Thought for the Day 29/01/21 - Heal the Land

AUDIO

I haven't heard it happening again yet, but normally when something bad happens there's a big outcry against God ... blaming Him for the thing we're  not happy about.

But with the current pandemic, apart from a few Christian books addressing this question that nobody I've met has been raising, there's been silence about God and the matter.

That seems odd.

Interestingly, the Bible isn't silent about pandemics, and sees the hand of God very much in them ... from the plagues of Egypt to the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem under King Solomon to be the place of God's special presence there's a rich Biblical theology of natural disasters and plagues.

Here comes the solution to them first in 2 Chronicles 7:14 from the promises God made at the dedication of Solomon's Temple:

One of the reasons for the Temple's existence, which was the place where God symbolically 'was', was for to be able to go to God there.

And in the previous verse it spells out that their God was to be their 'go-to' particularly in times of trouble, to renew and restore their relationship with their Creator, Who meant them all good things.

Verse 15 promises: "my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place."

We are pretty much ENCOURAGED in our troubles to turn to Him!

But what sort of troubles are in mind here?

It's not just about those days when you can't find somewhere to park and fling out a desperate plea towards Heaven!

No - check v. 13: "‘When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land."

Life-threatening, wide-area natural disasters that are NOT remote from the activity of God, and therefore well within His power to reverse!

Now, it's great that we've got vaccines and treatments for all manner of diseases now from Ebola to COVID and beyond. 

Of course we must make good use of whatever modern medical scientific solutions that the Lord has put into our hands. 

But we hear in the news of their weaknesses and imperfections and it's a reminder that it's not WE who control our human destiny.

What God warns us of and calls us to in times such as these is recorded for us in v. 14:

"if my people, who are called by my name, will 

• humble themselves and 
• pray and 
• seek my face and 
• turn from their wicked ways, 

then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land."

• Called by My Name is a Hebrew idiom for 'owned by me'

'It's my life' is not valid syntax for people that God has redeemed.

• Humble themselves is what our client status before our God calls for ... He is the King of Glory Who fills His Temple with His glorious presence ... read the chapter this is taken from ... and to humble yourself before the Mighty is just to recognise reality.

• Pray ... given Who He is and Who we are, talking to Him about our trouble should be natural ... another straightforward recognition of our realities.
  
  
• Seek my face ... to seek the face is a is figurative expression for seeking God’s presence and acceptance.

Astonishingly to minds that have tried to write off and write out God from their script, the Word of God that comes to Solomon here declares boldly it's quite possibly their relationship with God that's been disturbed and this has caused the hard experiences that they all have been going through ... 

And so the thing they must do to sort it is this: they must ...

Turn from their wicked ways to seek God and let Him hear their prayers for deliverance

... or as one fairly recent translation puts it, at times like these God's people should seek Him out, restore their relationship with Him to clear the way for effective praying and to do so they need to "repudiate their sinful practices".

That might easily be dismissed by folks who are not keen to give God His proper place, but the record of Israel's history bore this out ... and that historical record gets harder to argue with!

So where does this leave us with COVID?

The Point

The general principle is that God always stands ready to help His people in trouble when they turn back from their rebelliousness and sin and take all necessary steps to restore their relationship with Him ... and that works at a much larger than individual scale, at the scale of nations and peoples and continents.

But in any given case the particular causes for a given calamity are always much harder to come down to.

The takeaway

What we can say is that our world has generally and for some time risen up against the idea of and the ways of our God, and there's definitely scope for repentance and seeking His face.

Is COVID God's judgement? It's hard to say yet.

But it's always a good day to turn back to God, to restore the relationship and get our prayers into the ears of the Almighty!

"if my people, who are called by my name, will 

• humble themselves and 
• pray and 
• seek my face and 
• turn from their wicked ways, 

then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land."

Or would we prefer to stick with the life of a sinner, a rebel against the hope held out by God?