The Well
The Well |
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Connecting Hope to the Hurting | |
Thursday
September 18, 2008
"My advice to you is this: Go to God and confess your sins to him. For he
does wonderful miracles, marvels without number. He sends the rain upon the
earth to water the fields, and gives prosperity to the poor and humble, and
takes sufferers to safety."
Job 5:8-11
Well, this is one of Job's marvelous, encouraging friends who is sure Job committed some awful sin to deserve such horrible things happening in his life. Don't get me wrong, the advice he gives is good. It is true, when we sin we do need to confess the sin to God and repent. However, based on my understanding of how God works, calamity doesn't necessarily come only to those who sin.
"If I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or if I command the locust swarms to eat up all of your crops, or if I send an epidemic among you, then if my people will humble themselves and pray, and search for me, and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear them from heaven and forgive their sins and heal their land." 2 Chronicles 7:13-14
In this passage I see that God is sending the calamities. Maybe where we get confused is our idea of what sin is. From what I understand sin is "missing the mark." We all miss the mark. We all fall. We all struggle with what it is God wants us to do. We wonder what the true formula is for receiving God's blessings, His grace, His unmerited favor. This struggle continues from ages ago. When the Christian church was just beginning to form, when the Gentiles were being saved by God's grace, the issue of whether or not they should be circumcised came up. So, they have a meeting.
"God, who knows men's hearts, confirmed the fact that he accepts Gentiles by
giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he gave him to us. He made no distinction
between them and us, for he cleansed their lives through faith, just as he did
ours. And now are you going to correct God by burdening the Gentiles with a yoke
that neither we nor our fathers were able to bear? Don't you believe that all
are saved the same way, by the free gift of the Lord Jesus?. . .
"And so my
judgment is that we should not insist that the Gentiles who turn to God must
obey our Jewish laws, except that we should write to them to refrain from eating
meat sacrificed to idols, from all fornication, and also from eating unbled meat
of strangled animals." Acts 15:8-11, 19-20
God simply wants our prayer and praise. Oswald Chambers said, "As soon as you abandon your own reasoning and arguing, God witnesses to what He has done, and you are amazed at your total disrespect in having kept Him waiting."
Why do we argue? Instead of splitting hairs, let's simply turn our eyes on Jesus, and hold the hand of the hurting, lifting up praises to Him. He wants us to simply trust Him.
Father, too many times, like Job's friends, we tend to want to cast blame or look for some reason why people we know go through horrible times or disaster. I guess we even wonder the same thing about why America has gone through such disasters lately. However, Lord, help us not to do that, instead, let us look to You, and trust that You know what is going on and keep our faith, and keep pressing on.
