You Reap What You Sow.

You have plowed iniquity; you have reaped injustice; you have eaten the fruit of lies. Because you have trusted in your own way and in the multitude of your warriors, therefore the tumult of war shall arise among your people, and all your fortresses shall be destroyed, Shalman destroyed Beth-arbel on the day of battle; mothers were dashed in pieces with their children. Thus it shall be done to you, O Bethel, because of your great evil. At dawn the king of Israel shall be utterly cut off. – Hosea 10:13-15 ESV

At times, even as believers, we are surprised at the outcomes of some of our decision making. We are somehow amazed that our lies have consequences. We are shocked when our love affair with materialism leaves us struggling with greed, envy, covetousness, worry and anxiety. We wonder why we are so angry, yet never connect the dots to our daily consumption of violence-filled media. We wrestle with lust, but never seem to associate it with the sexually explicit programming that fills our TV screens each and every night.

The Israelites were also oblivious to the cause-and-effect nature of their lives. So God made it clear to them: “you have cultivated wickedness and harvested a thriving crop of sins” (Hosea 10:13 NLT). In other words, they were reaping exactly what they should have expected. No surprises. Just the natural consequences of living their lives apart from God. They had consumed a daily dose of lies about everything. They had been told that God would not punish them for their sins because they were His chosen people. They had been promised that alliances with foreign powers would protect them from destruction. They believed that the gods of pagan nations were anything but false. But while a steady diet of lies may taste good going down and make you feel good for the moment, it will leave you spiritually weak, malnourished, and starving to death. 

Self-reliance and misplaced trust were behind the behavior of the Israelites. “Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22 ESV). The prophet, Jeremiah, recorded a similar indictment from God against the people of Judah. “My people are foolish and do not know me. They are stupid children who have no understanding. They are clever enough at doing wrong, but they have no idea how to do right!” (Jeremiah 4:22 NLT). They thought they knew better than God. They rejected His commands and ignored His warnings. They lived life according to their own terms. They stopped trusting God and, instead, placed their hope in false gods. When things got tough and they found themselves threatened by outside forces, they turned to alliances with countries like Egypt. They refused to rely on God. He had become small, insignificant and insufficient to meet their needs. The God who had delivered them from captivity in Egypt and given them the land of Canaan had become too weak to meet their needs. They had long ago forgotten the words of David:

Now I know that the Lord saves his anointed; he will answer him from his holy heaven with the saving might of his right hand. Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God. They collapse and fall, but we rise and stand upright. – Psalm 20:6-8 ESV

Not only did they doubt God’s salvation, they denied His judgment. They really did not believe that they could fall. They were so confident in their status as God’s chosen people, that they believed they were invincible. And yet, they never seemed to recognize the fact that their protection by God was based on their obedience and faithfulness to him. He had warned them that disobedience would bring His discipline. Unfaithfulness would have consequences. So God gave them the bad news: “Now the terrors of war will rise among your people” (Hosea 10:14 NLT). Their army would be impotent. Their alliances would prove useless. Their fortresses and defensive measures would be insufficient. And their false gods would be exposed for what they were: non-existent and, therefore, no help in time of need.

The devastation would be horrific. Referring to a past battle, God warned them that their fall would be brutal and merciless: “as Shalman destroyed Beth-arbel on the day of battle; mothers were dashed in pieces with their children” (Hosea 10:14b ESV). The Assyrians were going to show no mercy. Their destruction of the nation of Israel would be complete and no one would escape their wrath. From king to commoner, priest to prostitute, the influential to innocent infants – all would feel the wrath of the Assyrians and the judgment of God.

These kinds of passages make us uncomfortable as believers. They paint a picture of God that seems to contradict our view of Him as loving, gracious, forgiving and merciful. But too often, our understanding of God can become one-dimensional. We prefer to emphasize His love while downplaying His holiness and hatred of sin. We find comfort in His grace, but don’t want to think about His righteous wrath and divine obligation to punish sin. In doing so, we diminish the value of the gift of His Son. But it is in understanding the severity of sin’s offensiveness to God and His just and righteous obligation to punish sin that we fully comprehend the magnitude of what Christ has done for us. “God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:8 NLT). Jesus “was handed over to die because of our sins, and he was raised to life to make us right with God” (Romans 4:25 NLT). The inescapable reality was that “even though we were dead because of our sins, he gave us life when he raised Christ from the dead” (Ephesians 2:5 NLT).

Our sin was real. God’s judgment against our sin was deserved. And yet He showed us mercy – in spite of our sinfulness. Grace does not diminish the gravity of sin. It actually reveals the amazing love of God as He provides a means of salvation that is capable of satisfying His wrath against sin. He gave His Son. It was the death of Jesus alone that could propitiate or satisfy the just judgment of God against the sinfulness of mankind. Nothing else would do. No other payment could have been made that would have paid the debt that was owed. So when we elevate God’s love while ignoring His wrath, we actually diminish the amazing nature of that love. He loved us in spite of us, not because of us.

And yet, we continue to sow and reap, sin and suffer, because we don’t fully appreciate the gravity of sin and the greatness of His grace. We justify our actions, rationalize our sinful behavior and then wonder why we reap discontentment, dissatisfaction, anger, joylessness, envy, greed, and immorality. It is an accurate understanding of the grace of God that should produce in us the fruit of righteousness. As God told the people of Israel, “Plant the good seeds of righteousness, and you will harvest a crop of love. Plow up the hard ground of your hearts, for now is the time to seek the LORD, that he may come and shower righteousness upon you” (Hosea 10:12 NLT).

Buying Into “The Lie”.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. – Romans 1:24-25 ESV This whole section of Romans 1 has to do with the truth versus the lie. In these verses, Paul says that man has “exchanged the truth of God for a lie”, or literally, “the lie”. To understand this passage we have to define what Paul had in mind with these two terms. What is the truth of God? What is it that man, in his unrighteousness, has suppressed (vs 18)? God has revealed His eternal power and divine nature to man through His creation. So they are without excuse. Nature virtually screams the reality or truth regarding the existence of God. The very fact that men have ended up worshiping the creation rather than the creator simply shows that man recognizes some more powerful source outside of himself, but has chosen to exchange “the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (Romans 1:23 ESV). The truth to which Paul is referring in chapter one is the reality of God's existence. “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them” (Romans 1:19 ESV). Because man has rejected the truth regarding the existence of God, it is virtually impossible for him to accept the need for a Savior sent from God for his salvation. Ignorance or disbelief in God's existence ultimately leads to a refusal to accept any kind of divine standard for moral conduct. Morality becomes highly subjective and relativistic. Each man ends up doing what is right in his own eyes. As a result, they begin to believe “the lie”, either rejecting that God exists at all or replacing the truth about God for something or someone else. Rather than honoring Him as God and giving Him thanks for all that He has done for them, they turn their attention elsewhere, relying on their own wisdom to explain their existence and to determine their conduct.

So God gives them up. That sounds like such a harsh statement. It comes across as some form of divine abandonment. The Greek word is paradidōmi and it means “to give into the hands (of another)” or “to give over into (one's) power or use”. In a way, this simply means that God releases them to pursue and believe “the lie”. He allows men to rely on their own wisdom and darkened hearts. His wrath is less active in this sense, than passive. He allows them to reap what they sow. Paul had this idea in mind when he wrote to the believers in Galatia. “Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life” (Galatians 6:7-8 ESV). Three times in this section of Romans 1, Paul uses the phrase, “God gave them up”. In these two verses, God gave them up to impurity. The rejection of the truth regarding God's existence will ultimately lead to a false conclusion that man is the ultimate arbiter of his own fate. It is the wisdom of man, apart from God, that leads to things like genocide, infanticide, abortion, and virtually all forms of sexual sin and perversion. Highly intelligent people can commit and justify highly immoral acts. Humanism, as a philosophy of life, is destructive. It can be define as “a variety of ethical theory and practice that emphasizes reason, scientific inquiry, and human fulfillment in the natural world and often rejects the importance of belief in God” (Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition).

Man ends up worshiping and idolizing man. But at the end of the day, all men are inherently selfish and self-centered. Even our best attempts at living altruistic lives end up being self-serving. When you make man the center of your world, it is difficult, if not impossible, to keep from making that world revolve around yourself and your individual wants and desires. You end up doing what is right in your own eyes, and find yourself serving the creature rather than the creator. Not only do you dishonor God, but you eventually dishonor your own body, doing with it things that God never intended or approved, fulfilling the lusts of your own heart. God releases you to reap what you sow. He allows you to experience the negative outcomes of your own myopic and narcissistic lifestyle choices.

We see the reality of these verse all around us. Highly education and intelligent men and women living God-less lives in which they have made themselves the sole focus of their worship and attention. Mankind has made a habit out of rejecting the one true God and coming up with their own version of the truth. They exchange the truth about God for the lie. And the lie always leads do destruction. Paul is going to outline some serious consequences of living according to the lie. When we read the following verses we tend to focus on one particular sin, but Paul has a much broader view in mind when it comes to man's belief in the lie. He describes those who reject the truth of God and accept the lie as “filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless” (Romans 1:29-31 ESV). Sound familiar? It should. That is the world in which we live. Paul says, “since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God have them up to a debased mind to do what out not to be done” (Romans 1:28 ESV). And this is what they reaped. A life lived without God is not a pretty picture. Buying into the lie results in some serious consequences. Any man, left to himself, allowed by God to pursue his own way, will ultimately live a life marked by godlessness and unrighteousness.