Her prophets are light [lacking truth, gravity, and steadiness] and men of treachery; her priests have profaned the sanctuary; [defrauding God and man by pretending their own word is God’s word] they have done violence to the law. – Zephaniah 3:4, Amplified Bible (AMP)

As we start out the New Year, we ought to make a pact with our Creator to stop twisting His words to ease our consciences. Instead, we should endeavor to accept His instructions at face value and obey.

Every good parent has at some point dealt with a child who did something wrong and then defended the wrong action with the following excuse: “I thought you meant X when you said Y, which is why I did Z.” Every good parent has then followed up that poor excuse with the following response: “Bologna! You knew exactly what I meant by what I said, and now you have to suffer the consequences of your disobedience.” To defend himself or herself, the disobedient child feigns misunderstanding in order to try to escape discipline. Likewise, we often pretend that God’s Word says one thing when it obviously says something different, and the reason we pretend is so that we can justify our actions when the Holy Spirit convicts us of our sin.

A good parent sees through the child’s ruse of misunderstanding, and so does God. And, like the good parent, God will punish us despite our claims of misunderstanding. So, rather than play a game with God that we will never win, we ought to do the logical thing, which is to avoid the ruse, seek to understand what God meant by what He said in the Bible, and obey. If we seek to follow His truth rather than to fulfill our lusts, we will avoid the inevitable discipline that will come, we will forge a rich relationship with our Lord, and we will have a new year filled with heart peace, no matter what our circumstances.

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