UNBELIEF MAKES GOD A LIAR!

“He who does not believe God has made Him a liar, because he has not believed the testimony that God has given of His Son” (1 John 5:10).

Consider all the ugly sins listed against Israel in the wilderness; murmuring, complaining, idolatry, ingratitude, rebellion, sensuality. Yet none of these provoked God’s wrath. It was their unbelief that angered God! “And the Lord said to Moses: ‘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?’” (Numbers 14:11).

God said to Moses, “These people make a lie out of everything I have done for them! I have performed miracle after miracle and delivered them time after time. When will they ever trust and rest in Me?”

Stop for a moment and think about all the things God has done for you: He has kept you, He has answered this prayer, that prayer. He has met you in a crisis here, a crisis there. He has brought you through trials, fed you with manna from heaven, done things for you that are nothing short of miraculous.

For thirty-eight long years Israel forgot God’s Word and dismissed His miracles from their minds. And because they fell back so often into murmuring and unbelief, God said, “I will strike them with the pestilence and disinherit them” (v. 12). He told Moses, “I am giving up on My people because they will never come to the place where they trust Me!”

When Israel was on the victorious side of Jordan, Moses made a solemn declaration: “Look, the Lord your God has set the land before you; go up and possess it...Do not be terrified, or afraid of them. The Lord your God, who goes before you, He will fight for you...Yet, for all that, you did not believe the Lord your God...And the Lord heard the sound of your words, and was angry, and took an oath, saying, ‘Surely not one of these men of this evil generation shall see that good land of which I swore to give to your fathers’” (Deuteronomy 1:21, 29-30, 32, 34-35).

God magnifies His Word above His name. He means every word He says and all of these things God told Israel are the same things He has told us. I ask you: Will we not also incur His wrath if we act in unbelief?

We read His Word and hear all His promises from the pulpit but then we go to our corner and fret because we do not see Him immediately doing what we think He should do for us. When we do not let His Word anchor our souls, when we hear great and precious promises and then act as if we have been abandoned, we make God out to be a liar!