Do you pray to God without fear? Do you trust in the fact that you are loved by God? Do you seek God and want to get close to Him?
These are all good things, after all we are told in Hebrews 4:16:
Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Yes, go boldly to the throne of the One who made the entire universe in our time of need! He is our father after all. Our heavenly Father who loves us. Hallelujah and Amen!
But do we realize that it was not always this way. Before Jesus, His death and His resurrection even the only chosen people of the world, the Israelites were not in the position we are today.
They did not, under any circumstance, go boldly anywhere near God’s throne. They stayed far away from the throne and recoiled in fear from the presence of God.
In Exodus, while the Israelites were in the Sinai, God came to Moses and told him that He was going to come down onto the mountain to be with His people.
Great, right, they are going to get up close and personal with perfectly loving God. Not so fast!
Since they are very normal, very sinful people and He is a very holy, very pure God the meeting of the two on their own would not result in happy, cuddly moments on the Israelite’s part. Man’s sinfulness cannot stand in the presence of God’s Holiness.
So God has the Israelites rope off the whole mountain and stay away from it, as even touching it when God was there would result in them being destroyed. When God appears in all of His greatness, there is absolutely no desire to go boldly to Him or get up close and personal, Exodus 20
18 Now all the people witnessed the thunderings, the lightning flashes, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood afar off. 19 Then they said to Moses, “You speak with us, and we will hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die.”
The Israelites were terrified and begged to no longer hear from God. He is too great and too massive to be approached by man in his own strength and own sinfulness.
It is like a germ coming into contact with a powerful antiseptic, the very nature of the antiseptic guarantees a bad outcome for the germ without any action on its part. The germ just cannot survive when the two come in contact.
Then Jesus became man and everything changed. Because He died for us and enabled us to be justified through Him that huge chasm that stood between us and God has been done away with for ever. Jesus allows us to put on His clean white garment of righteousness and go to His Father just like He is our Father as often and as pathetically human as we wish.
It would be like if Jesus appeared in the area between Mt. Sinai and the Isrealites and took each of them by the hand and walked them up to see the Father, “Abba, Father, this is your new adopted son or daughter”.
It blows your mind when you thing about it, doesn’t it?
The things that Daniel, Jeremiah, Isaiah and the other great prophets of God gave all their lives for and never saw in person we have at our fingertips every day.
Do we realize just how blessed we are? If we do, then take God up on His offer and go, go, go every day boldly to His throne and just appreciate every moment.
