The Grace Of God

Today during my devotions I was reading in Deuteronomy and I saw something that I don't know that I've ever seen before.

Most of the time we like to think of the God of the Old Testament as a vengeful God. A god who passes judgement and punishes the Israelites for every little thing that they do wrong.

But today I saw that even the God of the Old Testament was a God of grace.

In Deuteronomy 29, God is telling Moses all of the things He will do to them if they don't follow God's law.

But then if you read Deuteronomy 30, you see that, even then, God had a way back for His people.

All they had to do was turn back to Him.

Which also means that no matter what they did or where they went, He would always be there with them.

Think about it this way. If I were to move away from my friends and family and turn my back on them and walk away from everything that I hold dear in my life, there would be some consequences.

My family would probably not be there right when I turned back to them. They wouldn't except me back in with no questions asked. Even if they did let me back into their lives it would take them a while, and some very hard work, for them to ever trust me again.

But that is what the Israelites were doing. That is what we do still today.

We turn our backs on God and His ways and go on our own way.

Yet when we realize that we are lost without God, and turn around, we find that He never even left us.

He is standing there with open arms just waiting for us to run back to Him.

To make things even stranger, the moment we turn around and see Him there, He runs to us.

Like the Prodigal Son's father, He takes off running towards us and wraps us in His arms.

No questions are asked.

No plan of reconciliation is needed.

No trust building exercises.

He is just there to love us and take us back.