No Remedy

Here is a question for you:  Would you rather die from some dreaded, incurable disease, or from a common ailment for which you can get an over-the-counter remedy for five dollars?  If you are like me, you probably don’t want to go with either option! Isn’t it amazing, then, that people have died from both causes?  How horrible to croak over the sniffles!  Truthfully, there is no cure for a disease when the person does not accept the remedy.

II Chronicles 36 tells us about the final nail in the coffin of a nation.  They “died” from a disease for which there was a cure!  How tragic that they ignored God “till there was no remedy”!  God sent the cure “betimes . . . because he had compassion on his people.” When God’s people rejected the messengers of God with the message from God, they wrote their own tragic end.

There is no remedy for someone who rejects it; but there is always help for someone who wants it. Even wicked Manasseh found help from the Lord (II Chronicles 33:12-13).  But the Bible says of Zedekiah that he “stiffened his neck, and hardened his heart from turning unto the LORD God of Israel.” (36:13)  Here at the Ranch, we happen to have some experience with stiff necks!  If a horse is obedient, he has a soft and flexible response to the reins.  But you get a totally different response from a horse with a mind of its own!  A horse with a hardened will responds to the reins with a hard and stiff neck.

There was not a person who perished in the last chapter of II Chronicles who did not have the potential to be helped.  God sent the cure early and often, but they rejected it. God has compassion for the hardest of hearts.  There is not a person today for whom there is not help except the person who does not want it. The issue is not the size of the sin; the issue is the state of the heart.  There is no reason to suffer from a disease when God has given the cure in His Word.  The question is, will you take the remedy?