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Ann Shields
GOD'S SEVERE MERCY:
Jesus was, of course, speaking here specifically of the Jews' inability to recognize the Messiah. Why? Mainly, because He had not come as they expected. When Jesus began His public ministry, He proclaimed: "Reform your lives! The Kingdom of heaven is at hand." (Mt. 4:17) It was not a popular message, not a message the Jews wanted to hear. They expected their Messiah to come with lavish displays of power and authority and dominion. Their Messiah would destroy their political and religious enemies. He would set the people free--from political oppression, from the bondage of taskmasters down through the centuries. But Jesus disappointed them. He did not come as they expected. He came simply, quietly, humbly preaching repentance. Those who had eyes to see and ears to hear heard the truth. Some responded and were set truly free for eternal life. That same Messiah, that same Jesus comes again in our lives and says to us in 1994: "Reform your lives! The Kingdom of heaven is at hand." Through all generations, He speaks that same word. "Come to Me! Don't miss how I'm speaking to you. Learn to hear My voice, to read the signs of My call in the daily circumstances of your lives." As I see it, there are two very clear sets of signs we need to interpret through which God is speaking to us, revealing His will to us and calling us to repentance in our day. As clearly as He spoke to the people of His time, I believe He is speaking to us. FIRST SET OF MAJOR SIGNS The first major set of signs can be read in our newspapers every day, experienced on our streets and in our homes. Crime: There is one crime index offense committed every two seconds. Since 1960, violent crime has increased 560%.
What do those signs tell you? Family Life:
What do these signs say to you? What does such a national family picture indicate? Economy:
What do these signs tell us about stewardship of national resources? About respect for property and possessions? How should we interpret the present time in light of these representative signs? All of these signs point to personal, family, corporate and national loss of values based on Judeo-Christian principles. They are the fruit of rebellion and greed, anger and hatred in our personal lives, our families and our nation. Why does such evil seem to thrive in our society? Karl Menninger, a nationally recognized psychiatrist in this century, succinctly said it decades ago: "Whatever happened to sin?" Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, speaking at Harvard, plaintively cried out: "America has forgotten God!" Pope John Paul II, recently speaking of the West, declared that there is an eclipse of God. Yet the average Westerner persists in looking for answers to these terrible signs of moral decay and collapse not from God and His Word but from the government, from the legal system, from the church as institution, from sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists. Like the primordial sin of Satan, like the first sin of our first parents, pride governs our actions. We do not want to serve--even God. We do not want to acknowledge the true cause of our suffering, the true source of our cure. And so we prolong our agony looking for human answers to problems that cannot be solved by human means. It seems that we are willing to pay any price but that of submission to the only One who can bring us true help and peace. Based on this analysis, it is understandable that we have not read the signs of the times accurately. In other words, we have not been willing to identify and face the principal cause of our suffering--rejection of God. Scripture has warned us quite clearly about this: See Deut. 28:1-9; 15-32.
We would have to be very stupid not to see that a modern version of those evils is being visited upon us today. Many of us in different parts of the country have seen our land destroyed. Divorce is rampant. Not all the illness we experience is the fruit of a curse, but some is the fruit of hatred, unforgiveness, and the rejection of God in our hearts. Many of us have seen our property stolen, sometimes violently, with little or no legal redress. Many of us have seen our children taken from us by drugs, the occult, and those who prey on the young. Why? The true, simple answer is that as a nation, and often as individuals, we have forsaken God. We have rejected His Lordship over us. At best, most of us have reduced His role in our lives to a token acknowledgement on Sunday morning. Sometimes when I have written or spoken like this, people say that God must be a vengeful God to punish us in the way the Book of Deuteronomy describes. Not so. God knows what is best for us, whether we are willing to acknowledge that or not. He is a loving Father and will not stand idly by while we destroy ourselves. He will not turn a blind eye and allow us temporal or short-term happiness at the expense of eternal life. Like any good father He will take measures--even severe ones--to get us on the right course. God punishes, as a Father punishes, the son and daughter whom He loves that they might turn from their wicked ways, come back to Him and be healed. "Repent," says the Lord. SECOND MAJOR SET OF SIGNS Even though we are blind to the source of our moral collapse, God does not give up on us. He is giving us additional signs, hoping that we will see the error of our ways. It is my belief that God is trying to speak to us through the natural disasters that are increasing over this land. In the United States in one year alone (to say nothing of disasters in many other nations), we have experienced:
This list by no means exhausts the natural calamities we have experienced. Yet even in this representative list, we can see with eyes of faith that God is shaking the earth. (See Romans 12:25-29) So often we focus only on secondary causes of these disasters as the source of the problem--the El Nino stream, the greenhouse effect, the Santa Ana winds. But God who is the creator of it all and Lord even over the secondary causes, has through the centuries used His natural creation--floods, fire, earthquake and famine--to call us to repentance, to call us back to Himself. TRIAL FOR REPENTANCE God uses these natural crises to ask us where we are putting our faith and hope. He's using these situations to show us that material things in which we have put our security can be taken from us in a moment. He wants us to see that our only security is in Him. He wants us to receive the blessing of material things but not at the expense of displacing Him from His rightful place. Have we acknowledged His sovereignty? Have we submitted to His Lordship? Have we thanked Him for His blessings? Or have we attributed it all to ourselves to use when and where and how we want without reference to the Creator of it all? God will not allow that indefinitely. Sometimes He withdraws the blessings to cause us to face ourselves, our priorities, our motives, our relationship to God. Sometimes people will say that in regard to natural disasters God is not the source of our difficulties, because He would not let the innocent suffer. We need to understand that God is not causing the innocent to suffer. It is our sins, our rebellion and pride and greed that are causing the innocent to suffer. Secondly, in another sense, none of us is innocent. "All of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23) We all need correction. However, while we all have sinned, it does not mean that those to whom a particular disaster comes are necessarily more guilty than the rest. In Jesus' time, people had the same question:
The Lord is clearly saying here that the people on whom disaster falls are not necessarily more guilty than the rest of us. However, if we fail to heed the warning, if we fail to repent for our sin, we will perish. Will we read the signs accurately and repent or not? EXAMINATION OF CONSCIENCE Are we, like our first parents, guilty of the sin of pride, of arrogance? Perhaps we need to repent for thinking, "I know better than God what is best for me, for others." or "God is not doing what I thought should happen, what I prayed for, so I will not serve." or "No one but no one is going to have control over my life and that includes God." Are we sinning by rebellion and stubbornness? Do we say we want God's will and yet in the same breath dictate the terms? Are we sinning by disobedience to God's clear direction because we fear what others think more than what God has commanded? See 1 Samuel 15: 1-31. Note especially verses 3,9-11, 13-16, 21-24. We need to examine whether we are guilty of the sin of idolatry. Have we, like the early Israelites, chosen to worship the golden calf rather than the creator? Are we worshipping the gods of money, sex and power? See Exodus 32. None of these three areas is evil in itself. Each can be a blessing from God. But, if we put our hope in them or in anything else, look to things or people as a source of happiness and security, we have made an idol out of them. Only God can be looked upon as the Source of Life. Are we sinning by faithlessness in spite of God's care? Has God been good to us in many ways, showered blessings upon us? Yet we do not thank Him. Instead, we ignore Him or continue to doubt Him and fail to put our faith in Him. See Numbers 14:20-23. We need to pray:
TRIAL FOR TESTING AND PURIFICATION It is true that sometimes tragedy befalls those who are genuinely holy and we cry out, "why?" Scripture is very clear that God sometimes allows trial to test the righteous man or woman. Abraham was tested by being asked to sacrifice his son, Isaac. He put his faith in God Himself. He did not put his faith even in the gift God had given him--his son, Isaac. In the book of Job we read that Satan was sure Job was faithful to God only because everything was going Job's way. If God would allow Job's blessings to be removed, Job would surely curse him. So, God allows it. Job sees the death of his children, the destruction of his property, physical affliction, loss of friends--he experiences all the pain and anger and bewilderment of mankind but he does not reject God. God rewards him doubly for his faithfulness, and Job's life proclaims the goodness of God to those who rely on Him. Daniel suffered in being thrown to the lions, but he did not reject the Lord. The Lord miraculously saved him and used him to bring many to worship the one, true God. Joseph was sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, falsely accused in Egypt, condemned to being forgotten in prison. But he did not harbor unforgiveness or revenge toward his brothers and God raised him up as a leader who was in the right place, at the right moment, to save God's people in a time of famine. These men, as well as Sarah and Ruth and Esther, are only some of the outstanding examples of those who remained steadfast in their faith in spite of unbelievable suffering, allowed their character to be shaped by God Himself in the crucible of affliction. God was always lavish in His reward and used His faithful sons and daughters to bring abundant eternal blessing to others.
Whether we suffer because of our personal or corporate sin or because God is allowing us to be tested and purified, let that suffering turn us more and more to Him. CONCLUSION Let us pray that each of us will be able to read the signs of our times. Let us pray that we will be able to open our eyes and ears and heed the warnings. Let us pray that we will read the warning and turn back to God. God will not be mocked. He will come to judge the living and the dead. He's coming now in mercy, severe mercy, yes, but mercy. He's giving us chance after chance, opportunity after opportunity to repent that we might experience the infinite blessings He has promised us.
Will we rebel or repent? Will we seek to shift blame or face our sin? Will we give in to hopelessness or put our trust in the One who has won the victory over all death? Will we once again put ourselves under the Lordship of Jesus Christ? Will we commit ourselves to intercession for our families, for our land? Two thousand years ago Jesus wept over the city of Jerusalem because they failed to recognize His presence among them:
In 70 A.D. Jerusalem was destroyed. Christ's prophecy was fulfilled. The Lord did not want His people to suffer. He begged them to hear His voice but they did not. The Lord is visiting His people again. But, once again, He is not coming as we expect. Will we again fail to recognize the time of our visitation? I believe the destiny of our lives and our nation lies in our answers to these questions. The Gospel of Luke, Chapter 12, records Jesus' frustration with the people of His day. They could read the signs of nature and predict the weather accurately, but they could not read the signs of the times. Ann Shields looks at the statistics clamoring for the attention of our generation: the growth of crime, the alarming disintegration of families, economic crisis. She examines the moral fiber of individuals and the nation. What does it all tell us? Do we have the courage to face the answers? Ann reflects on the growing frequency of natural disasters and declares that God is speaking to His people through them--if we have the courage to listen? God's Severe Mercy: The Signs of Our Times gives a clear call to repentance and prayer in the midst of the distorted voices and false solutions of our times. Ann Shields In Canada: |