for real what they themselves said, “Because the LORD hated us he has brought us out of the land of Egypt.”

Because the Lord hated us? But that is the kernel of rebellion. God hated us, and so he created us and gave us all this food and water. God hated us, and rescued us from all our troubles. God hated us, and so he put limits around our behavior and our identity. God hated us, and so we had to go to war with him, and keep warring, even though we could never win.

When you discover this single, niggling grain of ugly deceit–that God hates you and that’s why he’s doing what he’s doing–then you can discover the truth. Does God really hate you? No, indeed, he loves you more than the grains of sand in the desert. You are the one who hates him. But you don’t have to carry on hating him.

His mercy, there in the wilderness is sharp and occasionally bitter. It is too much to bear. The snakes, the plagues, the being swallowed up by the ground–all of it is the chastisement that brings peace to the mind and soul. And peace is also rest. Because the trial doesn’t go on more than a generation, more than the span of your own life, and then, knowing that God’s great love is sufficient for eternity, you, having striven to enter his rest, actually do get to enter it.

Have a lovely Sunday.