[stephenkhoo]

STRAYING FROM THE LORD AS THE CAUSE OF OUR DOWNFALL
SCRIPTURE READINGS: 2 KINGS 17:5-8, 13-15, 18; MATTHEW 7:1-5
http://www.universalis.com/20140623/mass.htm

Is your life in a mess? Do you find yourself falling from one tragedy into another? What is the root cause? More often than not, it is our abandonment of God in our lives. As the gospel says, we are unable to judge others rightly because there is a plank in our eyes. Indeed, quite often the judgement we make of others is a reflection of the state of ignorance or folly we are in. No wonder Jesus remarked, “The judgements you will give are the judgements that you will get, and the amount you measure out is the amount you will be given.”

If we want to avoid greater misery in our lives, we should take a leaf from the history of Israel. Today, we read of the dire consequences they had to live with due to their poor judgement of the situation. In 722 BC the Northern Kingdom fell and the people were exiled to Assyria. This inevitable state of affairs did not happen overnight but came about because of 210 years of idolatry, false compromises and moral decadence. Hence, it is important that we ask how such a great nation under King David and Solomon could come to such a miserable state.

The root cause, as the author pointed out, was due firstly to Israel’s forgetfulness of what the Lord had done for them, namely, His grace and mercy in redeeming them from the land of slavery. “This had happened because the Israelites had sinned against the Lord their God who had brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the grip of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.” Their sin was one of ingratitude due to their forgetfulness. When we forget the kindness of people, we also forget about their existence and their good influence in our lives. Not only do we not remember the kindness of our loved ones and friends who had helped us in our times of need, we also forget the many times God had helped us when we turned to Him in our illnesses and sufferings.

So from forgetfulness of what the Lord had done for them, they turned away from His laws. When God and His laws were forgotten, they adopted the customs and lifestyles of the godless people. They forgot that they were called to holiness, that is, to live a life different from the worldly people. By assimilating the immoral values of the surrounding nations and conforming to their ways, they gradually lost their culture and the values that came with it. This too is the same challenge we face today, living in this so called secular world. Our Christian values are being eroded and compromised because of our desire to be more acceptable to the world. Furthermore, with our lack of seriousness in deepening our faith and understanding of God’s truths, worsened by an ambience that is no longer Christian, we too have replaced the wisdom of God with the individualistic, materialistic and self-centered values of the world. The effect is a crisis of deep emptiness, as we lose our ultimate goal in life, our identity of who we are, and most of all, what we are called to be.

Thirdly, the absence of God will make us turn to false gods, just as the Israelites turned to the gods of the Canaanites. Evil grew by leaps and bounds because the Israelites “worshipped other gods, they followed the practices of the nations that the Lord had dispossessed for them.” What is worse are the subtle ways in which we are being led astray from God. Like the people of Israel, their separation from God first began with their separation from Judah, setting their own shrine or Temple instead of worshipping at the Temple of Jerusalem. Cut from the nexus of their faith, they began to make false compromises with the gods of the Canaanites. They wanted both Yahweh and also the gods of the Canaanites, of Baal and Astarte. The loss of true faith, that is orthodoxy, not only resulted in the loss of truth but also authentic values, as they could no longer tell what was good or evil. Aren’t we in this situation as well? By allowing the false gods of power and wealth to dominate our lives, we supplant the place of God.

This will lead to rebellion against the authority of God in our lives and His laws for us for harmonious living. When our hearts are closed to God, we become stubborn and self-willed. This was how the Israelites behaved towards God. “They despised his laws and the covenant he had made with their ancestors, and the warnings he had given them.” All sins are rooted in the one sin, which is the rejection of God and His authority over us. Without reverence for the Lord, like the Israelites, we will abandon ourselves to divination, sorcery, occult practices and all kinds of immorality, injustices and crimes. Otherwise, we will resort to self-worship, of our beauty, talents, power, status, wealth and achievements, believing we can do all things without Him; just like the Israelites.

When we allow ourselves to fall so deeply into sin instead of quickly returning to God through sincere repentance, we might find that we may not be able to get out at all. God in His mercy will never withdraw His love for us, just as He was faithful to the Israelites in spite of their spiritual rebellion and apostasy. He sent them prophets who called them to repentance and obedience, but they spurned them all, refusing to turn from their wicked ways and accept their message of righteousness. We too must never tempt ourselves to think that we can continue to sin for now until such time when we are ready to repent. The deeper we allow sin to hold us in bondage, the greater would be our struggle to shirk off the Evil One from controlling our lives, because by then we might have sunk so low in our pride and arrogance, or so mired in our disappointments and pain that God’s grace would not be able to reach us.

Let us ask the Lord for the grace to judge ourselves subjectively and the situations in our lives objectively. Each one of us must judge ourselves rather than others. More often than not, the tendency to judge others is a mask to avoid confronting our deeper selves. If we purify our minds and our hearts, we will be better able to feel with our fellowmen in their sins, their struggles and their pains. Cognizant of our own sinfulness and our solidarity with them, let us first seek sincere repentance for ourselves, so that experiencing God’s merciful love for ourselves, we can then extend the same compassion towards our fellow sinners and bring them to the consciousness of God’s mercy and love for them as well. Indeed, we are never in a position to judge others subjectively. At most, if we are in union with God, we can only remind them of the objective truths God has revealed to us.

Written by The Most Rev William Goh