Better to Trust than to Fight

“Or let him take hold of my strength, [that] he may make peace with me; [and] he shall make peace with me.” (Isa 27:5 AV)

Verse four is revealing.  The LORD says that fury is not in Him.  Wrath, anger, and indignation, yes.  Revenge; most certainly.  But not fury.  Fury is a purely emotional, unrestrained, and unprincipled exercise of repercussions on others who have inflicted injury or offense.  God is not unprincipled.  He is methodical, measured, and appropriate.  Verse four is in response to those who hate Him, placing obstacles in His way intended to cause Him harm.  Really?  Almighty God?  Then we have this verse as an offer of alternate reaction.  Instead of fighting the omnipotence of God, why not come to trust in it?  I have in mind a toddler who throws a temper tantrum by striking his parent.  No actual damage is done and Dad or Mom will win the battle.  Better to trust the strength that seeks to lead you than fight against it!

Fighting a force greater than oneself is not wise.  There is always injury that follows.  It is better to submit to a just force than to risk losing everything just to prove a point.  I find an alarming trend in today’s generation.  They are rejecting God because they see God as unjust.  Their argument is sound to where it gives mankind no other reasonable choice.  God created you and I to know Him and love Him by obedience and faith.  If we refuse, we will be tormented in hell for all eternity.  The short-sighted rebel will see this choice as unjust.  If God knows all things and knows the sinner wants nothing to do with Him, why create him?  He creates only to turn around and destroy.  If the object He creates doesn’t respond to His will, it is destroyed.  So the faulty reasoning is that God is unjust if He knows this and does it, anyway.  The rebel will respond by a choice of hell over surrender to the God who created him.  What will that prove?  So, you go off into hell falsely thinking God is unjust and suffer an eternity of torment for what?  To prove you were right?  Talk about stupid!

Yet, this behavior is not limited to the rebel.  The child of God can do this, too.  We can fight God on things only to discover no matter how hard we fight Him, he always wins.  It reminds me of my earthly father.  He was a four-D chess player.  He saw the board in ways his children could not.  If we tried to counter him, it always ended in a checkmate.  He knew far more than we what we would do and what we would choose to do.  He put in place barriers from poor decisions that we didn’t even know were there until we came up against them.  The ultimate argument of a rebellious adolescent is when they blurt out, “I hate you, Dad.”  To which he would reply, “that is why I had eleven of you.  I got a back-up plan.”  There was no winning the battle with Dad.  Better to trust him than to fight him.  The same is true of the LORD.  Better to trust than to fight.