Pastors' Blog

You probably saw the headline a few days ago, “As famines of ‘biblical proportion’ loom, Security Council urged to ‘act fast’” (UN News www.news.un.org/en/story/2020/04/1062272). Biblical proportions? Weren’t we talking about famines a few days ago ourselves?

“Noting that the global spread of COVID-19 this year has sparked 'the worst humanitarian crisis since World War Two', Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP) David Beasley pointed to deepening crises, more frequent natural disasters and changing weather patterns, saying 'we’re already facing a perfect storm’.”

The United Nation news website continues: “As millions of civilians in conflict-scarred nations teeter on the brink of starvation, he said, 'famine is a very real and dangerous possibility'. 

Mr. Beasley painted a grim picture of 135 million people facing crisis levels of hunger or worse, coupled with an additional 130 million on the edge of starvation prompted by Coronavirus, noting that WFP currently offers a lifeline to nearly 100 million people – up from about 80 million just a few years ago. 'If we can’t reach these people with the life-saving assistance they need, our analysis shows that 300,000 people could starve to death every single day over a three-month period', he upheld. 'This does not include the increase of starvation due to COVID-19’” (ibid).

Was that 300,000 people starving to death every day for three months? Do you mean 27 million people? A crippling pandemic followed by famines “of biblical proportions”—no wonder he calls it “a perfect storm.”

Did you know God prophesied a devastating global famine before the end of the world? The shepherd prophet Amos recorded the prediction: “'The days are coming,' declares the Sovereign Lord, 'when I will send a famine through the land—not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it’” (Amos 8:11-12).

A famine of biblical proportions—but not a famine of food—rather a global famine driven by desperate hunger for the Word of God that apparently will no longer be found.

Will all the Bibles on earth disappear? That seems highly unlikely. Rather Amos’ somber warning depicts a time when God’s appeals to this civilization will finally cease. Humanity will have had its golden opportunity to respond to “the last rays of merciful light, the last message of mercy to be given to the world . . . a revelation of His character of love” (Christ’s Object Lessons 415). Having uttered their irrevocable No to God, perhaps these like the worried antediluvians outside the ark’s closed-door offer to reconsider their No. But it is too late. “They will not find it”—the words of God, the promise of the Savior, the offer of forgiveness and restoration. 

But good news—this sad word doesn’t have to be the last word for this civilization right now. Why? Because you and I very well know where the Bread of Life can still be found in glorious supply—where the Water of Life still flows in crystal streams. “Then Jesus declared, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty’” (John 6:35). Knowing what we know or Whom we know, we remain God’s most effective and final strategy to stave off the predicted global famine! 

Which is why when this lockdown is lifted, I'm praying none of us will go back to letting everybody else be Christ’s witnesses. No—you and I thus far have been spared the frontal assault of the coronavirus pandemic—which makes us God’s humble strategy to stave off a spiritual famine of biblical proportions. Our friendly deeds of love, our simple witness for Jesus are a revelation of God’s character of love to people more open to Him now than perhaps ever before. 

As someone once said—“Witnessing is one beggar telling other beggars where we found bread.” And that really is good news.

No sense beating around the bush. Let's pretend we're kids once again and it’s very OK for us to pester our father with the familiar question: "Are we there yet?" Of course, I’m not thinking of our father, but rather our Father who is in heaven. 

I.e., God—are we close to calling this pandemic off (we, of course, meaning You)? Haven't we pretty much learned what we need to learn by now? You know—the lesson about how quickly life can irrevocably change—we got it. Or the lesson about how important patience is for our spiritual growth—got it again (sort of). So, dear Lord—since it's now been five weeks and we’ve learned our lessons—we promise—is it OK for us to ask: Are we there yet?

In The Atlantic science writer, Ed Yong describes the reality we face: "This physical-distancing strategy is working, but at such an economic cost that it can't be sustained indefinitely. When restrictions relax, as they are set to do on April 30, the coronavirus will likely surge back, as it is now doing in Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other Asian states that had briefly restrained it. As I wrote last month, the only viable endgame is to play whack-a-mole with the coronavirus, suppressing it until a vaccine can be produced. With luck, that will take 18 to 24 months. During that time, new outbreaks will probably arise. Much about that period is unclear, but the dozens of experts whom I have interviewed agree that life as most people knew it cannot fully return. ‘I think people haven’t understood that this isn't about the next couple of weeks," said Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota. “This is about the next two years.'" (www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/pandemic-summer-coronavirus-reopening-back-normal/609940/). 

Did you catch that? "Life as most people knew it cannot fully return." He means “ever."

Yong goes on: "The pandemic is not a hurricane or a wildfire. It is not comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Such disasters are confined in time and space. The SARS-CoV-2 virus will linger through the year and across the world. 'Everyone wants to know when this will end,’ said Devi Sridhar, a public-health expert at the University of Edinburgh. 'That's not the right question. The right question is: How do we continue?'" (ibid).

"How do we continue?"

That seemed to be on the mind of Jesus that Tuesday just before His Friday execution. I came across it a few days ago here in my lock-down study at home—one intriguing line: "'By your patience possess your souls'" (Luke 21:19 NKJV). The Greek word for "patience" is from hupomeno ("to remain under" or "to endure"), which of course is what patience is all about, remaining pinned down by circumstances utterly out of your control. You remember from our Livestream Agape Feast a couple of Sabbaths ago the same word described the four walls of dread that pressed in tighter and tighter on Jesus on Calvary. "He endured [hupomeno] the cross." Literally pinned down—not so much unable, but very much unwilling to extricate Himself, which defines the magnitude of what His love endured to save the likes of you and me.

And I complain about my circumstances after a few weeks of being pinned down in my comfortable space by this lock-down?

Interestingly this same hupomeno appears in another one-liner, this one in the Apocalypse, describing God's endgame friends before Jesus returns: "Here is the patience of the saints; here are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus" (Revelation 14:12). Pinned down-and-under kind of patience—the very patience I don't have but I want very much to possess. "By your patience possess your souls." Jesus did. His friends will. And by God’s grace, I seek to learn His lesson here in my lock-down.

"Are we there yet?" Turns out we are much closer than we ever realized before—which makes this a very good time to be learning our lesson.

Elijah remains one of the great heroes of Scripture. And everybody remembers that moment, when after three and half debilitating years of drought and famine, he and the wicked king Ahab meet once again.

But don't forget the backstory of their meeting. Three and half years earlier, unannounced Elijah strode into the monarch’s throne room with a thundering pronouncement: "'As the LORD, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word'" (1 Kings 17:1). With that, he vanished. But don't miss the key phrase, "except at my word." I.e., this vagabond prophet held the key to any recovery from the nation's devastating calamity.

Insert here one more line from the New Testament to further illumine the backstory: "Elijah was a human being, even as we are. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years" (James 5:17). Catch that? Elijah's prayers personally solicited the divine judgment on the land! So it was no idle threat for the prophet to declare the crisis would not end until he said so.

Another writer agrees: "Viewing this [national] apostasy from his mountain retreat, Elijah was overwhelmed with sorrow. In anguish of soul he besought God to arrest the once-favored people in their wicked course, to visit them with judgments, if need be, that they might be led to see in its true light their departure from Heaven" (Prophets and Kings 120 emphasis supplied).

He prayed it would not rain—and it did not rain. King Ahab's futile search for the pronouncer of doom over the intervening 1,260 days finally ends when the haughty monarch spots the prophet. "When he saw Elijah, he said to him, 'Is that you, you troubler of Israel?'" The blame game! "'I have not made trouble for Israel,' Elijah replied, 'But you and your father's family have. You have abandoned the LORD's commandments and have followed the Baals'" (1 Kings 18:17-18).

Guess what. It's going to happen again, this notion of the majority blaming the minority for their ills. I did a double-take when a physician friend of mine out West alerted me to an op-ed headline a few days ago, "The Religious Right's Hostility to Science Is Crippling Our Response [to the Coronavirus Pandemic]" (New York Times, March 27, 2020). Using a paint-everybody-with-the-same-brush sort of logic, the op-ed writer essentially attempts to draw a line from hyper-reactionary evangelical responses to science over the last century and a half to the government’s response to our national pandemic today. Are evangelical Christians to blame? Hardly! But Ahab’s blame game is an easy one to play.

And it will happen again one day. "Satan is exercising his power. He sweeps away the ripening harvest, and famine and distress follow. He imparts to the air a deadly taint, and thousands perish by the pestilence [like the coronavirus]. These visitations are to become more and more frequent and disastrous. . . . And then the great deceiver will persuade men that those who serve God are causing these evils. . . . Thus [Ahab's] accusation urged of old against the servant of God [Elijah] will be repeated and upon grounds equally well established. . . . [The nation] will pursue a course toward God's ambassadors very similar to that which apostate Israel pursued toward Elijah" (The Great Controversy 590).

How then shall we survive, we who wait out this calamitous pandemic? The same way Elijah and all of God's friends through history have survived—casting ourselves upon His saving grace night and day, loving and caring for our neighbors, reflecting the self-sacrificing compassion of our Lord Jesus, volunteering to help in communities desperate for assistance, heeding the government’s mandated protocols for social isolation and virus containment, praying for those on the healthcare frontlines, interceding on behalf of a planet under siege, and calling upon God to open a new door through which we might yet reach our little worlds before Christ our King returns. We don’t have time to blame. God gives us the grace to help and to heal.

The well-known line from Psalm 2 actually reads like this: “The One enthroned in heaven laughs” (v 4). QUES: What would cause God to break out in such laughter? ANS: A political coalition here on earth—one targeting His kingdom (vv 1-3). In this season when the coronavirus and the US political scene are the preoccupations of the media, I know well the axiom: politics is the third rail of polite company—touch it and it is curtains for you. But let me seek to be non-partisan and still touch on it.

For months both national and international news media (themselves aligned politically) have been engrossed in American politics. Given this election year, who’s surprised? But I wonder sometimes if God doesn’t look down from heaven and sadly shake His head, or, as the psalmist suggests, “laughs.” How puny our political alliances and machinations must appear to the Supreme One of the universe! Not that God hasn’t suffered at the hands of those alliances Himself.

The arrest, trial, and execution of Jesus of Nazareth remain a classic demonstration of political alliances between strange bedfellows—Pilate and Herod, Rome and Judea, the Pharisees and the Sadducees, et al. Heaven knows the meaning and pain of political confederacies. The followers of Christ (before and after His incarnation) have been ravaged for millennia by such alliances.

But in this season when political stratagems and intrigue are the parlor game of American households, we do well to remember the psalmist’s sober depiction of God laughing over humanity’s alliances. His followers know that human politics can neither deter nor deflect the divine agenda for this civilization. As the converted king Nebuchadnezzar himself testified of God: “‘His dominion is an eternal dominion . . . He does what He pleases . . . All His ways are just and those who walk in pride He is able to humble’” (Daniel 4:34-37).

I’m reading Jen Pollock Michel’s new book, Surprised by Paradox: The Promise of And in an Either-Or World—“. . . for that matter the kingdom does not grow because of political influence and social clout. In fact, Scripture makes clear, God’s kingdom is frequently in conflict with the pharaohs and caesars of its day. Paradoxically, the kingdom of God seems to have all the vulnerability—and virulence—of a little seed. Even more surprising, the only way this seed is ultimately harvested is through suffering. Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, Jesus said. God’s holy hill isn’t Capitol Hill but Golgatha” (93).

How true—but how easily we are captivated by Capitol Hill more than Golgatha.

Pray for Capitol Hill and the White House, we should and we must, Paul is clear (1 Timothy 2:1-4). But to become consumed by politics and feed on its detritus is surely a dangerous mistake for third millennial followers of Jesus. Go ahead and laugh—God does. But beware of the very forces (the strange bedfellows) that one day will unite themselves against God’s endgame community. To silence the voice(s) of the conscience-pricking minority (as at Golgotha) has always been the rebel angel’s stratagem. Which is why now is the time to declare our sole loyalty to the God of heaven, who may be laughing now, but who will be returning soon.