GOD DOES NOT NEED YOUR HELP

Hi Guys, Good Afternoon. Mid-Week check in! How Y'all doing? Lool. So I’ve been thinking a lot lately of help, and I came to the conclusion that if there’s such a thing as helpful help, then there’s definitely unhelpful help!  The latter is what I’m going to be talking about today in the context of us trying to help God. I hope it blesses you and helps you repent.

I was doing some studying in the book of 1 Samuel and I was somewhere in Chapter 13, reading how Saul messed up and got rejected when I realized that His crime was that He tried to help. Yup! Would you believe it? Ordinary help! Samuel on instructions from God had told Saul to wait for 7days for Him to join Him and offer sacrifices to God on behalf of the Israelites. This was important because the sacrifice had to be offered before they went into battle so they could defeat their enemies. On day 7 at the appointed time, Samuel had not arrived and to be fair to Saul, a sizeable number of the army had deserted him and more were about to leave. So, after some ill-advised panicking, Saul decided to take the bull by the horn (no pun intended) and offer the sacrifice himself to God.

To be clear, it wasn’t allowed for Kings to offer Sacrifices on behalf of the people, only Priests and in this case, the High Priest was allowed to offer that sacrifice. Immediately after Saul is done with the sacrifice, Samuel shows up and tells Saul that He has acted like a fool! He tells him that because He has disobeyed God, God will not confirm His sovereignty and has chosen another king for Himself. Back to 2018, me I’m just crouching over my bible thinking harsh much? I mean Saul’s heart was in the right place.  Afterall, he could have been proud and assumed that he didn’t need the presence of God to win the battle but he refused to go into battle without God. Yet somehow, God was not pleased with him.

Then I thought some more about that poor lad, Uzzah (2 Samuel 6:6-7) who also had his heart in the right place and tried to prevent the Ark of the Covenant from falling down by touching it and then got struck down! If I’ll be honest that one always had me shook! Then there was Father Abraham and Sarah, who believed that God would give them an heir but tried to help God do it through Hagar Sarah’s Egyptian maid, which was still an act of faith in part. I say so because if you fast forward to Romans 4:19, Paul tells us that Abraham did not consider deadness of his body. This means that our ancestor Ab was impotent, so it must have taken some measure of faith to believe that something would happen if he got together with Hagar. Yet centuries and generations later, the world is still feeling the impact of that one act of disobedience. God declared that Ishmael, the fruit of Abraham and Sarah’s impatience would be great but that He would be a wild man and that his hands would always be against his Kinsmen and theirs against him. (Ishmael is believed to be the father of a portion of the Arab race by many Christians and Muslims).

All of these people in spite of their obvious errors were still trying in their own way to help God’s word come to fruition or honour God and apparently, therein lays their mistake.

Let’s Start with Saul. As much as Saul believed that bringing God into the matter was the way to attain victory, he did what he did not out of faith but out of fear and panic. Saul was scared because not only did their enemies outnumber them in a measure that would make any warrior weep, the already outnumbered army was dwindling in number. So he panicked like most of us would, lost heart and took matters into his own hands.

In the case of Abraham and Sarah, our parents of faith got impatient and tired of the waiting like most of us do. It was not that they didn’t believe God was able to do it but when reality started reminding Sarah of what was impossible; her faith got slashed in half. While she believed that God would keep his promise to Abraham, she could not see how it would come through her anymore. So like all impatient control freak women do, she took matters into her own hands and cajoled Abraham to sleep with Hagar to have an heir. Unfortunately, that was Sarah’s promise not Gods.

Then there was Uzzah. This one took some revelation to even make sense of but you guys know how the Holy Spirit rolls, He’s always willing and ready to give revelation. So I had been studying earlier chapters of 1 Samuel, and it was 1 Samuel 6 that the Holy Spirit used to explain Uzzah’s error to me. In chapter 6, the Philistines after realizing that the Ark of the Covenant which they had captured was causing plagues amongst them, finally decided to return it to Israel. In returning the Ark, they basically put the Ark on a cart and attached it to two cows. How they decided to test to see if indeed it was the Ark with God’s presence displaying such power in their midst was if the Ark was able to go straight up the hill and down into the Israelites territory by itself and it did. V 12 says the Cows did not turn to the right or to the left and if you know anything about animals, that is the exact opposite of how cows behave.

So what the Holy Spirit told me was that asides from breaking the Law of Moses, (with regards to who was allowed to touch the Ark) If Uzzah had prevented the Ark from falling, it would have meant that the presence of God was not enough to uphold the Ark.  However innocently Uzzah intended it, It would have meant that man was coming to the rescue of God and that can never happen. As natural as Uzzah’s actions were, Uzzah like the rest of us ought to have known that something that God is present and alive in CANNOT fail or fall apart. Which brings me back to us, at different points in our walk with God; we will be tempted to step into the roles of one of these biblical characters. It could be Saul who is too scared of losing face and losing the help of men. Sarah or Abraham who trust God but want to show Him how to keep a promise that He made to them; Or Uzzah who means well but feels that he needs to add His own effort to prevent God from failing.

When that time comes, and it will, please remember that remember that He is the God who holds the whole universe in the palm of His hands and sits in Heaven with earth as His footstool. He will never need your help for His part. He is the Ancient of Days so I’m pretty sure He has the being God thing down to a T by now. All that God asks of us is that we wait on Him in perfect obedience, faithfully and till the fat lady sings. No last minute quitting and running into panic mode like Saul. Just believe that faithful is He that has promised and it shall come to pass and simply hold your peace.