When I was young, I fell asleep in a raft and floated from a small cove out into the middle of the Rhein River in Germany. The foghorn of a barge awakened me and I rowed quickly to safety. I never intended to drift out into the river, I was just taking a nap on a warm summer day. The current of our world never pushes us closer to God. We never drift our way into holiness or righteousness.
We may feel whiplash as we read again the collision of worship with worldliness in these verses. On the mountain with God, some sing in worship, “A refuge for the poor, a shelter from the storm. This is our God.” But the presence of God which brings grace to the worshiper brings grief to the worldly. The Moabites miss the point of the worship. Wrongly thinking they can save themselves, they experience the judgement of God instead of the justification God could give. The walls they thought would protect them will come tumbling down like Jericho. No wall blocks God.
One of the puritans wrote, “The narrow way was never hit upon by chance, neither did a heedless man ever live a holy life.” Let us hide God’s word in our heart so that we do not sin against God (Psalm 119:11). We do not find the will of God haphazardly.
As the poem attributed to Ella Wheeler Wilcox says,
“One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
'Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.”
Which way are our sails set today? Prayer sets the sails toward God. The God of the scriptures is our God. Will we follow him today?
