You Can Have Better

Why seek bread, when its pardon you need?
Why hang with the dead, and avoid the quick?
Why spurn God, and embrace a traitor breed?
Why keep from the well, yet live with the sick?
Who planted you for figs, but reaps no fruit?
Who gave you voice, and has heard not one hymn?
Who gave you His image, but you disrepute?
Who died to give you grace, yet must condemn?
Who made you pure gold, but you're only dross?
Who wants you on high, but you seek the vale*?
Who expects gain from you, and earns but loss?
Who desires you win, yet you always fail?
Must I say, you're falling short of your best?
You can have better, making God your quest!

*vale = valley of the shadow of death

These questions are meant, of course, for you only if you have ignored the behest of God to seek His face. Believers will recognize at once to whom they are directed. They are fair questions, but they just scratch the surface of the mountain of beneficence poured out on every human being by the Creator. If a dollar cost could, in any creditable calculation, be assigned to the provision and production of a single human being by economists for his value, including his pro rata share of the cost of producing earth in a 13.7 billion year process, it would be astronomical, even larger than the national debt of the United States. What has God received in return for His investment from the vast majority of us? No one, of course, could ever hope to reimburse Him, but non-believers have accepted God's munificence with a "so what" attitude, like that of an unruly child who shrugs his shoulders with an ungrateful air and says, "I didn't ask to be born!" If your child says that to you, it would hurt to the quick; that is exactly what you are saying to God by sailing through life and never giving Him a thought, sliding into hell when you die, when you could have lived a so much richer life and ended up with Him for eternity!

But God didn't choose a beligerent method to call attention to what we humans owe Him; instead, He calls to us in a still, small voice by His Holy Spirit. And He never will hound you like an aggressive bill collector trying to collect a past-due debt.

"So he said to me, 'This is the word of the Lord to Zerubabbel: Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the Lord Almighty.'" (Zechariah 4:6)

Zechariah was a prophet to Israel about 400 years before the birth of Jesus; Zerubabbel was Israel's governor appointed by the king of Babylon, who currently ruled the land of the Jews. The Lord was sending word to Israel, and to us today, that Jesus would be no military conqueror, nor is aggression the manner in which people are going to be converted into service to God. Of course the Jews did not get it---they rejected the Messiah mainly because they did not believe the gentle, meek, mild Jesus could possibly be the Messiah who was to force their Roman (at Jesus' time) occupiers from their land.

The great majority of humans today go through life ignoring their debt to God, when He lovingly wants them to accept His gits of grace and faith and to be saved to eternal life. But God will never force them to become His children; His method is still "not by power, but by His Spirit". In John Chapter 16 Jesus tells the apostles that the Holy Spirit will witness to lost people and convict them of sin, but still in the soft voice of mental persuasion; force will never be used. Revelation 8-19 describes the awful destruction of most of earth's population for their refusal to accept the gentle voice of His Spirit.