God in Our Midst

A family member of a friend was involved in an accident killing a pedestrian with her car. We may never know why, or what caused the person to walk into the midst of highway traffic. Both families are suffering now. Modernists, latter-day Epicureans, would search for an answer of cause-and-effect believing that it was only 'atoms colliding and swerving'--determinism--that can explain this. Believers may want to look for divine answers. The truth may lie in the middle.

Since ancient Greece, Epicurean ideology has grown to where most people believe God is not involved in the affairs of men. It drove the Founding Fathers of the US to ignore the scriptural dictum that all rulers are ordained by God (Romans 13.1). How could a loving God who is for us be against us by putting Mad King George in place as a ruler? And so, they committed that God would not be in charge of the affairs of men. We would control the collisions and swerving of atoms and separate church and state. We in the US have grown up under this philosophy.

Scripture tells us otherwise. From the early chapters, we have God walking in our midst in the Garden. I believe the power of the gospel of Y'shua Meshiach is that it demonstrates again that God walks in our midst. Post-Genesis, God could only show His lament and empathy at the suffering of His people through the prophets. With the Messiah, God the Son weeps with the mourners outside the tomb of Lazarus. God the Son suffers derision ("Can anything good come from Nazareth?")...and torture and death. Y'shua Meshiach is Emmanuel: God-with-us.

It is perhaps why the slaves could relate to the Messiah so well. He understood their suffering for no or little offense, and He shows that death is not the end. Rev. Cone writes about this in The Cross and the Lynching Tree. It may also explain why the faith in the black church endures through centuries of overt oppression and covert oppression, as detailed in Jemar Tisby's The Color of Compromise.

Even after Y'shua Meschach no longer walks on this earth, though He will return as conqueror, we can know we are still in His midst because His Spirit laments with us over tragedies like the one my friend's family is suffering through.

If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare even His Own Son, but gave Him up on behalf of us all--is it possible that, having given us His Son, He would not give everything else too?...Who will separate us from the love of the Messiah? Trouble? Hardship? Persecution? Hunger? Poverty? Danger? War?...No, in all these things we are superconquerors, through the One who has loved us. (Romans 8.31-37 Complete Jewish Bible)

Paul, the writer of Romans, does not say we will avoid trouble, hardship, persecution, hunger, poverty, danger, war; he says that God's love can reach through those tragedies to tell us we will get through this by walking with Him.

(c) S.A. Ward 2017