Happy New Year! And I hope that the New Year finds you hopeful.
Supply chains being what they are, these days we wait to receive lots of commodities that are stuck on cargo ships out in the Pacific. Thankfully, in Jesus, the grace of hope is available on demand, although hope does come at a price…
I suspect that many God-fearing Jews living in Jerusalem in 661 BC were gasping for hope.
Depending on how the kingly reign is calculated, 661 BC would have been about the 35th year of the reign of King Manasseh of Judah, the fourteenth king of Judah, and the son of the good King Hezekiah. But Manasseh was not a good king.
Several texts in the Bible tell us that Manasseh was the worst king who ever sat on the throne in Jerusalem. He reversed the reforms of his father and introduced unprecedented wickedness in the form of gross idolatry, rampant sexual immorality, unbridled violence, and injustice.
Imagine that you are living in Manasseh’s Jerusalem. You love the Lord and have endured thirty-five years of a reign of terror. You mourn no longer enjoying the God-honoring ways of King Hezekiah.
Life is hard. It is tragic. The question asked of you and of me is the question that comes to all of God’s people who face hard times. And the question is not, “Do you see the problems?” As more than one sage has noted, the ability to see problems is a cheap gift, indeed.
The set of questions that comes to us is, “Will you hope in God when life is not turning out the way you hoped? Will you embrace the reality that God is good even when life is hard? Will you live faith-fully as your life appears to be spinning out of control? Will you believe the truth, that your story (or the story of a friend) is not over, even if the current chapter is ugly?”
These would have been the questions facing a Jew in the middle of Manasseh’s fifty-five-year reign. These are the questions we all face, all the time.
Those same questions faced the people of God in year two hundred and fifty of the four hundred years of Egyptian slavery, in year twenty of the forty-year wilderness wandering, during the sad times of the Jewish Judges, in year fifty of the seventy-year Babylonian captivity, and in the reign of Caesar Augustus when a census was “taken of all the inhabited earth.“
During all these seasons, someone might have cried, “This is hopeless!” But that cry is not a cry of faith. It ignores the one reality we must not ignore: God.
This, my New Year’s post to you, is not a call to Pollyanna-ish-ness. I’m not urging you to look on the bright side or to remember, “It’s always darkest before the dawn.”
My hope-filled exhortation is that you and I will simply and fully hope in God.
Lots of faithful people died in Jerusalem before Manasseh’s repentance and reforms turned the city back to God. They never saw it. But those who hoped to see it were blessed by God – even if they only saw it on the other side.
In the same way, generations of God’s people died in Egypt, before the crossing of the Red Sea. Lots died in the wilderness, too, before crossing the Jordan River.
But they were right to believe that the story wasn’t over.
God did show up. The Red Sea parted. Manna was at the tent door, daily. The captivity ended. And in the fulness of time, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem us and that we might receive the adoption as sons and daughters of God.
Hope is available, today, to you and to me as we courageously remember God. It takes guts to fix our hope on Him, when all the evidence we see points to hopelessness.
So, let’s not rest content, exercising the cheap gift of seeing the problems all around us. Let’s ask God for a holy imagination to see what might be, to look beyond the problems, beyond the messes, to the redemption that is possible because He IS.
Hope and pray for your friend who is stuck in a mess. Her story, his story isn’t over.
Hope and pray for the child whose life is spinning out of control.
Live faithfully in the middle of the mess because God IS, and He is GOOD.
Yes, Happy New Year.
Yours…His,
Dave
