It is always best to obey God. Whether we believe in God or not, we will always be greatly benefited when we obey his commandments.
God has no need of anything from us. It does not change him a bit whether we obey or not. It does not diminish his power and holiness.
It is obvious that God did not implement his ten commandments for his benefit. It is solely for the benefit of man that God instituted his moral laws. With these, man can attain lasting peace and happiness.
Some people see God as a strict disciplinarian. They do not like the idea of God commanding them not to do this and that. They believe they are free, and nobody should tell them what to do or what not to do.
This is because we consider the ten moral laws as commandments. Exodus 20 verse 1 says “And God spake all these words, saying, …” It is very clear that these are words of God, and “he spake”, and not “he commanded”.
We hate being commanded to do a thing, and we do not obey especially if it is hard for us to do. That is a natural human attitude: we want to be free from duties, and we want easy life.
Let us change our belief about God. He is a God of love and mercy. His loving kindness and tender mercy endure forever. He is a loving Father who always wants the best for his children. He will not surely burden us with commandments that are very hard for us to follow. What kind of father is it that heap heavy burdens on his children? If you cannot do it to your children, how could you expect a very loving and merciful God to do it? Are you more loving and more merciful than our heavenly Father?
When God spoke the words, he enables and empowers us to do them. There is an inherent power in the word of God. When God said “Let there be light…”, light appeared from nowhere at an instant. There was no finding and waiting – it came from his word as he spoke it.
The same power was inherent in his words when he spoke his moral laws to the Israelites at the foot of Mt. Sinai, and that power is still present in his words today. When God said “Thou shalt have no other gods before me…”, he empowers us not to be idolaters. When he said “Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy”, he empowers our mind to remember it always; he gives you the means, time and strength to keep it, and he give you his Holy Spirit to keep it holy. When God said “Thou shalt not kill”, he made us loving and merciful persons and enables us to forgive not only our neighbors but our enemies as well.
You might not believe in this. But I dare you: surrender your life to God, believe in his word by faith, and you will see the result. You must believe. To believe is to see.
Let us not talk about spiritual blessings that God showers on us when we believe his words for we do not see them directly until they manifest in physical forms or conditions. Let us speak of good tangible things that God give us whenever we obey his words.
Let us take our body as an example. In the very beginning, God chose the best diet for us: fruits, grains, nut and vegetable. When men started eating flesh meats, their frontal lobes were destroyed and lost their conscience and spirituality. They became more animalistic and started devouring each other. Being unspiritual, they forgot the moral values spoken to them by God, and they wallowed in the quagmire of sin, and has not been able to get get out from it until now. Their indulgence and intemperance in meat eating brought upon them untold miseries and afflictions from uncurable diseases that are only known in our modern time.
Refusal to keep the sabbath day can weaken our body and endangers it to a host of illnesses and diseases. Latest findings in chronobiology confirms the strong undestructible link between the perfect functioning of the human body with sabbath keeping. Inherent in the human body, that governs the immune system, and the myriads of functions of the organs in the body, is a biological clock that precisely follows a seven-day cycle known as circaseptan. Heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, waking and sleeping cycle, hormonal production, healing processes, and all metabolic processes in the body are governed by this seven-day cycle. When we desynchronize ourselves with this cycle, we bring upon ourselves unbearable maladies.
No wonder, God instituted the seventh day as a day of rest. Some Christians have their sabbath on Sunday. But Sunday is not the seventh day of the week – it is the first day. You are not synchronized with the seven-day cycle when you keep your sabbath on Sundays, and this will tamper with the normal functioning of your immune system, and other metabolic processes in the body.
God promised to bless those who keep the seventh-day sabbath holy. The physical and the material blessing are evidently manifold, much more the spiritual blessings if we can only open our spiritual eyes to see them.