Grains of Sand

Pixabay Some of us are ready to swear off watching, reading, or listening to the news. Just when we think things couldn’t get worse, they do! You can’t fix stupid, and apparently stupidity is contagious. And it can be distressing, disturbing and dangerous to our mental and spiritual health to spend too much time focusing on the evil that men do. It’s enough to deal with my own evil let alone carry the burden of that which others engage in. It is helpful instead to dwell on the great truth of Scripture. Here is one for today: “ His eyes are on the ways of men; he sees their every step. ” (Job 34:21) We often live as though God isn’t aware of what is happening. We often live as though God doesn’t care. We often live as though He is powerless to do anything about the evils happening in this world. And that makes us anxious and upset. But in addition to reading the verse from Job this morning, I also read Romans 2 and the chilling words from verses 5, 6, 8, 9: “ But because of your stu...

Pixabay I have a news app on  my iPad. This morning, like many other mornings, I took a peek at the headlines and shut-down the app. I don’t want to know. The world is too ugly a place for this bright sunny morning with its fresh fall of brilliant white snow on the ground. Evil is overwhelming. Whether it happens on the streets of Rainbow Village, in the remote regions of the Far North, in the back halls of power, in the quiet backyards of suburbia, or in some third-world rocked by perpetual conflict, it’s just too much. Enough, already. How do you stand firm when the ground underneath is shaking? I remember a few nasty tremors of the earthquake variety. Their arrival was a reminder of just how insecure our hold on anything is, no matter what the venue may be. Psalm 11 is made up of only seven verses, but they powerfully address the issue of rocking foundations. " In the Lord I take refuge. How then can you say to me: 'flee like a bird to your mountain. For look, the wicke...

Pixabay Sometimes it only takes the right people or circumstances to reveal the evil that lies deep within. Genesis 37 tells us that story. Did Israel (a.k.a. Jacob) know how much his older sons hated their younger brother, Joseph? Had the older boys walked around camp with smiles pasted on their faces but harbouring a deep-seated resentment in their hearts? Joseph was not only preferred by their father, but had shared some pretentious ambitions with them—he would rule over them. Did Israel choose not to believe that his boys were capable of doing harm to the one he openly favoured? In any case, Israel sent Joseph out alone to find his older brothers. It became the right time and the right place to act upon their anger, jealousy and hatred. When Joseph arrived at Dothan to find his brothers, the Scriptures say: “ …they saw him in the distance, and before he reached them, they plotted to kill him ” (37:16). Reuben convinced them to simply throw Joseph into a nearby cistern. His plan...

Google Images Born blind. That was the situation of the man who encountered Jesus in John 9. As keen as his other senses might have been, he had never seen a sunrise, or watched the wind blow gently blow through fields of ripened grain. He had never seen the faces of those who stepped out of his way on the streets, or the colour of his mother’s eyes. The disciples considered it a punishment, but Jesus told them: “ ...this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life ” (John 9:3). Twenty, thirty, forty years wondering “why?” If someone had said to this blind man that his sightlessness would bring glory to God, the logical question would have been “how?” How can such a thing be glorifying to God? The questions remain the same today. My prayer list is long with the names of people who are sick or who have been terribly hurt by others. I listen to the news and shake my head at the evil that men do. Closer to home, I am wounded by the evil that men do to me. The “why?...

“ There is not a righteous man on earth who does what is right and never sins ” —Ecclesiastes 7:20, NIV. Last night I watched the beginning of a televisions series called The Borgias. Though I haven’t read up on the subject recently and I am certain a lot of fiction has been added to the facts, history doesn’t deny that these leaders of the church in the fifteenth century (or any other century) was unholy men dressed up in holy clothes. Before I began to watch the movie I had been at church facilitating a discussion on evil and suffering.   The movie left me with that age old question prompted by the discussion: Why? Many of the saints of Scripture asked God, Why? Someone commented last night that it was too pat an answer to say that evil and suffering exist because we live in a broken world, and that we need to focus on fact that there is another world, a better world that is to come. It was a good thought. But the inescapable truth is that our world is broken, we broke ...

“ Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; do not fret when men succeed in their wicked ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes ” —Psalm 37:7, NIV. Ahhh, patience, what I have so little of. I was intrigued by a piece of a verse I read recently that reminded me of how limited my knowledge is about God’s working. The Lord was explaining to Abraham what would happen to the nation that God was going to form from Abraham’s descendents. He told his servant that this people would end up in Egypt, be held there for four hundred years and then be brought back to the land of Canaan when the “sin of the Amorites” had gone as far as God was willing to allow it to go (Genesis 15:12-16). While the Hebrews were literally slaving away in Egypt, things were happening in Canaan of which they were unaware. We don’t know all the history, but God was there among the Amorites. The Amorites were descendents of Canaan, Noah’s grandson. At some point in their history they had been ...