These past few months, I have been struggling! Struggling to find my path, my place, my purpose, my joy. It has felt like doors slamming shut all around me, but no doors were opening. I felt like that Christian cliché, “When God closes one door, he opens another”, except every door was slamming shut 100 times over, and I couldn’t find the open doors anywhere. Each aspect of my life was taking hits and it felt like I was being closed in. As many of you know, my life and decisions are centered around my faith. I don’t decide things from a worldly perspective, but from a place of seeking God’s will. I try to fit my decisions into what I find Biblically and what I “hear” through prayer. During this time, all of this felt like it was failing me. My fire for Bible study felt like the ashes after the fire goes out. My ability to pray and talk to God felt like I was attempting to talk to a wall. My heart felt cold and empty. How could this be! Just a few months ago I was feeling more connected to the Lord then I had ever felt before. I was breathing him and speaking him. I felt such great peace and no fear at all! What changed??
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to wake up and pull out my Bible. When I am feeling deeply motivated or attempting to get to a place of feeling deeply motivated, I read the Life-Application Study Bible. The information in it has brought such enlightenment into my Bible experience and helped me dig deeper into the word. I’ll be honest, I don’t know if I had left the Bible on the verse or if divine interjection pulled me to it, but my app opened to Revelations 9. Revelations 9 is about the fifth trumpet and the first terror. It’s about the locusts coming up from the bottomless pit to torture and bring pain on anyone without the seal of God on their forehead. As I was reading the passage, I realized that these locusts weren’t “real” locusts, in the essence that they were not physical things, but spiritual apparitions and their stings were pokes and prods focused on the sinful areas of their victims lives. The torment would feel like giant stings of pain, guilt, shame, and would bring the victim to a point of feeling like the only relief is death. This is worse than a “bug bite”. It makes this so much worse understanding that, but it also makes it so much better! Why would God allow this to happen to someone? Why would he want this kind of torment and pain? Because he loves us that much! What? How is that? Let me break it down for you. God told these locust demons “not to harm the grass or plants or trees, but only the people who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads” (Revelations 9:4). SO, torment those that had not given up their sins and turned to him fully or at all.
As a parent, I HATE punishing my kids. I really do! It hurts me so bad, but I know that when the action is egregious enough, it requires a consequence that is memorable and helps them realize they need to turn away from the action so they can have a much better life. The Bible is clear, 1) we all have free will to choose our path; 2) We can choose God/Jesus and have eternal life; 3) we can NOT choose God/Jesus and will have to face the consequence of eternal darkness. On this earth, (especially right now) to turn away from God/Jesus seems so much better. Sin seems to make so much sense over constantly keeping ourselves away from it, but the consequence…
As a parent, I know the consequence for my kid’s actions. All I want is for them to choose NOT to break rules or face punishment. I will do whatever it takes to help them turn down the path that brings them peace and away from pain. If I feel this, how much more does God feel this. He wants all of us back with Him. He wants to be with each of us for eternity and enjoy our presence. He has given ample warnings and provided so many ways to avoid punishment, but some of us are still trying to make our own rules and live away from him.
What does all this have to do with locust demons and even before this, my closed doors? God can’t heal us and bring us closer to him when we are blinded by the comfort the devil has surrounded us with. God must break our comfortable places for us to see the truth. He will bring the locusts to bring his children to their knees in hopes that they will finally turn to him for the answers and the healing. He brought closed doors without openings, to clear out the comfort and bring me to a place I had to turn to him for answers. He loves us so much that he will do anything to bring us back to him, but he knows that sometimes true love takes letting someone walk through pain to find the purpose on the other side. When we think of this world through a spiritual lens, complicated experiences can become much easier. God wants truth and for each of us to find a complete life. The devil wants us to be tormented, in anguish, and living in blindness to truth. The devil likes to make us super comfortable, so we think everything is good and we don’t want to leave our cozy spaces. He uses our comfort to keep us blind to truth. The more comfortable we get the easier it is to slide some more sins into our minds. God knows this and wants to turn things upside down to break off the blinders and bring us back to truth. God loves us so much, that as a loving “parent” he will put something on us that hurts him in hopes that we will come back to him. As I write this, I can almost hear the skeptics saying that is sounds like God is masochistic. I even feel the prompting of my mind telling me “don’t put this out there, it stupid, no one will read it”, but as a parent, I can tell you that this really is love. Helping our children find the right path through consequences, sometimes induced by us, is painful and hard, but the result is absolutely joyous and wonderful. Gods final punishments are going to hurt, him and his children, but if he can get them to turn to him, the results will be joyous and wonderful!
Mind Skipping 