“So how can you console me with your nonsense? Nothing is left of your answers but falsehood!” (Job 21:34, NIV)
Only yesterday, I walked the fairways at a Division I men’s college golf tournament, spectating. I was there to follow a player whom I had coached in high school. As far as golf goes, the experience was excruciating. He couldn’t make a putt all day, and there was nothing I could do but watch.
Like Job, we do not know the mind of God in the midst of our groaning.But golf only goes so far. It absolutely does not go as far as where all our eyes went when we woke up Monday. To Las Vegas. To another of those tragedies we have come to despise and to grieve. Watching there too is excruciating. There is nothing we can do.
I know what some of you are saying: “Oh, but we can pray.” I will never deny you those prayers, and I will pray them with you. And yet it feels like so very little, like impotence in the face of the “Where is God?” questions.
That question is asked, you know, in two tones—honest lament and caustic accusation. The tone is incidental. In either case, it’s a crippling question, one not bettered by replying, “I don’t know, but I’ll be praying.”
What we really should be praying for is that people will hear and receive our answers, no matter how feeble they may seem when they fall from our tongues.
Here, feebly, is what I know.
Tragedies that leave us wondering, “Whatever will we do?” are the result of sin. We may say that God allows these tragedies when he could intervene and prevent them, but we are the ones who create them. Take away the bombs and men have guns. Take away the guns and men have swords. Take away the swords and men have fists. The law is this: Thou shalt not murder. And wicked men will find any means to break the law.
I know, too, that we have no way of knowing what tragedies God does prevent. He does not advertise on a roadside billboard: This is the site of an accident I did not allow to happen. What if there a millions of deaths that God does not allow each and every day? Indeed there are, for it is he who has made the health of our bodies to sustain us from breath to breath.
And what if there were never any murderous tragedies? Would we then praise God for his goodness, or would we take credit for being such a peaceful, loving people?
You see, the disconsolation of Job still haunts us. Are we honest enough to admit this? Like Job, we do not know the mind of God in the midst of our groaning. But for this: God is yet Job’s Redeemer, the one who will stand on the earth, the one who exceeds in love, the one who will make all things new. Until then, we can cry and cry out with the masses; we can say, “Lord God in heaven, there is nothing we can do, and so we beg of you to come here in this moment with your mercies unbound.”
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Jeff Hopper
October 3, 2017
Copyright 2017 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.