READING: 1 Kings 14-17
It’s hard not to see the image—and to see it so dramatically that it’s convicting even to those of us who are believers. God’s words to King Jeroboam were clear: “You behaved more wickedly than all who were before you” (1 Kgs 14:9). He had made himself other gods and images, as if the gods he fashioned were somehow gods at all. Then—and, this is the image that grabs me today—God said of him, “you have flung me behind your back.” In essence, Jeroboam had turned his back on God.
Why this image captures me is my gratitude for another text with similar language within the poem of Hezekiah: “your love has delivered me from the Pit of destruction, for you have thrown all my sins behind your back” (Isa 38:17). God in grace remembers our sin no more, his having tossed our sins behind his back; as one writer put it, “He wiped the record clean.”*
Meanwhile, though, we still sometimes turn our back on Him.
May that not be the case today.
DAILY PRAYER: “God, I cling to You today.”
MONDAY’S READING: 1 Kings 18-20
* J. D. W. Watts, (2005). Isaiah 34–66 (Revised Edition, Vol. 25, p. 594). Thomas Nelson, Inc.