Actively Ask for God’s Direction
How often has God stood by ready, willing and able to help us, but we never turned to Him or gave Him an opportunity to intervene and bring glory to Himself through our crisis? As a result, we have often forfeited peace and struggled under the load of unnecessary burdens—all because we did not inquire of the Lord. What’s worse, an opportunity to bring glory to God was lost.
What is so amazing is that Asa makes the very same mistake again only three verses later: “In the thirty-ninth year of his reign Asa was diseased in his feet—until his disease became very severe; yet in his disease he did not seek the Lord, but relied on the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers, dying in the forty-first year of his reign” (2 Chronicles 16:12–13 AMP).
Can you see the pattern? The author is trying to communicate a moral through this story that is of utmost importance. Asa called upon the help of foreign armies instead of the Lord, and as a result, he inherited perpetual war. He called on the aid of doctors instead of the Lord when he became sick, and as a result, he inherited death. God wanted to help Asa. God wanted to deliver him from his enemies.
God wanted to heal him from his diseases. But for some strange reason, like so many of us, Asa ignored God in the issues that mattered most, and as a result, he sealed his own fate.
