Get up, God! Are you going to sleep all day? Wake up! Don’t you care what happens to us? Psalm 44:23 (TM)
Wendy and I saw a play the other week. It was called Camp Angel and it provided Wendy and I a lot of food for thought. In the play’s most dramatic scene, a radical Christian who had committed acts of terror here in the United States was being tortured in order to get him to reveal who his accomplices were. He took the torture, crying out his misplaced faith in his god. The prison official then, as the prisoner was tortured, cried out his agonizing doubts and disappointment with a "Where were you, God?" mantra as he recounted scenes like Dachau and Darfur.
One of the most difficult questions we all must grapple with is the tragedy, both personal and corporate, of living in a sinful world where people are given the choice to do evil things. Bad things happen to good people in this world in which evil is as ever-present as good.
Faith, the Bible says, is the "assurance of what we hope for, the evidence of things unseen." Sometimes that means being assured of that which is good in the midst of overwhelming evil.
Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr and Captured by the Light
How you sent those people packing
but gave us a fresh start.
We didn’t fight for this land;
we didn’t work for it—it was a gift!
It seems the Sons of Korah were taught how they had received what they had. I don’t know the history of these guys, but if the chapter is literal their parents told them that everything they have is from God. In times of trouble, they cry out to God, but start the chapter with a true knowledge of who God is. One of the things I don’t like about school today is that I feel like they withhold some history from our kids. As more history exists, it gives faculty an opportunity to weed some out (you can’t teach it all you know). In doing that, some very major events can be left out. So….it is our job as parents to make sure that our kids know the most important points. Things like “everything we have is a gift from God”. Without this appreciation, we and our kids think that everything we have is a result of us. This is a very dangerous path to follow.