On the run

I love crime-everything. Crime movies, crime series, crime fiction, you name it. I guess it’s the police blood in me. My all time favourites include The Italian Job, Takers, Rookie Blue, The Mentalist, NCIS-anything, Flashpoint, and any work by Michael Connelly. One thing you’ll find in almost all of these is one rule: the law always wins, no matter how good the criminal is, no matter how far or how long they run; the law will eventually catch up with them. I found it to be the same with God.

It is plain silly to run away from an omnipresent and omniscient God like ours, but that doesn’t stop us from attempting it. Ask Jonah. The Bible puts it plainly that the guy was running away from God and I believe that some of us are Jonahs' on the run in some or other area of our lives. Jonah ran away in the area of an assignment, you and I might be running in another area; consciously disobeying God wanting to see how far we’ll get before He catches up with us. Well, another thing the Bible means when it says He is Alpha and Omega is that He always wins, God always has the last say; it will end His way if you are His.

I’m obsessed with the 139th Psalm these days cause I relate so much with the frustration of the writer.
“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” (verse 7)
And there’s only one thing that makes us want to hide from God; sin. Remember Adam? When he realized his nakedness after he had sinned, he hid from God. When we sin against God the last thing we want is to be in His presence where His Spirit will convict us. So we bunk church, that’s where His presence is right? Guess what? Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit; He lives in you, there’s no running from what is inside of you.

This writer cries and complains that there’s nowhere he can run, be it in the sky or underground, or beyond the sea. My favourite verses are 11 and 12:
“If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,’ even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day; for darkness is as light to you.”
Tell me how you run away from that? From a God who won’t give up on you, a God who won’t let go? A God who’ll go against natural laws which He set just to keep His eyes on you. Verse 10 says His hand guides even as I run, His right hand holds me fast wherever I go. All this made me ask like the Psalmist in chapter 8: “what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?”
The obvious answer is that man is the very likeness and image of God, but that in itself is an unfathomable mystery. I don’t think we can fully understand why God pursues us so much, why He remains faithful when we are faithless, why He renews His mercies every morning just so He can commune with us. All I know is that there is no place too far for Him to reach, no darkness too dark for Him to illuminate, no place I can run where He cannot find me. So never allow that Liar to tell you that you're too lost to be found, that you're too far in to turn back now, remind yourself of the prodigal son who was so far in he dined with pigs.

My favourite phrase in this Psalm is the last two sentences of verse 18. I love the picture it paints. That after all my running and all my rebellion, I will awake, I’ll come to my senses, and when I do, He’ll still be with me.