Nehemiah 12;27-13:31
1 Corinthians 11:2-16
Psalm 33:1-16
Proverbs 21:17-18
This was a challenging week as a father, as disobedience characteristic of children made numerous guest appearances in the Lanuza household.
As I was reading this, I wondered "how could a loving God condemn the foreign women who married into Israel, presumably with the best of intentions, to a life of hardship and desolation?" Or "why was it wrong to try and make an honest living selling spices on the Sabbath?" And in the New Testament reading, women's head covering? Really?
Then I realized one thing, then remembered another: first, the rightness or wrongness of the action wasn't determined by man's motivations, by the seeming innocuousness of the action - it was determined by God's commands, God's law, God's will. And second, from something else I read or heard earlier this week - "obedience first, then comes understanding".
And this is where I was reminded of what my kids would say when I told them they had to do something - either with words or just with their eyes, my ears and my mind would hear "Why?" The eternal answer to that question, as I myself learned long ago from my own parents is "Because I said so."
It's funny how, so many decades removed from my childhood, so much of what my parents seemed to demand so unreasonably now makes so much sense. Yes, there was ignorant (and often unwilling) obedience...years later, there is understanding. I can only believe that will also eventually be true for my children. And as I struggle to obey the Lord's confusing commands, as the perfectly reasonable justifications come to mind as they must have for the Israelites and the Corinthians, I trust that eventually I will be blessed with the understanding as well.
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