Word of Encouragement (09/06/2023)

Is it not wheat harvest today? I will call upon the LORD, that he may send thunder and rain. And you shall know and see that your wickedness is great, which you have done in the sight of the LORD, in asking for yourselves a king." ¹⁸ So Samuel called upon the LORD, and the LORD sent thunder and rain that day, and all the people greatly feared the LORD and Samuel. (1 Sam. 12:17-18)

We don’t have the actual words of Samuel’s prayer. But Samuel told the Israelites what his prayer would be about: he would ask the LORD to send thunder and rain so that they might know how wicked their sin of asking for a king was. In other words, he asked the LORD to show His glory so that they might be convicted of their sin as they renewed their covenant with Him.

This covenant renewal had a very interesting dynamic, didn’t it? Regarding this covenant renewal, Bill T. Arnold uses the term, “reconfiguration”: God not only forgave Israel’s sinful demand for a king, but He also used it to “reconfigure” the administration of His covenant relationship with them by establishing a monarchy in Israel. They wanted a king to replace God. But God granted a king as His servant to administer the covenant: “…if both you and the king who reigns over you will follow the LORD your God, it will be well” (12:14). God took Israel’s sinful demand and reconfigured it to accomplish His purpose.

This may be why the wickedness of Israel’s request had to be pointed out at this time of covenant renewal. Just because God used our sins for His purpose doesn’t mean that our sins were not sinful. Should Joseph’s brothers be praised for selling Joseph as a slave and Potiphar’s wife for falsely accusing Joseph because their actions eventually led to Joseph’s rise to the premiership in Egypt? The end, which God accomplishes by His wisdom despite our sinful deeds, does not justify our sins. Even when things go our way, there are times we must pray, “To you, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but to us open shame” (Dan. 9:7).

It seems that one of the things we should not forget to pray for is the conviction of our sins. This is not because Christians are just morbid kind of people who are obsessed with their sins and enjoy the masochistic pleasure of feeling guilty all the time. We are a forgiven people: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). Judicially speaking, all of our sins are forgiven once and for all by the blood of Jesus Christ. But existentially speaking, we still commit sins. Even though we are forgiven in the divine tribunal, we experience the destructive effects of sin, one of them being the disruption in our fellowship with God (that is, the quality of our relationship with God as our Father since our relationship with Him cannot be broken).

We all know that we are not always aware of our sins. Even then, sin is still sin, and its destructive effect does not go away. Even though we may not be aware, sin injects its destructive venom into our lives in some ways. That is why we should pray for the conviction of our sins so that we can confess them and ask for God’s cleansing and restoration. We don’t want the glorious liberty we have received from Christ to be compromised or robbed by sin, do we? Let us open our hearts toward God and ask Him to open our eyes to see the debilitating sins in our lives. And let us ask for the courage to confess and repent of them decisively and willingly, especially knowing that God will forgive us and restore to us the joy of salvation.

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