13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.
14 For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end.
15 As it is said, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”
15 As it is said, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”
Bob was killed this morning in a car crash. In his spiffy new Lexus, he had exited his driveway and, ignoring the STOP sign the county had placed at his gate, he drove straight out onto the adjoining highway and was struck broadside by a semi-truck full of frozen chickens. At the moment he was crushed to death by several thousand pounds of high-speed metal and frozen poultry, Bob's attention had been on a text that had just arrived to his cell-phone.
Bob had long ago taken to ignoring the STOP sign that he had not asked the county to put at the entrance to his driveway. At first, it had irritated him. Who did the county officials think they were inhibiting his driving in this way? he had thought to himself. Initially, he had halted at the STOP sign reflexively, but since there was almost never any traffic coming when he did, he soon began to coast right past the sign - slowly, though, and looking both ways for oncoming vehicles.
In time, Bob ceased to slow down past the sign. It was so rare that he encountered another vehicle as he was exiting his driveway that he couldn't see the point of obeying the sign - even partially. Besides, who was around to make him obey it? And he certainly saved some time by ignoring it. Eventually, the sign didn't register in Bob's mind at all. He had got in the habit of acting as though the sign was not there and, after a while, as far as Bob was concerned, it wasn't. He could look right at it and not register its presence.
And so, though he had managed for years to zip past the STOP sign without incident, this morning Bob didn't. It will be the last time Bob passes any sign, anywhere
Neither the semi-truck nor the frozen chickens were seriously damaged.
Bob's story, pure fiction though it is, finds an echo in the lives of most of us, I think. We are all habit-forming creatures, settling into modes of thought and behavior with surprising speed and naturalness in many instances, developing comfortable routines and systems of action that streamline the effort and attention we give to commonplace activities and things.
In a good number of cases in our mundane living, doing so is very helpful. But our habit-forming tendency has a very serious, dangerous downside. In the spiritual realm, in particular, we can encounter the STOP sign of God's truth and begin to follow Bob's bad example. We simply don't want to do what God has commanded us to do, to heed His warnings when they would constrict our own will and way. We might slow down a bit in acknowledgement of God's commands but we don't respond fully, completely, to them. We start fudging, you see, in our obedience to Him, bit by bit turning more and more fully away from Him, tuning Him out, ignoring His "STOP signs," until, one day, we can sit in church on a Sunday morning, an audience for an hour to the preaching of God's truth, and not really hear a thing that was said.
Some in this condition wonder why their Christian life has grown so dull and grey; why the pastor keeps droning on, over and over, about the same bland stuff; why the prospect of prayer and Bible study is repellant and God feels a million miles away, a distant, irrelevant figure. They've certainly "picked up speed" in other areas of living, though. God might be as boring as a box of soda crackers but the new hard-core porn site they've found is great! Scripture might be utterly obscure now to their mind and heart, but the vistas of fleshly self-gratification, of self-stimulation and adventure have blown wide open!
Eventually, though, thoughts of God and His truth disappear altogether as habits of selfishness and sin dominate and distract from the dangers of the Broad Way. And those dangers are great and terrible. God has warned:
Proverbs 6:12-15
12 A worthless person, a wicked man, Is the one who walks with a perverse mouth,
13 Who winks with his eyes, who signals with his feet, Who points with his fingers;
14 Who with perversity in his heart continually devises evil, Who spreads strife.
15 Therefore his calamity will come suddenly; Instantly he will be broken and there will be no healing.
Galatians 6:7-8
7 Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.
8 For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption...
Romans 6:23
23 For the wages of sin is death...
Like Bob, many get away for years with blasting right past God's "STOP signs." Emboldened by their apparent "proof" that God was wrong, that they can get away safely with ignoring Him, they continue to harden into their blindness and deafness to Him, settling with ever-greater firmness into selfishness and sin. They mistake God's patience, you see, His merciful reluctance to drop the hammer on the wicked, for a license to continue in sin. Until, one day, mired in body-destroying addictions, utterly fouled in their minds and hearts, and completely blind to the high-speed catastrophe bearing down on them, they are "broken without remedy."
Don't be like Bob.
