How might I betray God?
Jeremiah 3:20“You have been unfaithful to me, you people of Israel! You have been like a faithless wife who leaves her husband. I, the Lord, have spoken.”
The opposite of betrayal is loyalty. Anyone who has become a Christian has pledged loyalty to God—Father, Son (Jesus Christ), and Holy Spirit. We are disloyal to God when we allow something else to become more important than him, or when we look to something or someone else to help us without even acknowledging God or asking for his help first.
Romans 7:21-23I have discovered this principle of life—that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. I love God’s law with all my heart. But there is another power within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me.
Despite all his theological training and his success in carrying the gospel all over the world, the apostle Paul never lost sight of his own flawed humanity. He was still capable of sin. Sin always betrays God. We see in Paul’s description of his own sin that our sinful human nature causes us to betray God even when we don’t want to. Our sin also betrays us, lying to us that we can get away with it or that it will actually make our life better. As a human race, we are infected with unfaithfulness. Unless we acknowledge that we are prone to wander, we will never honestly repent or ask God to help us do better.
Nehemiah 9:26Despite all this, they were disobedient and rebelled against you. They turned their backs on your Law, they killed your prophets who warned them to return to you, and they committed terrible blasphemies.
Like the people of Jerusalem in Nehemiah 9, we can benefit from reflecting on the past from time to time. Honesty about the past can be painful; our former disobedience to God was a betrayal of him. And when we betray others who are representing God in our lives (as the Israelites did who turned on and killed God’s prophets), this action is also a betrayal of God (see Acts 9:4).
Numbers 5:6“Give the following instructions to the people of Israel: If any of the people—men or women—betray the Lord by doing wrong to another person, they are guilty.”
Harming others is the exact opposite of keeping the second part of the great commandment: to love our neighbors as ourselves. Doing wrong to another person is also an act of betrayal to God, because we are called to do what is right toward all people created in God’s image—and that’s everyone!
2 Timothy 2:11-13This is a trustworthy saying: If we die with him, we will also live with him. If we endure hardship, we will reign with him. If we deny him, he will deny us. If we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny who he is.
This passage seems to indicate that there are two levels of betrayal: denial and unfaithfulness. The first describes a settled rejection of God; the second, a momentary and regrettable failure. The first seals our fate, but the second may be reversed by God’s own faithfulness. God knows how prone we are to fail in keeping our promises, yet still he is utterly dependable.
