The Faithful King:
(Download this study here.)
Rejected
By: Peter Bales
No. 4, November 19, 2023
Follow or Reject?
God ultimately has a plan and he uses our free will to fulfill it. You can work with him and cooperate. Or he’ll do it without you- as we see with the Israelites who weren’t ready to go to the promised land, but God ultimately God led his people there anyway.
God allows us to choose his ways or not. If we choose our own ways, that’s called sin. However, even when we sin and rebel against God, he is faithful.
Why would God allow evil and let people sin?
The answer is love.
For love to be genuine, you must have a choice not to love. If we were forced to be obedient, it’s not really love. God put Adam and Eve in this amazing garden with everything they needed to thrive, including intimacy with him. And he also placed one bad choice there. One bad choice. But this one bad choice means that they could have genuine love.
This one bad choice has led to lots of bad choices of people throughout history.
- Why do you think God let’s us make bad choices?
- How do you balance God’s goodness with allowing us to choose evil?
READ 1 Sam 8: 1-21.
God had called the Israelites out. To be his Chosen people.
Yet they wanted to be like other nations.
- Why do you think that the Israelites wanted a human king?
- How did God handle this rejection?
Are we like that?
Following God is hard sometimes. Sometimes it feels like we’re going against the flow. And the current is strong!
Have you ever looked at the world and thought- that’s not so bad? They seem to be doing okay. It would be a lot easier to just do what everybody else is doing! I would suggest we are faced with the same situation that the Israelites were in. Every day we get to choose which king we will follow.
- How are we like the Israelites in the story?
- Why would we choose another king when we know all the consequences that come along with that choice?
Good News
Rejecting God is sin. The good news is that God is faithful through it all. He was working behind the scenes to reconcile mankind to himself.
READ Romans 5:6-10.
When we were ungodly. When we were still sinners.
When we were rejecting God. - Christ died for us.
- How is sin like rejecting God?
- Did God wait on us to come to him before he acted? What do those verses tell us about it?
- What can we do to help us not reject God in the future?
GO DEEPER> Read 1 John 1:9. Take some time to confess your sins to God.