Have you ever thought about sin? I mean really thought about what the Bible says about it, what God thinks of it or even why we do it? The easy answer would be sure I think about it and I try not to do it. Or maybe we think about sin and how others tend to be worse off in sin then we are. Of course, upon reconsideration of that we realize that all sin is equally abhorrent to God. We know that God’s Word is clear, “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Why, you might ask, am I writing a blog post on sin? My simple answer is that sin is clearly spoken about in the Bible and we are all sinners. My focus in this blog is actually on the phrase we find in the Bible which is, “high places.”
A reading of just two chapters in God’s Word, 2 Kings 14 and 2 Kings 15 reveals to us an issue with the “high places.” The most comfortable way to read of these “high places” is to wonder why these Old Testament kings had so much trouble with them. That is a dangerous spot to be, because we have our own “high places” to deal with. So again, the question is not only why did the Old Testament kings and people have trouble with “high places,” but do we have trouble with these “high places” mentioned in the Bible? Thankfully, by the grace of God, we can be forgiven for our sins and we can learn from the study and prayer of and in God’s Word what our “high places” are.
The “high places” as written about in the Bible were places at which worship, by sacrifice or offerings were made to a real or false deity. We therefore understand that when the Bible speaks of the kings performing evil in the sight of the Lord by refusing to destroy the “high places,” we can take the “high places” to represent idolatry and the worship of false gods in our lives. The approximately seventy mentions of “high places” in the Bible were a reference to sinful behavior, pagan shrines, and worship of false gods.
In my study of 2 Kings I had posed a question in my personal writing as to why these “high places” seemed so hard for the kings to destroy? I even noted the fact that the following of the Lord is easy, so why is departing from sin so hard? At this point it becomes much harder to continue this blog without addressing our own sin. I have arrived at the spot in which I need to decide if sin is easier then following Christ. What should we do at this point? How about a prayer of confession such as, “Lord I deserve to be blotted out, but by Your grace I am saved and even when I was a sinner away from You, Your mercy protected me. Thank you, Lord, for being in the high place for me and never forgetting me.”
Sin is not a subject that we like to talk about, but we do. Let us all go before God, so we know what we have placed in the “high places” that keep us from fully knowing His love and peace.