Oh come, let us worship and bow down;
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker! – Psalm 95:6 (ESV)
One lesson we’ve been learning lately in our household is that eventually, everyone will have to kneel down to something.
My children are learning, at least in the sense of our household, that there are people in the house more powerful than them. By more powerful, I mean mom and dad don’t have to let them go everywhere they want to go. Mom and dad don’t have to finance everything they want to do. Mom and dad, at least at this point in their lives, have authority over their lives and the power to execute that authority.
Our children can choose to either respect that authority or they can rage against it. Eventually, they will outgrow our power, but at that point they will be old enough to move on with their lives.
Though not a perfect example, this is similar to how each person in the world relates to God. I’m not talking about just followers of Jesus Christ, though, I’m talking about every single person. You see, God holds authority over every single person that’s ever been born. His authority allows Him to either give the gift of eternal life or to sentence a person to eternal damnation as the result of their sins. God holds this authority and He also holds the power to execute this authority.
Therefore, we should recognize this authority and worship Him and bow down to Him.
But many of us just won’t simply bow down to anything.
It’s a simple act, really. We just admit that something is greater than us, something is, dare I say, better, than us. We recognize this and then place that something above ourselves. But again, many of us just won’t do it.
Why is that? I wondered about that many times. I think part of the reason is cultural. In the United States, we are taught to be free and taught to value our own individual rights. These are wonderful things and should be fought for to be protected, but sometimes, I think, we take these wonderful rights as an excuse to do anything we want and then we flaunt are rights back at the One who gave them to us.
I also think many of us won’t kneel to God because we really don’t need a God. Sure, there’s a lot of poverty and such in the U.S., but, for the most part, we are an extremely wealthy land. Even the poorest among us have stuff. Cell phones, cable service, stuff. Even the government helps many of the poor. But most of us have plenty. Sure, we may have some problems, but materially speaking, we are pretty well off. As many have said before, we don’t seek the Savior because we don’t think we need to be saved from anything. We’ve associated our overall well-being with our W-2s or bank statements (or credit card statements) and determined that we can take care of ourselves.
Another reason I think we won’t bend our knees to anything is because to do so may mean that we have to stop doing something we like. In this case “doing something we like” is the equivalent of sinning against God. When we bow our knee to something, we are saying, “You are my Lord. Ask and I will do.” So we don’t bow down, because we don’t want to follow anyone else’s instructions. I suppose this reason meshes with the first two I gave, but we don’t want to give up the things we do or the stuff we have. We don’t want to run the risk that God may ask us to leave something behind and totally follow Him.
We stiffen our necks and won’t bow down to Him despite what He’s done for us. We can look around and see God in creation – who couldn’t? – but we won’t acknowledge a Creator. We see right now the blessings He’s put into our lives, but won’t fall to our knees and offer Him a heartfelt thank You. We see the sin and failings in our lives and look for a way out of them, but we won’t take the free gift of His grace. When you step back and think about this, it’s pretty sad.
God is even showing us great mercy in that He doesn’t end things today and call us into account. It’s by His grace and mercy that we have another day. And no matter how hard the new day is, it’s a blessing from the Lord that He’s given it to us; He’s given us another chance to be right with Him.
But we shouldn’t take God’s delay as a sign that He won’t do what He says. Eventually, every knee will bow:
“Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” – Philippians 2:9-11 (ESV)
So today, as Psalm 95 also says,
For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.
Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
when your fathers put me to the test
and put me to the proof, though they had seen my vwork.
For forty years I loathed that generation
and said, “They are a people who go astray in their heart,
and they have not known my ways.”
Therefore I swore in my wrath,
“They shall not enter my rest.” – Psalm 95:7-11 (ESV)
Husband Father Son 