Let’s Just Blame God
Proverbs 19:3 One’s own folly leads to ruin, yet the heart rages against the Lord.
Have you ever blamed God for something? You know, things are going along fine and then, it all just goes pear-shaped. Where did that come from? Why did that happen? You mull over it, you go from angry, to hurt, to lost and back to angry again. And if you keep chewing it over, pretty soon it all turns into bitterness and when bitterness sets in, it’s time to start playing the blame game.
And so, you start asking some different questions.
“God why did you let this happen? What were you thinking? How could you let that guy over there do that to me?”
We rant and rave and hang all sorts of things on God. It’s easy. I mean God’s not there to answer back – to defend Himself. Well … God is there. And He could answer back with a lighting strike, a voice from heaven, an earthquake. Sure, God could answer back. But He chooses not to. All you hear is a deafening silence. Why?
In any case, this thing that we’re so upset about, how often is it in fact our own fault in the first place? We make a mess of things and then we blame God. Come on! We’ve all done that!
One’s own folly leads to ruin, yet the heart rages against the Lord. (Proverbs 19:3)
We all have blind spots and the thing with a blind spot is that it’s something you can’t see.
And when we’re living out the consequences of our own blind spots, whilst the easiest thing is to let your heart rage against God, my hunch is, the reason He takes a quiet step back is to let us figure out what went wrong.
Maybe the question we should be asking ourselves is:
“How did I contribute to this mess? To what extent did I contribute to this situation? How much of my own folly has led me to this ruin?”
Yep, when we’re hurting we want to blame other people. We even want to blame God. But the mature thing to do, the thing that’ll help us learn and grown through this mess, is to take responsibility for the part we ourselves played in contributing to it in the first place.
Sometimes that simple act of taking responsibility can go a long way to fixing the mess. It can lead us to do things to clean up the mess. To apologise. To start treating someone differently. To stop acting like a two-year-old.
Other times, the simple act of taking responsibility helps us to understand the situation, to see it in a different light and to move on with our lives.
That’s God’s Word. Fresh … for you … today.
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