Bad news. You're going to owe money this year. And you've got the cash to cover it - but that's the money you need to pay off the property tax bill (which you've been putting off).

What do you do? You could borrow money from your credit card to pay the property taxes, but that will set you further behind. You could sell something perhaps. You could take out another credit card, or take advantage of the flyer you just received to transfer your current balance to a zero-balance-for-12-months account.

But they're all the same, really. They all amount to piling more and more and more debts, obligations, responsibilities, problems one on top of the other.

Maybe it's not money for you. But we can do the same with time - with tasks - with laundry - with relationship issues. We can't handle it so we put it off, but it piles up and piles up.

That's what the sins of Israel were like. Their relationship with God became so tangled. It wasn't a simple matter of just stopping the nation from worshiping idols. It was untangling all the complex of wrong behaviors and false ideas and sinful attitudes and evil traditions and wrong values of centuries.

Don't you pray for a day in which God would simply cut it all away? End all of the trouble? That's the old illustration of the Gordian Knot - a rope knot of incredible complexity that was solved when Alexander the Great simply sliced it in half with his sword.

The Day of the Lord is a slicing through of our knotted lives. The day of resurrection, or of our own homecoming to heaven, will be the day that all such burdens are finally cast down.

"Surely God is my salvation; I will trust and not be afraid."