Tag: god’s deliverance

An Advent Message of Suffering and Deliverance (Micah 4:8-13)

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality Blog, Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year CLeave a comment
The Prophet Micah Exhorts the Israelites, by Gustave Doré, 1866

As for you, Jerusalem,
    the citadel of God’s people,
your royal might and power
    will come back to you again.
The kingship will be restored
    to my precious Jerusalem.

But why are you now screaming in terror?
    Have you no king to lead you?
Have your wise people all died?
    Pain has gripped you like a woman in childbirth.
Writhe and groan like a woman in labor,
    you people of Jerusalem,
for now you must leave this city
    to live in the open country.
You will soon be sent in exile
    to distant Babylon.
But the Lord will rescue you there;
    he will redeem you from the grip of your enemies.

Now many nations have gathered against you.
    “Let her be desecrated,” they say.
    “Let us see the destruction of Jerusalem.”
But they do not know the Lord’s thoughts
    or understand his plan.
These nations don’t know
    that he is gathering them together
to be beaten and trampled
    like sheaves of grain on a threshing floor.
“Rise up and crush the nations, O Jerusalem!”
    says the Lord.
“For I will give you iron horns and bronze hooves,
    so you can trample many nations to pieces.
You will present their stolen riches to the Lord,
    their wealth to the Lord of all the earth.” (New Living Translation)

A lot of people don’t understand much about the Bible, especially many parts of what some call the Old or First Testament of it. It seems to them like it’s all either nonsense or gobbledygook.

I am not exaggerating when I say that I have read the entire Bible not once, but hundreds of times. And there are still many places within Holy Scripture which are an enigma to me.

Part of the reason the Bible can seem so difficult is that, at times, the perspective being written about is so expansive, so large, and so wide that it nearly defies human comprehension.

The Bible reveals a God who is so transcendent that the Lord is able to see the past, the present, and the future all at once, because God is actually above everything, including time.

None of this talk on my part is meant to discourage anyone from reading scripture. Rather, it’s meant to encourage you to keep on reading it, listening to it, talking about it, and exploring its contents.

Instead of a being an impossible puzzle we cannot put together, the Bible is, instead, a deep treasure trove of knowledge, wisdom, and insight into the human condition and the human purpose for being on this earth.

The reason the biblical prophets came along – and included into the canon of Holy Scripture – is that they called people back to their original purpose for being here in the first place.

In every prophetic book, the culture, the society, the religion, and the politics of a people had strayed so far from their reason for existing, that it took what seems to us as extreme language in order to get them back on track.

There were some cases so bad that the prophet’s message to people was inevitable doom. And yet, even then, there was a nugget of grace, showing us that no matter how terrible things may get, the arm of God is not too short to pull the faithful from the brink of annihilation.

Examining the Book of Micah, there is nothing easy about it. The prophet wrote at a time when Assyrian power was dominate, and about to swallow up the northern kingdom of Israel. Yet, he spoke directly to Jerusalem in the southern kingdom of Judah.

Much like a woman in labor and about to give birth, Jerusalem’s cry of suffering will be transformed into a cry of deliverance and freedom.

But we aren’t talking about something that will happen in a few days or even a few years; the prophet was giving the people a panoramic sweep of centuries.

Eventually, the Babylonians come, take the people out of the city into exile to Babylon. It is a cry of pain. Micah was speaking about events which would not occur for another two hundred years.

Yet, at the same time, Micah was talking about his own present generation of people in Israel and Judah. What the people were doing, at that time, was leading to a future of great pain. And there would be a great crying out for salvation from it.

Injustice always creates a state of distress for some, while the ones perpetrating the unjust ways become wealthy on the backs of others who are miserable.

Babylon represented both the place of punishment and of liberation. Out of the exilic darkness, a new age bursts into the light.

Born into a time where many people were longing for God’s deliverance, centuries after the destruction of Jerusalem, after the exile and return to Judea, and after the days of the Maccabees, Jesus subversively entered human history.

Despite all of the human sin, the degradation and oppression of others, the injustice and abuse extant in the world, grace comes in the shape of a baby; mercy enters the world in the form of a child.

The God whom all things depend upon, became dependent, needing a mother to clean him up after a filled first-century diaper. Few people knew at the time that this little baby would be the one to clean up a massive spiritual and metaphorical diaper, full of the world’s nasty stinky injustice.

Presently, it is clear that the nations do not know they will be beaten and trampled – that all who are now in power will be answering to that subversive child born two millennia ago.

Each life may be a mere speck in the scope of history, and yet, at the same time, each life is precious enough to warrant attention from the One who stands above all time.

How you live makes a difference. How you are, matters.

God of both judgment and grace, we pray for all nations, that they may live in unity, peace, and concord; and that all people may know justice, and enjoy perfect freedom. Embrace the most vulnerable members of our society; end the growing disparity between the rich and poor; and grant us courage to strive for economic justice, so that all might know your mercy, and not your wrath. Amen.

A Prayer of Confession and Contrition (Nehemiah 9:16-25)

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality Blog, Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year CLeave a comment

But they—our own ancestors—acted arrogantly.
They became stubborn and wouldn’t obey your commands.
They refused to listen.
They forgot the miracles you performed for them.
They became stubborn and appointed a leader
to take them back to slavery in Egypt.
But you are a forgiving God,
one who is compassionate, merciful, patient,
and always ready to forgive.
You never abandoned them,
even when they made a metal statue of a calf for themselves
and said, ‘This is your god who took you out of Egypt.’
They committed outrageous sins.
But because of your endless compassion,
you didn’t abandon them in the desert.
The column of smoke didn’t leave them during the day,
but it led them on their way.
The column of fire didn’t leave them during the night,
but it gave them light to see the way they should go.
You gave them your good Spirit to teach them.
You didn’t keep your manna to yourself.
You gave them water to quench their thirst.
You provided for them in the desert for 40 years,
and they had everything they needed.
Their clothes didn’t wear out, and their feet didn’t swell.

You gave kingdoms and nations to the Israelites
and assigned them their boundaries.
So they took possession of the land of Sihon,
the land of the king of Heshbon,
and the land of King Og of Bashan.
You made their children as numerous as the stars in the sky.
You brought them into the land you told their parents to enter and possess.
Their children took possession of the land.
You defeated for them the Canaanites, who lived in the land.
You handed the Canaanite kings and their people over to them
to do whatever they wanted with the Canaanites.
The Israelites captured fortified cities and a rich land.
They took possession of houses filled with all sorts of good things,
cisterns, vineyards, olive trees,
and plenty of fruit trees.
So they ate and were satisfied and grew fat.
They enjoyed the vast supply of good things you gave them. (God’s Word Translation)

The Jewish people had experienced the Babylonian Captivity. The walls of Jerusalem had been torn down, and the Temple was ransacked and destroyed.

Years later, the Persians overthrew the Babylonians, and many of the Jewish captives were allowed to return to Judea. One of the returning groups was led by Nehemiah, who was a cupbearer to the king.

Nehemiah engaged in an ambitious project of rebuilding Jerusalem’s wall and securing the city. It was a large undertaking. Yet, even more daunting was restoring the Jewish people’s worship of Yahweh, and following the Torah, God’s law.

Today’s Old Testament lesson takes place in the fifth century B.C.E. Nehemiah, along with the religious leader Ezra the scribe, organized a public assembly. The people listened to the Torah being read, and were fasting, confessing, and repenting of the ways they had neglected God’s law.

A group of Levites (the priests) stood up and said a long prayer of confession. Our verses for today are a part of that extended time of confession of sin and profession of faith. The people’s past history was very much a part of their present circumstances.

The Levities emphasized that it is God’s nature to be full of faithfulness and steadfast love. So, the Lord preserved the Israelites and rescued them out of Egyptian slavery through a series of miraculous wonders.

While their ancestors were out in a desert sojourn, anticipating entry into the Promised Land, God was faithful to provide for the Israelites both physical and spiritual food – Torah and manna.

And yet, despite the incredible rescue from Egypt, and miraculously escaping through the Red Sea, the people were rebellious. Their disobedience to God in the golden calf experience prevented that generation from entering into the promised rest. (Hebrews 3:16-19)

Every generation has its “sinners,” those who seem to have a bent toward selfish behavior, and refuse to see the needs of the entire group. They only serve God if it serves their own self-centered purposes. And they stubbornly refuse to bend to anyone’s wishes, including God’s.

Unfortunately, that sin of pride and arrogance gets passed down to the next generations. It’s not only, in some ways, taught; this sort of stubbornness also appears to have a genetic component, as well. Whenever our minds and hearts are rewired with injustice toward others and disobedience toward God, that wacky wiring gets passed down to the next generations.

It is quite likely that past trauma has a lot to do with skewed minds and hearts.

Epigenetics is a scientific field which investigates how environment influences our genes. Trauma does not alter our actual DNA sequence; but it does impact how that sequence is read and utilized in our body.

When an individual experiences trauma, their body may adapt by adjusting gene expression, and some of these changes can be passed on to their children. It’s like passing on genetic notes to our progeny – which means that these notes can be rewritten (and rewired) by our own life experiences and actions.

I am not a genetic scientist, yet this may be something akin to the divine warning about generational sin, arising from a generation’s trauma experience, after being enslaved and mistreated for 400 years in Egypt. In giving the Law to Moses, God then said:

“The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” (Exodus 34:6-7, NIV)

Whether any of us knows anything about genetics and epigenetics, or not, there yet remains the need for a prayer of confession. It is necessary to acknowledge our own sins, as well as the sins of our ancestors.

In their prayer of confession, the Levites in Nehemiah’s time acknowledged and confessed their own guilt, and the guilt of their ancestors, of being the following:

  1. Obstinate. They stubbornly presumed God would be with them, then obstinately did whatever the heck they wanted.
  2. Stubborn. They were “stiff-necked” and refused to obey God when they didn’t want to.
  3. Forgetful. Not an accidental forgetting, but a purposeful neglect to remember what God had done for the people.
  4. Idolatrous. It was the people’s impatience with waiting for Moses on Mount Sinai that led to the golden calf idol disaster. Failing to accept God’s timetable will always lead to a bevy of bad behavior.
  5. Disobedient. The most sinister form of this is obeying halfway, and believing that you have completely done your duty for God, i.e. the sin of one person, Achan, affecting the entire community. (Joshua 7:1, 10-12, 20-26)
  6. Complaining. Murmuring and grumbling is the dissatisfying attitude and speech of ingrates. When directed at God, it is a failure of faith, replaced with a belief that God is mean and/or capricious.

Confession and repentance are the remedies to both individual and communal guilt. And that is exactly what Ezra and Nehemiah organized the post-exilic Israelites to do, publicly.

Not only did they offer a prayer of confession and repentance, but they also acknowledged and believed God’s faithfulness and mercy to forgive, renew, and restore.

Indeed, God’s grace is greater than all of our sin.

The Levites were not simply offering a mechanical liturgical formula for corporate confession. They were crying out with heartfelt confession to the God they believed was listening and would respond.

As the Levites led the people in confession and repentance, they pointed to the following attributes and activities of God which they put all of their trust in:

God forgives.

He made known his ways to Moses,
    his deeds to the people of Israel:
The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
    slow to anger, abounding in love.
He will not always accuse,
    nor will he harbor his anger forever;
he does not treat us as our sins deserve
    or repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
    so great is his love for those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
    so far has he removed our transgressions from us. (Psalm 103:7-12, NIV)

God guides.

He guides me along the right paths
    for his name’s sake. (Psalm 23:3, NIV)

God provides.

He has caused his wonders to be remembered;
    the Lord is gracious and compassionate.
He provides food for those who fear him;
    he remembers his covenant forever. (Psalm 111:4-5, NIV)

God sustains.

I lie down and sleep;
    I wake again, because the Lord sustains me. (Psalm 3:5, NIV)

When all is said and done, the centrality of God is humanity’s ballast. As we orient all of life around the Lord, this is what makes all the difference in coming to grips with our past, present, and future.

May it be so, to the glory of God.

Mercy Is Coming (Micah 7:8-20)

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality Blog, Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment
“Justice Tempered with Mercy,” an oil painting by Emil Bisttram, 1936

Do not rejoice over me, my enemy,
        because when I fall, I will rise;
            if I sit in darkness, the Lord is my light.
I must bear the raging of the Lord,
    for I have sinned against him,
        until he decides my case and provides justice for me.
    He will bring me out into the light;
        I will see by means of his righteousness.
    Then my enemy will see;
        shame will cover her who said to me:
            “Where is the Lord your God?”
    My eyes will see her ruin;
        now she will become something to be trampled,
            like mud in the streets.

A day for the building of your walls!
        On that day, the boundary will be distant.
        On that day, they will come to you from Assyria and the cities of Egypt,
            from Egypt to the River,
            from sea to sea,
            and from mountain to mountain.
And the earth will become desolate because of her inhabitants,
        because of the fruit of their actions.

Shepherd your people with your staff,
        the sheep of your inheritance,
        those dwelling alone in a forest in the midst of Carmel.
    Let them graze in Bashan and Gilead, as a long time ago.

As in the days when you came out of the land of Egypt,
        I will show Israel wonderful things.

Nations will see and be ashamed of all their strength;
        they will cover their mouths;
        their ears will be deaf.

They will lick dust like the snake,
        like things that crawl on the ground.
They will come trembling from their strongholds to the Lord our God;
        they will dread and fear you!
Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity,
        overlooking the sin of the few remaining for his inheritance?
    He doesn’t hold on to his anger forever;
        he delights in faithful love.
He will once again have compassion on us;
        he will tread down our iniquities.
You will hurl all our sins into the depths of the sea.
You will provide faithfulness to Jacob, faithful love to Abraham,
        as you swore to our ancestors a long time ago. (Common English Bible)

The prophecy of Micah was directed to the people because of the nation’s messed up social and political relations. Unrighteousness had thoroughly drenched the land. In this situation, the nation groaned; Micah responded to them and interceded for the people; God agreed with it all; and Micah concluded with a theological reminder of who God is and what God is like.

The nation of Israel was in a bad way during the eighth century B.C.E. because of their injustice toward one another. The leaders only thought of themselves, and not the people as a whole. Unfaithfulness ran so deep that not even one’s closest friends or relatives could be trusted.

To be a faithful and righteous person during that time required a resolve to wait for God’s deliverance – because there was no way any one person or group of people could fix any of it.

And this is the nature of hope – it can only be understood and realized by knowing, sensing, and feeling hopelessness in all of its despair. We do not hope for something we already possess.

The prophet Micah recognized the situation of the nation for what it was, as well as the consequences to having injustice throughout the land. Yet, he also looked forward to a time when God’s wrath will move from God’s people to the people’s enemies.

It may seem as if the Lord is either slow, not paying attention, or doesn’t care; but God’s timing is not the same as ours. Divine deliverance will come when divine deliverance will come.

The circumstances of Israel’s national sins were ripe not only for God’s judgment, but also for Micah’s prayers on behalf of the people. He called on the Lord to shepherd Israel, while at the same time, to put Israel’s enemies in their place.

And God, out of the storehouse of divine mercy, granted an assurance of pardon.

But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from everything we’ve done wrong. (1 John 1:9, CEB)

Micah affirmed the grace and mercy of God. He had the confident expectation that the Lord would cast all of Israel’s sins into the depths of the sea. Guilt, shame, and despair will not have the last word; the final word belongs to mercy.

Into a world full of cynicism and sarcasm, hopelessness and despair, it is vitally important that we have faithful and godly individuals who have a settled hope. This is what it means to be a remnant, a small minority of people who hold onto that which is just, right, and good.

We are to quietly go about our business of bringing justice, mercy, and love to this world with a quiet and confident expectation that God’s grace will overcome and overwhelm everything in its path.

Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name. Amen.

Restoration (Jeremiah 30:1-11a)

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Christian Spirituality Blog, Daily Bible Reading Blog, Year BLeave a comment

This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Write in a book all the words I have spoken to you. The days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will bring my people Israel and Judah back from captivity and restore them to the land I gave their ancestors to possess,’ says the Lord.”

These are the words the Lord spoke concerning Israel and Judah: 

“This is what the Lord says:

“‘Cries of fear are heard—
    terror, not peace.
Ask and see:
    Can a man bear children?
Then why do I see every strong man
    with his hands on his stomach like a woman in labor,
    every face turned deathly pale?
How awful that day will be!
    No other will be like it.
It will be a time of trouble for Jacob,
    but he will be saved out of it.

“‘In that day,’ declares the Lord Almighty,
    ‘I will break the yoke off their necks
and will tear off their bonds;
    no longer will foreigners enslave them.
Instead, they will serve the Lord their God
    and David their king,
    whom I will raise up for them.

“‘So do not be afraid, Jacob my servant;
    do not be dismayed, Israel,’
declares the Lord.
‘I will surely save you out of a distant place,
    your descendants from the land of their exile.
Jacob will again have peace and security,
    and no one will make him afraid.
I am with you and will save you,’
    declares the Lord.” (New International Version)

The cry of Jeremiah the prophet, by Slovakian artist, 1937

To be restored is a beautiful thing, namely because it presupposes that someone or a group of people were dilapidated and in need of healing. Restoration implies that something was lost, but now is found.

If you have lost things like finances, a home, a car, precious memorial items, a job; or relationships such as a marriage, a friendship, estrangement from family members; or your health to disease or disaster; or even lost your mind or your soul – you can completely understand the longing for restoration and wholeness.

The Jews lost their homeland, their property, their temple, and their dignity to the invading Babylonians. Babylon took everything from Judea. The people became exiled in a strange land. Only some poor folk were left behind in a land that was ravaged.

This was the place that was once referred to as a land of milk and honey, a good home of abundance and blessing. But in the prophet Jeremiah’s day, it was becoming a thing of the past. Would the people ever recover what they had lost? Is restoration even a possibility? Could they learn to hope again?

Into a time of distress and despair, God spoke, and said that yes, it is possible; yes, restoration can and will happen. The people will not be in captivity forever.

Things can get so bad that you become physically sick, emotionally spent, mentally fearful, and spiritually disheartened – as if your life has been ripped from you without mercy and with malice. Yet, what is true of us today is not necessarily going to be true of us tomorrow.

Oppression is a terrible thing. To be constantly harassed by others or by chronic pain or by adverse situations is draining; it sucks the life out of us. Into these sorts of circumstances, God says to us, “I am with you, and I will save you.”

Perhaps tomorrow comes and nothing changes. The pain is still there. The mean-spirited people haven’t gone anywhere. The lost things are not found. And yet, there is something primal and universal which has always been here and shall never go away, no matter the circumstances: God is with us, and God loves us.

If we have the spiritual eyes to see, we will notice that God is alongside us, weeping with us. God knows a thing or two about the sort of suffering and pain that is unimaginable.

“Why does not God do something sooner, if God is so loving and powerful?” you may ask. If you are a parent, you have likely had a child ask you why you are doing something to them that feels awful. You know that emotion of feeling hurt alongside them. You also know that there is sometimes no way you can adequately explain to them what’s going on.

You commit yourself to being there, being present, and assuring the child that you aren’t going anywhere. So, when it comes to us, why is it so hard to understand that God is not a divine Santa or a cosmic Genie granting our every wish? If we want kids to understand, then perhaps we ought to first understand our own relationship as God’s children.

There will be times of trial and tribulation, even divine judgment. Yet there shall also be deliverance from evil, and salvation from sin, death, and hell. The yoke of oppression won’t last because there is the promise of restoration.

No matter how nasty, misguided, or sinful the political leadership and governmental system, none of those rulers or politicians have the last word – God does, not them. Grace has the final say, utilizing a restorative mercy which cannot be undone.

The days are coming when there will be a new future, based in the resolve of God to accomplish it. Fortunes shall be restored. Rehabilitation and renewal are ahead for the faithful. Healing will happen, whether it be in this life, or the next.

Things may seem impossibly hopeless now, but God can and will overrule the present evil machinations of oppressive rulers. Terror may be on every side, yet the Lord will break the bonds of oppression; God will burst the unjust practices. Indeed, God will save.

Therefore, we need not fear, for God is with us; and divine intervention is nearly here.

O God of heavenly powers, by your holy might, be present to us in your goodness and grace; banish all injustice and unrighteousness and restore your people in the strength of faith. Amen.