June 3
DebDay 81: Our Only Option
It's funny (okay, not funny) how some of the apocalyptic movies we've maybe stayed up late watching in the past are starting to look like our approaching reality.
Our cities hd been abandoned by the restrictions in place to combat the virus. Now our major (and not so major) cities are being destroyed by violence, malice and property damage.
We all wonder if the "new world order" will include any order.
Political polarization, cultural distrust and a severely divided society seem to be the mark of our present age. Ideologies against ideologies. People against people.
God's been through this Himself. He has been ostracized from His own people before. He knows what it is to be distrusted, hated and rejected. (Still does.)
Isaiah 32:14 says, "For the palace is forsaken, the populous city deserted; the hill and the watchtower will become dens forever, a joy of wild donkeys, a pasture of flocks.
Said this way, the infrastructure for the cultural life they had known, and assumed by entitlement, would be destroyed. Cities would be left to feral animals. God's feral people would no longer be there.
Their desire to be relationally separate from God resulted in their being spatially separated from God.
v15 give us a fix. "until the Spirit is poured upon us from on high, and the wilderness becomes a fruitful field, and the fruitful field is deemed a forest."
As our society tries to fix society, and fails, God tells us that it is only by His Spirit that anything positive can happen. It is only by His Spirit that any people group can find healing and restoration.
Verses 16-18 then say, "Then justice will dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness abide in the fruitful field. And the effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever. My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places."
We all want to think we're righteous, meaning we all want to think our own ideas and opinions are right. But none of us are capable of the kind of righteousness that results in fertile land, or insures peace, or is marked by quietness and trust -let alone that which lasts forever.
It's the righteousness of Jesus. His alone. The righteousness that has been imputed to us, undeserved by us yet accepted by God.
His righteousness alone is what will bring peace to our hearts, and heal our land. I'm praying for just that.
He is our only option.
-Mike Rydman, Lead Pastor, Radiant Church | Juneau
