Rootless and Branchless
“Lo, the day is coming, blazing like an oven,
when all the proud and all evildoers will be stubble,
and the day that is coming will set them on fire,
leaving them neither root nor branch,
says the LORD of hosts.”Malachi 3:19
The Lord warns us that there will be those who will come into our lives portraying to be someone from Him but in reality is not. There will be instances when our senses will fail to detect that what we are experiencing is not from God. There will be times when what is evil will seem to be what is true, good, and beautiful. How will we know? How will we know what is truly from God and not just a trick of the Enemy? We need to train our bodies to seek what our souls truly need — the food that sustains us, and this training can only be done by prayer.
We cannot choose good and evil at the same time. We must make a decision to choose either good or evil and to follow either God or the Enemy. In this world those who choose good over evil and God over the Enemy will be persecuted and dismissed but that is no reason to do otherwise. We are told that evil and all that follows it will one day be eradicated, leaving neither root nor branch. But it is a battle that is continuous and dare I say, one that is increasingly fierce. Indifference is one of the major contributors to this losing battle. We have to remind ourselves that this battle is very real and that the Enemy mimics the Truth and tries to fool us constantly. But by training our ears and hearts to listen to the voice of the Good Shepherd, the tactics of the Enemy will have no hold of us. With prayer evil will be rootless and branchless.
Brothers and sisters, we must listen in the silence of our hearts to the Voice who calls us His beloved. We need to train our senses to discern what is from God and what only seems to be from God because at the end of time following and believing only what “seems” to be from God will not lead us to Paradise. Rather it will lead us only to a mirage that quickly disappears when the Enemy reveals himself. As we quickly approach the end of this liturgical year, may we choose God daily and offer to Him our hearts, our bodies, our being, because when we do, it is truly God who lives in us and when He does, we can never fail.
