God Is God, And We Are Not.

The Scriptures said that, not only did the priest try to get him out of the temple as fast as they could, he himself was eager to leave because the Lord had struck him. King Uzziah, the man who had it all, lost it all. The leprosy not only kept him from entering the temple again, he couldn’t even go back home. He lived in a separate house.

His son had to step up take over the palace and to rule the people. When he died, he was buried in a separate area away from the other kings. He had no idea, that forgetting God was God and He was not, would cause him to end up with the future that he had.

I am thankful that God loves us so much, that it is God’s desire for us to repent and that God does not immediately send judgment when we choose to disobey or to defy Him. Yet the fear of the Lord, reminds us that God will have the last say in what happens in the future with our lives. Uzziah had a change of heart in trying to run out of the temple, but it came too late.

Just as success can make us want to walk away from God, disappointment can also do the same thing. We may think that because we have done all these things on God’s good check list, God should have done something for us that God has not done. We decide God has not kept his end of the bargain, so why should we keep ours.

We can at that point also forget that God is God and We are not. Our walking away from God does not diminish who God is in anyway, it simply cuts us off from blessings that could be ours. At the heart of the person walking away from God because of success or the person walking away because of disappointment, the issue at hand is pride. I’m going to do what I want to do, regardless of what God has said about it.

Many people want to know the will of God, but much fewer want to obey it. In our New testament reading we find the same certainty in what God’s will is as Uzziah did in his situation.

We find in I Thessalonians 4:3 It is God’s will that you be sanctified. This means that we should be in the process of becoming holy or in the process of becoming more dedicated to God. To be holy is to be set apart for God’s use. When we say, we are all created in the image of God, we often think that means we are all to treat each other the same and respect one another as fellow human beings.

I think it goes deeper than that. I think because we are created in the image of God, there is something in us that has some of the attributes of God inside of us. We know that God is holy and righteous.

If we are in his image, then there is a part of us that calls for holiness and righteousness. God is going to hold all of us accountable for how we do damage to that part of his image. God’s law has been set up to protect God’s image in us. The part of us that is most in the image of God is our spirit. That’s the part that longs after wanting to be with God.

Whether we are saved or not, God does not want us hurting his image in us because when we do, we are hurting ourselves. When we are the ones deciding what can hurt the image of God in us and what doesn’t, then once again we have forgotten that God is God and we are not.”