Exactly What Our World Needs

In order to get where we are trying to go in this post I need you to engage your imagination for a minute.  I want you to imagine yourself as a victim of oppression.  (I don't mean a victimista of our American culture; you know, the guy complaining that a few of the down feathers in his mattress topper sometimes poke through and irritate his skin, or the girl who thinks that her mild occasional headache or bloaty feeling entitle her to being coddled and catered to because of her "serious medical condition.")  I mean a real victim.  Imagine you are someone forced into slavery, or someone imprisoned by militant Muslims.  Imagine you are a journalist in a North Korean prison camp, catching and eating rats to keep you alive so you can keep suffering and carrying out difficult and meaningless tasks for the next twenty years.  Or imagine you and your family are painfully hungry every day because wicked rulers have seized control of everything "for the good of the people." 

Got it?

Okay, now imagine what your heart is longing for.  Imagine your prayer life.  Does it have to do with your nephew's cold, which blend of coffee to choose, or wanting to feel #blessed?

What do your prayers concern?  Love, perseverance, hope, justice.

It is the last one I want us to think about.

In this thought experiment, do your prayers include a longing for God to make things right?  Do your prayers sound like many of the Psalms? 

"How long, O Lord, Will you forget me forever?"

"How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?"

"Save, O Lord, for the godly one is gone; for the faithful have vanished from among the children of man."

"Why, O Lord, do you stand far away?  Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?  In arrogance the wicked hotly pursue the poor; let them be caught in the schemes that they have devised."

"For the needy shall not always be forgotten, and the hope of the poor shall not perish forever.  Arise, O Lord!  Let not man prevail; let the nations be judged before you!  Put them in fear, O Lord!  Let the nations know that they are but men!"*

The Psalms are full of prayers for God to arise and judge, because the oppressed rightly long for judgment.  But sometimes when I read these Psalms I get a little uncomfortable.  Do you?  We hear about God's judgment and we don't like it, or at least it makes us feel funny.  It doesn't seem very...nice.  After all, isn't the greatest command to be nice to your neighbor?  Something like that.  Can you imagine Rob Bell and Oprah sitting on her patio rejoicing in God's judgment?  They actually came kind of close.

I think part of the reason we are uncomfortable with longing for God's judgment is because we don't identify with the oppressed.  We don't really like to think about the oppressed.  We don't really think about abortion, because, what a downer!  We sometimes think about sex trafficking.  It is horrendous, and it is important that it has been brought to light.  But I wonder if we like talking about that one because we can still think about sex.  If the wild success of 50 shades is any indicator, we kind of like thinking about that sort of thing.  We don't think about real hunger and poverty and war, and when we do, we start thinking that something has gone wrong with God and we don't know what to do with all of this.  We don't make a practice of praying for those in prison as though we were in prison with them.  We don't like the idea of going to Jesus outside the camp, thrown away, rejected.

But when we identify with the oppressed, or when we are oppressed ourselves, we rightly begin to long for God's judgment, for God to make things right.  This is not a childish vindictiveness, it is a built-in longing for righteousness and justice.  This is a longing for a world in which things are upright.  This is a longing for people not to be taken advantage of, and for those who take advantage to be stopped.  This is a refusal to make peace with the rampant wickedness in the world, a refusal to acknowledge that this is how it will always be.  We need a judgment day.  We need a God who is powerful enough and just enough to rise up, to step in, and to set things right.  And we have such a God, but we are often embarrassed to admit it to ourselves, or to talk to others about this aspect of God's good character.

This path of thought raises (at least) one more serious question.  Once we realign our hearts from embarrassment about judgment to longing for judgment, another troubling question arises in us.  Why hasn't God done this yet?  Where is he?  Why is he waiting so long?  This is quite a different, but a related question.  If God is so good, then where is he in the midst of human suffering and oppression?

One answer is that he is prolonging his judgment in mercy.  Peter tells us that people will start asking this question: where is the promise of his coming (to judge)?  And the answer is that he is waiting because he has  made a way for the wicked to turn in repentance and be saved from their own wickedness through the death and resurrection of Jesus.  He has a plan to fix us with love, to remake even the vilest of us.  He is incredibly patient.  If you don't know the gist of the passage I am referring to, I encourage you to go read 2 Peter 3 again.  It will only take you a minute or two.  The point is that God is delaying his judgment in mercy.  God will fully and finally judge the earth because he loves the oppressed and he loves righteousness and justice.  God hasn't judged the earth finally and fully yet because he is the kind of God who loves the wicked and oppressors, and because he delights to show mercy even to us, by granting us repentance from our wickedness.

We twist this all in our rebellion.  We say he is going to judge because he doesn't love mercy.  And we say he hasn't judged yet because he doesn't love justice.  When we think this way we have it all backwards.  God is just and merciful, and that is exactly the kind of God our world needs.  If he isn't merciful, we will all be swept away in the judgment.  If he isn't just, things will never be made right.  

Praise God, he will uphold his justice and his mercy perfectly.  He will make all things right.  The King has come, the kingdom is coming, the gates are wide open.  Come in and find hope and pardon in Christ.





*These quotes are pulled from Psalms 9-13ish if you want to follow them up.