Signpost (Photo credit: Peter Nijenhuis)

Psalm 25:4-8 “Show me the right path, O Lord;  point out the road for me to follow. Lead me by your truth and teach me,  for you are the God who saves me.  All day long I put my hope in you. Remember, O Lord, your compassion and unfailing love, which you have shown from long ages past. Do not remember the rebellious sins of my youth.  Remember me in the light of your unfailing love,  for you are merciful, O Lord.  The Lord is good and does what is right;  he shows the proper path to those who go astray.”

Today more of a rambling… hoping this makes sense.So i have this great visual in my head of this whole every command  of God actually being blessing.  The Word describes following God as walking on a path, neither veering to the left or the right.  I am finding that in life, there are these constant crossroads that we hit where a decision and a course of action must take place.

If you start by picturing a sign post at any intersection with 2 to x number of signs and arrows pointing in various directions, you might be picturing what I am seeing.  Here is the great part, wherever you are, if you look to the Word you will find the sign post lovingly and left specifically to guide you through the very moment you find yourself in.   On each sign, the various options laid out in those verses can be found.   There is always at least one that point clearly and decisively to God’s will, way and plan, by appearances, it may look like the least appealing, most difficult road to travel.  It reads, “to blessings/the Way”.  The remainder read “to curses” and of course there is always the third option, to leave all paths and forge your own, which always lands you of course, in the wilderness, deep forest etc…   When you zoom out of this and look at it from above, you will see the most wonderful and complex map.   Every point on that map has a signpost (a decision point) that can take you from wherever you are, back to being on “the way”.   But you can also clearly see that if you step off “the way” to the left or the right even a little, you would find yourself immediately off the path.

Signpost in the Yard of the Domeier Grocery Store, a Neighborhood Business, on South Minnesota Street in New Ulm Minnesota… (Photo credit: The U.S. National Archives)

Here is the point, I believe that God left us His Word as a love letter but also to give us clear directions how to stay on His path.   Pre-sin, the road was relatively clear to see, but by very definition, sin blinds us, snares us, lays pitfalls and snares at our feet endlessly and lures us off the right path onto other paths that look good but end in death.  As we can’t “see” this path with our senses, He has provided for us by leaving clear directions for every possible scenario we can find ourselves in.   Our human reasoning and temptation comes along regularly to try to lure us off the path.   How much harder it becomes to see the right path as each additional alternative path clouds are vision and tempts us to take another way.  Needless to say, the more complicated the situation, the more desperately we need to search God’s Word to find the right way.  It isn’t that the signposts aren’t there and easy enough to see and understand, it simply that we continually let our senses and reasonings convince us that another “way” would be better, more efficient, more successful etc.    Oh that we would completely trust the clearly laid out path the Lord has left for us.