Obedience

“And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.”

Hebrews 9:27-28

When we stand before the throne of God, we will be given a test to see if we can enter heaven. It won’t be a math or history test or even a Bible knowledge test; it will be a blood test. If Christ’s blood is found within us, then we will be allowed in; if His blood is not found in us we won’t be let in. it doesn’t matter how much we know or don’t know; it only matters Who we know. In Exodus 12, the angel of death passed over the houses that had blood on their door frames. It didn’t matter whose house it was or how big the house was. It only mattered if the doorframe had blood on it. It doesn’t matter how big or important we are, it only matters whether or not Jesus’ blood is found on our doorposts.

We must pass a blood test, not a scantron test.

Putting blood on the doorframes of the house would not have been a common sense thing that the Israelites figured out to do. They knew to put the blood on the doorframes because they listened to Moses listening to God. “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). We first have to listen to God before we can be obedient.If God tells us to put blood on our door frames, it won’t matter how good we are being to our neighbor. We have to do what God wants us to do, and in order to do that, we have to listen to Him first.

Obedience starts with knowing what to obey.

God has created us with a knowledge of good and evil and a desire to do good. Even in selfishness, we seek what is good for ourselves. The issue becomes that we don’t always live by an exterior standard of what is good. God tells us to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33). Spending all our time doing good things without seeking God first would be like a bunch of Isrealites cleaning their house without  putting blood on their door frames. No matter how nice their house looked, they would not have been saved because they didn’t obey what God told them to obey. The secret to saving your life from the angel of death is to listen to know what to obey and then obey whatever God has told you to do.