2 Chronicles 25:8, “The Lord has the power to help you or trip you up.” Do you want God to help you? Well, we must ask, what warrants God’s help? If you feel God has been tripping you up instead, we must also ask, what warrants God’s resistance?
It’s actually quite simple and there’s no need to make it mysterious or complicated. Your obedience to God warrants his help. Your disobedience to God warrants God’s resistance. When you’re obedient, he will help you in divine and marvelous ways. When you are disobedient, he will trip you up at every corner and absolutely nothing will seem to work.
There are extreme perks to obedience. When you seek to follow and obey God, you are NOT suddenly more loved or more righteous. You are not earning salvation. Ephesians 2:9, “Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.” This is all a gift from God which not a single one of us could ever be good enough to earn. However, there is something undeniable that happens when you seek to follow and obey God, and here it is: You’re on a path God can bless.
Obedience aligns your steps going in the direction of God’s blessings. Obedience puts you on the path of unspeakable goodness. God WANTS to bless you. God wants to help you. Obedience aligns you with the outpouring of his desired blessings and divine help.
Disobedience quite simply gets you off track. And when you’re off track, you miss what God has for you. Blessings never jump off track and go chasing you down dark alleys. God’s blessings are on the path of his intended will, and if you’re straying off the path, those blessings simply never collide with you.
In your disobedience and pursuit of your own way, God absolutely WILL trip you up. Why? Because he loves you too much to sit back and watch you continue down a path without his blessings. Here’s what we miss: God trips us because he loves us. He sees where we’re heading and he knows the blessings we are forfeiting, so he sticks his holy foot out and trips us up.
THANK YOU, LORD!
Right now, think of the times when you’ve been heading in the wrong direction, making the wrong plans with the wrong people, and suddenly absolutely nothing would work for you. You fell on your face. Faceplants are a sweet, sweet gift of God. That’s our moment of forced pause. That’s our opportunity for redirection. If God didn’t love you, he would have let you keep running right into that, but instead his holy foot tripped you.
Looking back we see it. How many times in our moments of failure did we say, “God, why me?” but we failed to hear his answer of, “Because, my girl, I love you too much to let you continue on this path. I have so much better for you.”
Isn’t God sweet? It’s awesome when God blesses us, but it’s life changing when God stops us.
If you have a loved one running full steam ahead on the wrong path, maybe a good prayer would be, “Father, in your loving grace and mercy, would you place your holy foot on their path and allow them to trip? And when they trip, would you catch them and lovingly redirect them?”
That’s what he’s done for you, my sister. He’s tripped you, he’s caught you and he’s redirected you. Now, as you walk the path of his will, he can help you in supernatural ways because his blessings are per-aligned all along the way for you!
Now, let’s dig deeper into this scripture. 2 Chronicles 25:8 says, “God has the power to help you or trip you up”, but what is the context? Who is receiving this warning and what can we learn from it?
King Amaziah was the ruler of Judah. Judah is the land of south Jerusalem. There have been a series of good kings and bad kings.