Rejection Is a Two-Way Street

 Rejection Is a Two-Way Street As children, most of us experienced rejection. For whatever reason, we felt no one cared for us. We perceived a wrongness from the way others—friends, teachers, cousins, even parents—treated us. We did not know why certain people who were onceclose were giving us the cold shoulder. We just felt slighted and rejected. Even as adults, we sometimes repeat the experience from a boss or coworkers. It is far worse when we feel it at home from our children or spouse. Depending on how sensitive we are, it may be something minor, like a kid turning away because wehave bad breath. Some people may avoid us because of our dress or an off-putting habit. On the other hand, maybe we did something someone took as a personal offense, and now he ignores us. Everyone must navigate periods of rejection. They are usually temporary and resolve when we figure out the cause and fix it. It is just a part of life among humans. But God has almost constantly felt rejection for the length of man's history on earth. Year after year, humanity has rejected Him, His words, His laws and statutes, His promises, and His attempts to get our attention. What does God have to say about this? Rejection can be a mere refusal, a gentle rebuff, an active spurning, or even an outright driving away of a person or idea. God has suffered all of these and more. In His Word, we find He experiences intense feelings when people reject Him.Because He created us in His image, we can understand those emotions. Numbers 14 contains an example of this. After the twelve spies return after spying out the land, the children of Israel again grumble. Aroused to anger, they decide to stone Moses and Aaron, but God intercedes to stop them. God asks Moses in verse 11: "How long will these people reject Me? And how long will they not believe Me, with all the signs which I have performed among them?" He became frustrated and upset because theyconstantly murmured and did their own thing, rejecting His efforts to help them. God proposes, "I will strike them with the pestilence and disinherit them, and I will make of you a nation greater and mightier than they" (verse 12). His anger was so fiercethat He wanted to destroy them! Moses reminds God about His mercy, longsuffering, and forgiveness, and God pardons them in verse 20. He may not have destroyed them, but He did not let their rejection and rebellion go unpunished! He tells them in verse 34, "According to the number of the days in which you spied out theland, forty days, for each day you shall bear your guilt one year, namely forty years, and you shall know My rejection." Their sentence was to be in kind: God rejected them! Their descendants continued to reject God. In the days of Samuel, they decide they want to be like other nations and have a man as their king, not God. He replies in I Samuel 8:7-8: And the LORD said to Samuel, "Heed the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not reign over them. According to all the works which they have done since the day that I brought them up out of Egypt, even to this day—with which they have forsaken Me and served other gods—so they are doing to you also." (Emphasis ours throughout.) Scripture mentions their rejection of God frequently. He says through Asaph in Psalm 81:10-11: "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt; open your mouth wide, and I will fill it. But My people would not heed My voice, and Israel would have none of Me." Jesusremarks to the Pharisees in Mark 7:6-7, 9 that not much had changed in the intervening thousand years: "Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written: ‘This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me. And in vain they worship Me, teaching as doctrinesthe commandments of men.' . . . All too well you reject the commandment of God, that you may keep your tradition." Ancient Israel's attitude is still prevalent among their descendants, who also reject His commandments. Instead of accepting the truth of His Word, they promote fables and lies. They do whatever they please, despite doing significant harm toothers and themselves. When God says to punish for sin, they parade it. When God tells them to be merciful, they destroy. On every side, men reject God and His ways. When their Creator, the God of the Old Testament, came to earth in the flesh, they rejected Him outright. As John writes, "He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him" (John1:11). Even the citizens of Nazareth, His hometown, "were offended at Him. But Jesus said to them, ‘A prophet is not without honor except in his own country and in his own house.' Now He did not do many mighty works there because of their unbelief" (Matthew13:57-58; see 8:34; Luke 17:25). The Jewish authorities rejected Jesus to the point of delivering Him to the Romans for execution (Matthew27:1-2; Mark 15:1-15; Luke 23:1-2, 13-25; John 18:28-32). Today, many supposedly Christian churches and denominations may not reject Him outright, but they discard much of what He taught, teaching about the Man and only the parts of Scripture they believe. This generation abuses and contorts Jesus' words to promote their own agendas. Some even preach that a person can sin all he wants, and God is obliged to forgive him if he confesses. Such teaching perverts God's grace and forgiveness, fullyembracing His mercy but rejecting His insistence that one must cease sinning through deep repentance and pursuing holiness. People cannot see that they are paying severe penalties for their rejection of God and His ways. They fail to recognize sin as the cause of crime, war, disease, famine, and frankly, all the ills of society. As the apostle Paul writes, "The wagesof sin is death" (Romans6:23). The same apostle warns in Galatians 6:7-8: "Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. For he who sows to his flesh will of the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the Spirit will of the Spirit reap everlasting life." As happened in Israel's history, so it will happen on a humanity-wide scale: As human beings reject God, so He will reject them. As the psalmist writes in Psalm 119:118, "You reject all those who stray from Your statutes." Jesus declares, "He who rejects Me, and does not receive My words, has that which judges him—the word that I have spoken will judge him in the last day" (John12:48). The author of Hebrews urges us to be careful and not reject God through neglect: Pursue peace with all people, and holiness, without which no one will see the Lord: looking carefully lest anyone fall short of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up cause trouble, and by this many become defiled; lest there be any fornicatoror profane person like Esau, who for one morsel of food sold his birthright. For you know that afterward, when he wanted to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no place for repentance, though he sought it diligently with tears (Hebrews12:14-17). As a final warning, he writes in verses 25 and 29, "See that you do not refuse Him who speaks. For if they did not escape who refused Him who spoke on earth, much more shall we not escape if we turn away from Him who speaks from heaven. . .. For our God is a consuming fire." This disobedient and immoral society's days are numbered. God will soon reject this sinful world in wrath, and it will be too late to escape judgment. Humanity must learn the hard and expensive lesson that, instead of rejecting God, it shouldembrace Him. People will eventually learn because God wants all men to come to repentance (IIPeter 3:9), and He will not stop working to that effect until most of humanity has returned to Him. - Gary Montgomery