Have someone ever broken your heart? What happened when you thought you had the perfect someone and they swept you off your feet. They did all the right things to make you fall in love with them. You thought you had the perfect romance. They said that they would be with you forever. "Love is a many-splendored thing."
What do you do when they lost that loving feeling? How can someone all of a sudden stop loving you? It feels really hurtful to love someone and they don't love you back, and you will never understand why it happened. This is a one-sided break-up. This is a break-up that you never really want to experience. Can you imagine giving someone your all-in-all and out of nowhere they reject you? Oh yes, rejection is painful.
We serve a mighty awesome and loving God. We could never imagine the hurt and pain God felt when the Israelites, God's special chosen people, kept rejecting Him. The Israelites lost that loving feeling toward our heavenly Father, so many times. Case in point, you see, when Joseph became second in command in Egypt, the Israelites came to live in Egypt in the land of Gashen during a famine. The patriarch Jacob, Joseph's father, traveled with his family of 70 to Egypt to live a better life. In over 400 years, while in Egypt, the Israelites multiplied rapidly. The old Pharaoh had died and the new Pharaoh became uneasy that the Israelites were becoming too many to control and he thought they might join their enemies and fight against them. So the Egyptians made slaves of them and put brutal taskmaster over them while building the cities of Pithom and Raames, as supply centers for the king. But because we serve a mighty God of love and compassion, God heard their cries from heaven, and remembered His promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God had promised to bring their descendants back into the land of Canaan. God sent Moses to lead the people out of Egypt.
Once the people were lead out of Egypt and after escaping through the Red Sea, they traveled through the wilderness and arrived at Mount Sinai, God's holy mountain. They arrived there three months after their departure from Egypt. There, God issued them His law, The Ten Commandments. Moses told them what God said, "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. Yo shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God" (Exodus 20:2-5). God did not stutter! He says what He means and He means what He says. God gave Moses further instructions as well, and the people promised to obey.
Then Moses, Aaron, Nadab, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up into the mountain and they saw God, "under his feet there seemed to be a pavement of brilliant sapphire stones, as clear as the heavens. Yet, even though the elders saw God, he did not destroy them; and they had a meal together before the Lord" (Exodus 24:10-11). The Lord told Moses to go up into the mountain and remain there until He give him the laws and commandments He had written on tablets. When Moses didn't come back down the mountain right away, the people went back to what they were familiar with - idols. Egypt was a land of many idols and many gods. Each god represented a different aspect of a person's life. It was common to worship many gods in order to have a fulfilled life. When God told His people to worship and believe in Him, that wasn't so hard for them, because they probably thought He was just one more god to add to their list.
Now Israel had now seen and heard the Most High invisible God in action, but yet they still wanted the familiar gods that they could see and shape into whatever image they desired. So they had Aaron make them a golden calf. How soon the Israelites "lost that loving feeling" toward God. The calf was one of the most popular idols in Egypt. Hapi and Hathor were two of the most worshiped calf gods and they were symbols of power and fertility. Scripture tells us, "So they got up early the next morning and began offering burnt offerings and peace offerings to the calf-idol; afterwards they sat down to feast and drink at a wild party, followed by sexual immorality" (Exodus 32:6). The Lord was going to destroy them, but Moses begged God not to. So the Lords changed His mind and spared them.
Further in the Bible, we see that the Lord gave the Israelites all the land He had promised their ancestors, and they went and conquered it and lived there. The Lord helped them destroy all their enemies. "Every good thing he the Lord had promised them came true" (Joshua 21:46). Before dying, Joshua called all the people together and told them, "So revere Jehovah and serve him in sincerity and truth. Put away forever the idols your ancestors worshiped when they lived beyond the Euphrates River and in Egypt. Worship the Lord alone" (Joshua 24:14). The people replied, "We would never forsake the Lord and worship other gods" (Joshua 24:16).
After Joshua had died, the people remained true to the Lord throughout Joshua's lifetime, but finally all that generation died and the next generation did not worship Jehovah as their God. "And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord and served Baalim. And they forsook the Lord God of their fathers, which brought them out of the land of Egypt, and followed other gods, of the gods of the people that were round about them and bowed themselves unto them and provoked the Lord to anger. And they forsook the Lord, and served Baal and Ashtaroth" (Judges 2:11-13). The Israelites "lost that loving feeling" toward God. God became angry with them and said, "I will no longer drive out the nations left unconquered by Joshua when he died. Instead, I will use these nations to test my people, to see whether or not they will obey the Lord, as their ancestors did" (Judges 2:21-22). So the Lord left those nations in the land and He would not allow Israel to destroy them.
So the Israelites lived among the other surrounding nations and soon they intermarried, and the Israelites accepted and worshiped their pagan gods. They began a series of sinning, worshiping idols, and God would punish them, and of course they would cry out for help. So God sent a series of judges to help them. They would obey God for a while, but when each judge died, they would fall back into their old ways, idolatry. Yes, they kept losing that loving feeling toward God.
During the reign of King David and King Solomon, there was prosperity. One of the reasons, both kings loved the Lord and they served Him with gladness, and the people worshiped the Lord. But after their deaths, the kingdoms worsened under the successive kings of Israel and Judah. Despite the continuous admonitions from the prophets, the majority of the people sinned grievously.
After so many years of God warning them, the people were sent into exile in Babylon. Scripture tells us, "All the important people of the nation, including the High Priests, worshiped the heathen idols of the surrounding nations, thus polluting the Temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. Jehovah the God of their fathers sent his prophets again and again to warn them, for he had compassion on his people and on his Temple. But the people mocked these messengers of God and despised their words, scoffing at the prophets until the anger of the Lord could no longer be restrained, and there was no longer any remedy" (2 Chronicles 36:14-16).
God did not completely abandon them, leaving them in exile. After seventy years God allowed them to return home. God told Jeremiah that He was going to give the people of Israel and Judah a new contract. Listens to what He told Jeremiah, "But this is the new contract I will make with them: I will inscribe my laws upon their hearts, so that they shall want to honor me; then they shall truly be my people and I will be their God" (Jeremiah 31:33).
God promised King David that his throne will be established forever. The Lord will raised up a godly ruler from the line of David. "And David, my Servant - the Messiah - shall be their King, their only Shepherd; and they shall obey my laws and all my wishes. They shall live in the land of Israel where their fathers lived, the land I gave my servant Jacob. They and their children after them shall live there, and their grandchildren, for all generations. And my Servant David, their Messiah, shall be their Prince forever. And I will make a covenant of peace with them, an everlasting pact. I will bless them and multiply them and put my Temple among them forever, then the nations will know that I, the Lord, have chose Israel as my very own" (Ezekiel 37:24-28).
Praise God for His grace and mercy, because in the New Testament the mystery is revealed. What mystery? Jesus Christ, the Son of God. These prophecies were fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ, "For the Scriptures clearly states that the Messiah will be born of the royal line of David, in Bethlehem, the village where King David was born" (John 7:42).
What about you today? Where does your love meter falls on your love scale for your love for God? Or have you lost that loving feeling for God? The number one problem that the Bible addresses is idols and idol worshiping. That problem was in Biblical times and it is still today. When Apostle Paul went to Athens, Greece, he saw that it was full of altars and shrines for so many different deities. They even had an altar for "the unknown God."
An idol could be anything that we worship. When you value something more than God, you are committing the sin of idolatry. This is why Apostle Paul tells us, "Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry" (Colossians 3:5). Satan will do anything to keep us from worshiping God fully, because he knows that the heart is the battleground for our spiritual warfare. That is why Jesus told us to, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" (Matthew 22:37). For Scripture tells us, "We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one" (1 John 5:19). There is only one true God and He is worthy of our worship. All of it! It is through God that we find forgiveness and fulfillment. It is through God that we can feel that loving feeling for Him. Please, do not "lose that loving feeling."