Just to catch you up: I felt like Jesus was showing me in my lectio divina of this passage, Isaiah 30:1-17 that the “rebellious children” Isaiah is chastising could just as well be believers like you and me who discover freedom in Christ and then exchange it for slavery to something else.

Remember Isaiah is all mad because some children of Israel have gone into Egypt and are trusting in horses and chariots instead of God — and Egypt for us today represents slavery right, like The Ten Commandments movie and all that.

So then, remember, the passage also contains this complaint: the rebellious children refuse to see the law of the Lord, and they ask the seers and prophets to stop talking about it because it’s making them uncomfortable.

I felt like Jesus was asking me, what law could this be? There’s only one law by His reckoning: Love! (Mark 12:30-31).

This means, for us today, the “rebellious children” are the believers who don’t want to believe that Love is everything and the only thing! The ones who insist on wrath and judgment and behavior and so forth. They’re rejecting the freedom of Christ and His one law of love, and demanding that we who just talk love, love, love all the time shut up about it!

This sort of hit home when I saw a newspaper article about Uganda’s anti-gay law. A happy Christian lawmaker was saying words to the effect “You act gay, you go to jail for life!” And there were photos of happy Christian young people waving placards thanking the president for signing this law into place.

Any one of those folks would probably tell me to shut up about it if I told them they might try to love their gay neighbors instead of being gleeful about sending them to prison. They don’t want to hear that law. They’ve put themselves in slavery to something else. A much harsher law.

Crikey.