Time and Timing
Sermon
SEEK GOOD, NOT EVIL
that you may live
"Why do bad things happen to good people?" is the way we say it today. "Why art thou silent when the wicked swallow up the man more righteous than he is?" It is not only "Why do bad things happen to good people?" but why does a holy and a righteous God permit the unrighteous to swallow the righteous, the wicked to devour the innocent? It may happen, but why does God permit it, seemingly doing nothing about it?
It is bad enough if some outsider is the villain. It is intolerable when the villain is home-grown. What response is left to us if some of our own turn on us and do so deliberately, premeditatedly, simply because they are in a position to do so? It's like having the firemen start the fires, the policemen rob the banks and murder the citizenry, the government extort money from its subjects, and the armed forces ravage their own country. Outsiders we could excuse by saying they are outsiders, but how does one excuse the insiders?
For all we did to the South Vietnamese, the Cambodians and the Laotians, certainly Vietnamese must ask why they are imprisoned in Vietnam prisons, the Laotians in Laotian prisons, the Cambodians in Cambodian prisons - political prisoners imprisoned for what they are thinking.
Why, not so incidentally, do we find the chiefs of state so often professing a love of their country and a dislike, not to say hostility, for their countrymen? The ultimate poignancy is Christ's outcry from the cross, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me!" As difficult, as unsatisfactory as are any of the answers, the question is legitimized if our Lord himself in the moment of extremity after dedicated life to his Father should ask the same question, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!" Why should God turn on the one who without question has been faithful? The fact that he does, makes it a question of supreme importance. Easy explanations are out.
How does one excuse God, the righteous God, for letting the righteous be victimized at will by those who scorn him and them? That's the problem that angers and humiliates Habakkuk. Outraged by what God's people are doing to God's people, he is even more outraged that God is doing nothing about it.
Who of us can understand God's ways the way we would like? For one thing, God has not chosen to tell us the whole story of himself. He's given us the central story but not the whole story. Whatever he has not spoken we speak for him, then demand he act the way we do. We have a black/white, on/off, binary idea of the way God should right wrongs, especially if someone has wronged us. Instant action! Instant justice! Instant retaliation!
Do we ask for the same quick, immediate solution when we are the ones who have wronged, when we have been unjust, when we have used power to serve self? It's a different matter then, isn't it? Then we are quick to plead extenuating circumstances, give explanations, beg for forgiveness. Then we are not unlike the criminal who refuses to extend mercy to his victim but who pleads weepingly for mercy when he himself is caught. Perhaps God might be rejecting the instantaneous response because that would mean sweeping all aside, not just the so-called guilty. That's what the story of the flood is all about. Sweep away the "baddies." Keep the "goodies." Then God discovers that the few whom he had saved were not as good as he thought.
Instantaneous rightings of wrongs has its drawbacks, mostly for those who demand that kind of action.
Perhaps we also get trapped in the old illusions that some obvious, public wrongs are worse than those that remain private. Hence, it is easy to demand justice be done to those whose wrongs are public and grievous while private offenders appear innocent.
God also understands time differently than we do. Since we measure in milliseconds, a little time seems like a lot of time. In our demand for justice now we forget that God is the inventor, the creator of time; so his relationship to time differs from that of our own. "A thousand years are as one day, and one day as a thousand years."
So, the people of Israel can be in bondage in Egypt for an inordinate number of years. They cry out to God to free them. Then God remembers his promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. When did that promising take place? Only four hundred years before. And his delivery of the people of Israel is regarded as fulfilling his promise four hundred years before that deliverance. That's a different way of keeping a promise.
A guide at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem explained it this way: A devout Jew who lives far from Jerusalem has his heart set on getting to the Wailing Wall during his lifetime. He dies without having made the journey. Then his children take up the wish and the dream. They do not make it. Then the grandchildren. They are not successful. Then the great-grandchildren, the great-great-great-grandchildren. At last one of the great-great-great-great-grandchildren does get to the Wailing Wall. In the person and presence of this child, the hopes and the dreams of all that went before her are fulfilled. The devout father who died several hundred years before is at the Wailing Wall as much as the child who now prays there. That is why God said that he had fulfilled his promise to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob when we would say he only fulfilled it for those Hebrews he brought out of Egypt some four hundred years later.
Individualism has become such a strong religion in the West that we cannot work very well with the idea that promises made to us, hopes held high by us, dreams which are dreamt by us are really all fulfilled when they come true in the life of our progeny generations later, because we were never able to taste them personally.
That's not unlike God's timetable with retribution.
Do we really believe that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked? Note the language: it does not say, "takes no pleasure in the death of his saints," but "takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked." How does that sit with us who gloat, rejoice over the punishment, the comeuppance of such as Richard Nixon, too clever for his own good, the downfall of a John DeLorean; the suicide of an Adolph Hitler; the stroke-induced death of a Joseph Stalin; or even, on a much lesser scale, the crushing of a sports hero by one still younger, or by the process of aging; when the so-called great are, as we say, brought down to our level, the victims of alcoholism, or a dissolute life.
Oh, yes, we rejoice over the death of the wicked. The more righteous we sense ourselves to be, the more fully and freely we gloat. But not God. He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. Always with God there is the hope that the wicked would turn from their way and live. That the wicked would seek good and not evil. God does not give up easily, though it may seem so to us.
"The vision has its time; it hastens to the end - it will not lie. If it seems so, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay." We are talking different languages here. Four hundred years is a long time for the promise to be fulfilled for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Some two hundred years of slavery is a long time for the black man in America. Add to that, years of not-quite-freedom since the Emancipation Proclamation, and you've got more time. Two years is a long time in a concentration camp. One year is too long. One day is too long. Yet people have spent whole lifetimes in the gulags of Russia.
The delay between the sin of Adam and Eve and the coming of Christ is a long time. Three days on the cross is a long time, especially after you have first been beaten until the white of your backbone and the white of your ribs show through the mangled flesh that once covered them.
As if to heighten the confusion even more, what Christ seems to designate as injustice - "My God, my God, why has Thou forsaken me?" - God called the real understanding of justice, different than any other understanding of it. To give the wicked what they have coming to them is nothing else but routine. But what if the wicked and the guilty got justice by not getting what they had coming to them; namely, Christ; namely, grace; namely, a new life?
"For I am not ashamed of the Gospel," writes Paul. "It is the saving power of God for everyone who has faith, the Jew first, but the Greek also - because here is revealed God's way of righting wrong, a way that starts from faith and ends in faith: as the Scripture says, 'He who is righteous by faith shall live.' " (Romans 16:17)
And again, "But now, quite independently of law, God's justice has been brought to life. The law and the prophets both bear witness to it; it is God's way of righting wrong, effective through faith in Christ for all who have faith - all, without distinction. For all alike have sinned, and are deprived of the divine splendor, and all are justified by God's free grace alone, through his act of liberation in the person of Christ Jesus. For God designed him to be the means of expiating sin by his sacrificial death, effective through faith. God meant by this to demonstrate his justice now in the present, showing that he is both himself just and justifies anyone who puts his faith in Jesus."
The cry against injustice must not stop. God's cry in Christ is the greatest cry of all. The work of righting injustice must not stop. God is working harder than all of us. But perhaps the question at the beginning needs to be rephrased, and with that rephrasing comes a little more vision.
Will I ever fully recover from the amazement of God's patience with me? The ultimate patience he has with me in Christ? How does he do it? Why does he do it? He not only does not take any pleasure in the death of the wicked, his innocent dies so that the wicked may live.
Just think of it. We are among the wicked who live justified by faith in Christ who died for us and rose again. In the deepest sense of the question, "Why do such good things happen to such bad people?"
Woe to her that is rebellious and defiled, the oppressing city! She listens to no voice, she accepts no correction. She does not trust in the Lord, she does not draw near to her God. Her officials within her are roaring lions; her judges are evening wolves that leave nothing till the morning. Her prophets are wanton, faithless men, her priests profane what is sacred, they do violence to the law. The Lord within her is righteous, he does no wrong; every morning he shows forth his justice, each dawn he does not fail; but the unjust knows no shame.
"I have cut off nations; their battlements are in ruins; I have laid waste their streets so that none walks in them; their cities have been made desolate without a man, without an inhabitant. I said, 'Surely she will fear me, she will accept correction; she will not lose sight of all that I have enjoined upon her.' But all the more they were eager to make all their deeds corrupt." "Therefore wait for me, "says the Lord, "for the day when I arise as a witness. For my decision is to gather nations, to assemble kingdoms, to pour out upon them my indignation, all the heat of my anger; for in the fire of my jealous wrath all the earth shall be consumed.
"Yea, at that time I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call on the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord."
(Zephaniah 3:1-9)
It is bad enough if some outsider is the villain. It is intolerable when the villain is home-grown. What response is left to us if some of our own turn on us and do so deliberately, premeditatedly, simply because they are in a position to do so? It's like having the firemen start the fires, the policemen rob the banks and murder the citizenry, the government extort money from its subjects, and the armed forces ravage their own country. Outsiders we could excuse by saying they are outsiders, but how does one excuse the insiders?
For all we did to the South Vietnamese, the Cambodians and the Laotians, certainly Vietnamese must ask why they are imprisoned in Vietnam prisons, the Laotians in Laotian prisons, the Cambodians in Cambodian prisons - political prisoners imprisoned for what they are thinking.
Why, not so incidentally, do we find the chiefs of state so often professing a love of their country and a dislike, not to say hostility, for their countrymen? The ultimate poignancy is Christ's outcry from the cross, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me!" As difficult, as unsatisfactory as are any of the answers, the question is legitimized if our Lord himself in the moment of extremity after dedicated life to his Father should ask the same question, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!" Why should God turn on the one who without question has been faithful? The fact that he does, makes it a question of supreme importance. Easy explanations are out.
How does one excuse God, the righteous God, for letting the righteous be victimized at will by those who scorn him and them? That's the problem that angers and humiliates Habakkuk. Outraged by what God's people are doing to God's people, he is even more outraged that God is doing nothing about it.
Who of us can understand God's ways the way we would like? For one thing, God has not chosen to tell us the whole story of himself. He's given us the central story but not the whole story. Whatever he has not spoken we speak for him, then demand he act the way we do. We have a black/white, on/off, binary idea of the way God should right wrongs, especially if someone has wronged us. Instant action! Instant justice! Instant retaliation!
Do we ask for the same quick, immediate solution when we are the ones who have wronged, when we have been unjust, when we have used power to serve self? It's a different matter then, isn't it? Then we are quick to plead extenuating circumstances, give explanations, beg for forgiveness. Then we are not unlike the criminal who refuses to extend mercy to his victim but who pleads weepingly for mercy when he himself is caught. Perhaps God might be rejecting the instantaneous response because that would mean sweeping all aside, not just the so-called guilty. That's what the story of the flood is all about. Sweep away the "baddies." Keep the "goodies." Then God discovers that the few whom he had saved were not as good as he thought.
Instantaneous rightings of wrongs has its drawbacks, mostly for those who demand that kind of action.
Perhaps we also get trapped in the old illusions that some obvious, public wrongs are worse than those that remain private. Hence, it is easy to demand justice be done to those whose wrongs are public and grievous while private offenders appear innocent.
God also understands time differently than we do. Since we measure in milliseconds, a little time seems like a lot of time. In our demand for justice now we forget that God is the inventor, the creator of time; so his relationship to time differs from that of our own. "A thousand years are as one day, and one day as a thousand years."
So, the people of Israel can be in bondage in Egypt for an inordinate number of years. They cry out to God to free them. Then God remembers his promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. When did that promising take place? Only four hundred years before. And his delivery of the people of Israel is regarded as fulfilling his promise four hundred years before that deliverance. That's a different way of keeping a promise.
A guide at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem explained it this way: A devout Jew who lives far from Jerusalem has his heart set on getting to the Wailing Wall during his lifetime. He dies without having made the journey. Then his children take up the wish and the dream. They do not make it. Then the grandchildren. They are not successful. Then the great-grandchildren, the great-great-great-grandchildren. At last one of the great-great-great-great-grandchildren does get to the Wailing Wall. In the person and presence of this child, the hopes and the dreams of all that went before her are fulfilled. The devout father who died several hundred years before is at the Wailing Wall as much as the child who now prays there. That is why God said that he had fulfilled his promise to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob when we would say he only fulfilled it for those Hebrews he brought out of Egypt some four hundred years later.
Individualism has become such a strong religion in the West that we cannot work very well with the idea that promises made to us, hopes held high by us, dreams which are dreamt by us are really all fulfilled when they come true in the life of our progeny generations later, because we were never able to taste them personally.
That's not unlike God's timetable with retribution.
Do we really believe that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked? Note the language: it does not say, "takes no pleasure in the death of his saints," but "takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked." How does that sit with us who gloat, rejoice over the punishment, the comeuppance of such as Richard Nixon, too clever for his own good, the downfall of a John DeLorean; the suicide of an Adolph Hitler; the stroke-induced death of a Joseph Stalin; or even, on a much lesser scale, the crushing of a sports hero by one still younger, or by the process of aging; when the so-called great are, as we say, brought down to our level, the victims of alcoholism, or a dissolute life.
Oh, yes, we rejoice over the death of the wicked. The more righteous we sense ourselves to be, the more fully and freely we gloat. But not God. He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. Always with God there is the hope that the wicked would turn from their way and live. That the wicked would seek good and not evil. God does not give up easily, though it may seem so to us.
"The vision has its time; it hastens to the end - it will not lie. If it seems so, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay." We are talking different languages here. Four hundred years is a long time for the promise to be fulfilled for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Some two hundred years of slavery is a long time for the black man in America. Add to that, years of not-quite-freedom since the Emancipation Proclamation, and you've got more time. Two years is a long time in a concentration camp. One year is too long. One day is too long. Yet people have spent whole lifetimes in the gulags of Russia.
The delay between the sin of Adam and Eve and the coming of Christ is a long time. Three days on the cross is a long time, especially after you have first been beaten until the white of your backbone and the white of your ribs show through the mangled flesh that once covered them.
As if to heighten the confusion even more, what Christ seems to designate as injustice - "My God, my God, why has Thou forsaken me?" - God called the real understanding of justice, different than any other understanding of it. To give the wicked what they have coming to them is nothing else but routine. But what if the wicked and the guilty got justice by not getting what they had coming to them; namely, Christ; namely, grace; namely, a new life?
"For I am not ashamed of the Gospel," writes Paul. "It is the saving power of God for everyone who has faith, the Jew first, but the Greek also - because here is revealed God's way of righting wrong, a way that starts from faith and ends in faith: as the Scripture says, 'He who is righteous by faith shall live.' " (Romans 16:17)
And again, "But now, quite independently of law, God's justice has been brought to life. The law and the prophets both bear witness to it; it is God's way of righting wrong, effective through faith in Christ for all who have faith - all, without distinction. For all alike have sinned, and are deprived of the divine splendor, and all are justified by God's free grace alone, through his act of liberation in the person of Christ Jesus. For God designed him to be the means of expiating sin by his sacrificial death, effective through faith. God meant by this to demonstrate his justice now in the present, showing that he is both himself just and justifies anyone who puts his faith in Jesus."
The cry against injustice must not stop. God's cry in Christ is the greatest cry of all. The work of righting injustice must not stop. God is working harder than all of us. But perhaps the question at the beginning needs to be rephrased, and with that rephrasing comes a little more vision.
Will I ever fully recover from the amazement of God's patience with me? The ultimate patience he has with me in Christ? How does he do it? Why does he do it? He not only does not take any pleasure in the death of the wicked, his innocent dies so that the wicked may live.
Just think of it. We are among the wicked who live justified by faith in Christ who died for us and rose again. In the deepest sense of the question, "Why do such good things happen to such bad people?"
Woe to her that is rebellious and defiled, the oppressing city! She listens to no voice, she accepts no correction. She does not trust in the Lord, she does not draw near to her God. Her officials within her are roaring lions; her judges are evening wolves that leave nothing till the morning. Her prophets are wanton, faithless men, her priests profane what is sacred, they do violence to the law. The Lord within her is righteous, he does no wrong; every morning he shows forth his justice, each dawn he does not fail; but the unjust knows no shame.
"I have cut off nations; their battlements are in ruins; I have laid waste their streets so that none walks in them; their cities have been made desolate without a man, without an inhabitant. I said, 'Surely she will fear me, she will accept correction; she will not lose sight of all that I have enjoined upon her.' But all the more they were eager to make all their deeds corrupt." "Therefore wait for me, "says the Lord, "for the day when I arise as a witness. For my decision is to gather nations, to assemble kingdoms, to pour out upon them my indignation, all the heat of my anger; for in the fire of my jealous wrath all the earth shall be consumed.
"Yea, at that time I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call on the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord."
(Zephaniah 3:1-9)
