Then the land shall enjoy its Sabbaths as long as it lies desolate, while you are in your enemies’ land; then the land shall rest, and enjoy its Sabbaths. As long as it lies desolate it shall have rest, the rest that it did not have on your Sabbaths when you were dwelling in it. Leviticus 26:34-35
In my drug addiction, God repeatedly asked that I follow him, doing whatever it took to abandon my will for his. Go to treatment. Get help. Change your life. The problem was that doing all those things would have been tremendously disruptive to my life. Going to treatment would have meant confessing to my wife and being gone from my job. I wasn’t willing to tell my wife or my employer, and I certainly couldn’t just not work for a month. I had bills to pay. I had a lot of reasons not to go to treatment, which were just a lot of excuses not to obey God. So, God removed all those obstacles. Eventually, I had to tell my wife, because I lost my job and the state said I had to go to treatment. All my excuses painfully evaporated, God got his way, and I did what I should have done in the first place. The lesson is that when God asks me to do something, it’s far easier if I just obey immediately.
This is the lesson of today’s passage. In it, God instructed his people to set aside every seventh year – a Sabbath year – not planting a crop, to let their fields rest for that year. If they obeyed, he promised that the sixth year’s crop would be bountiful enough to carry them through. Today’s passage is the reciprocal warning – If they didn’t set aside the seventh year, then God would take the land from them. If they refused to obey God, giving the land a year of rest, God would allow their enemies to remove them from the land so that the land would get its rest. The lesson for them was the same as my lesson. When God asks for something, it’s far easier to simply obey immediately.
Often, God gives us a chance to do what’s right. Stop looking at porn. Don’t cheat on your taxes. Get sober. We, however, have a lot of reasons why we’re not ready to change. God then, allows us to suffer the consequences of our self-destructive behavior, giving us no choice but to change. This is a far more painful path than if we’d simply obeyed in the first place.
I’m still not great at it, but I’m getting better. When God asks me to do something, I’m learning to simply say yes, even when it’s inconvenient because I’ve found the consequences of disobedience to be far less convenient.