Have you ever heard the statement that no matter how many times you flip a coin, and no matter how many times it comes up heads or tails, the odds of which side comes up is always 50%?
Well, that may be true in a scientific environment, but in the real world, the odds can be different.
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If someone has the same coin, and practices always starting with the same side facing up, then they can learn to flip it in such a manner that it will almost always come up the way they want it to.
So what? What does this have to do with God or Messiah, or anything spiritual?
I’m glad you asked.
We all have to make decisions in life, and more often than we probably want to admit, these decisions will have a spiritual side to them. It is like the image of someone trying to decide which to do, with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, fighting it out.
In the Bible, we read how so many important decisions were made using the Urim and Thummim, or by throwing lots, and allowing God to decide. But we don’t have those things here today, so we might just flip a coin and allow for that to be the modern form of God making our decision for us.
And there’s the problem: we can have a lot of control over how it lands on our hand. This allows us to fool ourselves into thinking it is God’s choice, when it was really what we wanted, all along.
And it can fool others, too!
So, my point is that we shouldn’t depend on flipping a coin, but rather on what God says in the Torah. More often than not, the answer will probably be what we know, in our hearts, we should do, but are hoping we can find some viable excuse for not having to do it.
I often point out in my messages that whatever feels wrong to our nature is probably right with God, and vice-versa. We are exposed to the world; and yes, Shaul (Paul) said that we are in the world but not of it (Colossians 3), but that is not as easy to live as it is to say.
If you work in a fish market all day, you might hate to eat fish, but you will smell like fish when you come home. If you are a shepherd, you may be careful when walking among the sheep, but no matter how careful you are, your shoes will not be clean by the end of the day.
The same is true with obedience: wanting to faithfully do as we know we should according to righteousness is easy, but very hard to actually accomplish. And if we need to flip a coin, the odds are very strong that we might just add a little “English” to that flip to make it come out the way our flesh wants it to, without even realizing what we are doing.
Therefore, read the Bible, and I mean the ENTIRE Bible- Genesis through Revelation- and get to know what God says he wants us to do (meaning not what some religion says), which boils down to how to worship him and how to treat each other. That way, when a coin flip situation comes up, you won’t have to flip it because you will already know the answer.
But here is the hard part… knowing the answer is actually pretty easy, but doing what you know you should do is often very hard. This is where faith and spiritual (as well as emotional) maturity are needed to strengthen you to do what goes against your human nature.
Call on the Ruach haKodesh (Holy Spirit) to guide and strengthen you during those tough times, because what is impossibly hard for a human to do, is remarkably easy for God to do.
That’s it for today, so l’hitraot and Baruch haShem!
