I should not have been surprised when, a few weeks after God's divine intervention on the road to Rimrock, our son began to doubt again--not God's reality, but His plan. Satan had snatched away much of the beauty of that experience. To paraphrase a current ad campaign, "When you're Satan, that's what you do." Satan loves to turn truth into lies, faith into doubt, and good into evil. He is the Snatcher. He snatches the seed of God's word sown into the world (Mt. 13:19) He snatches the joy of new believers by making them doubt their salvation. I vividly remember my own experience of that. And, if he could, he would snatch Christians themselves from God's hand. (John 10:29) Sometimes, he even snatches the joy of the Stone Pillar from Reed and I. The Snatcher is not only the bearer of bad news, he is bad news. The good news is, we have a Shepherd.
The Shepherd knows his sheep in all our frailty. It does not matter that the Snatcher is strong and the sheep are weak, because the good Shepherd is our protector. He has promised that nothing can take us from God's hand and that promise is just as true for those He is drawing to salvation as those who already belong to Him. The hand that draws us is the same one that keeps us. The Snatcher is pursuing our straying son, but so is the Shepherd. The main issue is not the desire of the sheep to be back in the fold, but the desire and love of the Shepherd. Trusting the Shepherd who found me and has taken care of me all these years is the least this Lamb can do.
No comments:
Post a Comment