More Compassionate Than God?

There is an alarming trend of imagining God’s word is a bit too harsh, implying that people could be more compassionate than God. What arrogance. The seductress in Proverbs 7 uses catchy words like “peace” and “love” to lure in the one lacking understanding. Satan does it today. He is spreading a “kinder Christian” message that allows people to make up their own rules, and discuss only the parts of the Bible that work for them. It plays to our pride that wants to appear more magnanimous than our fellow man, and it tramples the path that would have led souls to the true safe pasture of Christ and His teachings.

In Proverbs 7:22 the young man follows the seductress like “an ox goes to slaughter.”  We must pay attention to God’s wisdom, so that our hearts don’t turn aside to the ways of the deceiver.

“…for many a victim has she laid low,

and all her slain are a mighty throng.”

Proverbs 7:26

How did that happen? How do strong people get fooled? The strength we need in order to avoid deception and resist temptation will never come from us. It comes from understanding and knowing the Lord. It comes from being clear that God always exercises kindness, justice and righteousness – even and especially when He tells us what’s evil and what’s not.

“Thus says the LORD:

‘Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom,

let not the mighty man boast in his might,

let not the rich man boast in his riches,

but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me,

that I am the LORD who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth.

For in these things I delight, declares the LORD.’”

Jeremiah 9:23-24