What does it take for people to wander through the wilderness for 40 years seeing God work all kinds of miracles and still in the end rebel against Him? Unbelief. That’s what this passage teaches.

It tells us that no matter how great the miracles that we witness, no matter how great God’s provision is for us, that we have in us a bent toward sin that will take us captive if we let our hearts be hardened by sin. Just as many of the Israelites witnessed God’s continual mercies and still hardened their heats toward him, so do many of us.

Many of us have seen God completely change the lives of people around us, replacing the agony of their lives with the joy of Christ. We have seen Him heal marriages and cure the incurable. We have seen Him change communities and restore families. And yet, we are content to sit on the sidelines and watch Him work in others and never submit our lives to Him and ask Him to do those things in us.

So we wander. Enjoying God’s provision, but grumbling about the way that it differs from what we want or the way we think it should be. And we go after the things that He has warned us to flee from. But because of our unbelief in His sufficiency we replace Him, little bits at a time, with things that feel good and make us feel happy for the moment.

And as we give ourselves to those things our hearts grow harder and harder toward God, and many of us become angry at God because He doesn’t give us the things we want or do for us the things we require. 

But in the end, the only thing that we needed was Him.

It is our unbelief, and the unbelief of others around us, that drives us from Him. And we are admonished to “exhort one another every day… that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin (v13).” 

May we engage each other, and teach each other of the gretness of God so that our unbelief may not harden our hearts toward Him.

I hate struggling with sin. I wish I could just turn my sin off like a light switch, but the truth is, I can’t. And no matter how strongly I believe that I have mastered my sin, it lies behind the well built facade that I live out and begs for attention.

It is sometimes just as difficult to watch others struggle with, or in some cases surrender to, their sin.  It is hard to watch someone destroy all that God has built in and around them for fleeting moment of happiness.

In my better moments I want to strangle the version of me that is enslaved to sin.  I just want to yell at him, “look at all of the blessings that you have, don’t you get it?  You have everything you need and most things you want, but your ridiculous actions are robbing you of the joy that those blessings bring.  And for what? Being a little numb to the world for a few minutes? You are a joke, man.” But the shame of it is that, while living in my sin, I cannot see the destructive power of it. In those moments I don’t recognize the devastating consequences of my actions.

I see this in others too. I see their blindness to the light. And I just want to shake them and say “wake up, God has better plans for you.”

It is hard to watch.

I feel like Trinity from the Matrix. She tells Neo “You’ve been down there, Neo. You already know that road. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that’s not where you want to be.”

But no matter what I do, or how passionately I plead, it is still their choice. And sometimes all you can do is watch, pray, and wait for God’s humbling.

Oh, how I long for that day that God will flip that switch and give me a new body that is not broken under the weight of sin and is not bent toward anything but Godliness.  And how I long for that to be true in the lives of all of those I love.