Turn Back From Your Evil Ways
In Ezekiel 33:11 we read: "Say to them, As I live! declares the
LORD GOD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that the
wicked turn from his way and live. Turn back, turn back from your evil ways!
Why then will you die, O house of Israel?
God was instructing Ezekiel to tell the people to start serving the Lord God
once again. They had failed to serve Him for many generations. We see it in
the history of Israel as recorded in the pages of the Old Testament that it
did not take long for another generation to come along that did not know the
Lord.. The New Testament has the writers warning us to learn from those of the
old days and not repeat their sins. The warnings given to the people of the
Old Testament ring out just as true today as back then. God does not change
and God demands obedience to His commandments. That is why the Ecclesiastes
writer tells us that the whole duty of man is to "Fear God, and
keep His commandments".
Perhaps we are to blame for the shortcomings of man today. In many ways we have
changed the meaning of words that God used into something more acceptable to
our culture. The very thought of evil now seems to be limited to the worst of
the worst and those who are just downright bad people. We fail to consider that
the word "evil" simply means polluted or defiled. So to fail to do
God's commands is considered as evil by God, yet we just consider it a shortcoming.
Even if we do most of the commands of God, we consider it at least an effort
to please Him, when God considers that we do not keep ALL His commands as sinful
behavior.
Thus our evil ways that God wants us to turn away from can be described in the
term: "Stop the Sin in your life". Sin is transgression of
law (1 John 3:4); in this case, it is transgression of God's laws that
bring about the penalty of death that everyone is guilty of. "All
have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23)
and "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23).
Even though we know that we do not keep all of God's commands, we still do not
think of ourselves as evil. We have assigned that term to the most wicked, vile,
ungodly, and abominable people of the earth, and we compare ourselves to them
so that we feel like angels and certainly better than those awful people. This
helps us to feel good about ourselves, and therein lies the danger. We fail
to perceive the shortcomings in ourselves when we are so quick to point out
the evil in others.
We have failed to see our own faults and worse, we have failed to warn others
about their sins and the death, destruction and punishment that awaits them
if they do not turn to God for salvation. We have no problem seeing that sin
is taking over our culture and society where we live. We are bombarded by sinful
things all the day, every day. We need to be faithful servants of God and serve
Him with our whole hearts. So here is the point. If a person has sin in their
life, God considers them evil. So we need to stop putting a limit on the meaning
of evil as applying to the worst of humanity. We must begin in our own house
and clean it up, and then we can help lead others to the right way that God
wants them to be living in. We have a duty to God to help people out of their
evil ways and we need to turn from our evil ways also.
By Carey Scott
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