It's definitely poetic pain....a few hours before we are to enter Noah's Ark....and as I type this I am looking from the hotel room window at a deluge....Noah's Ark being the Ark Encounter in Kentucky.
It affects me at times more than others. I struggle with it....and the only balm is God's Word.....particularly the Psalms. Forty years ago....or thereabouts....most of us in evangelicalism....just about all of us being a part of a remarkable movement of God's Spirit in America....we knew that God was going to judge America....and the world....for what we had become....but here is the kicker....we are so much worse now than we were back then....and we don't even recognize God's judgments....even as we are increasingly being afflicted with them! Actually....that we are not aware of these being judgments....is a judgment in itself.
America is so far gone it is hard to grasp. We in evangelicalism today have been lured away from the gospel. Revelation's letter to the Ephesians describes it best....for many of us anyway....in that we have lost our....'first love.' You could see this with Covid....where we showed so little compassion. We turned....
(with a little help from those pundits who haven't a clue as to what the gospel is)....we turned wearing a simple mask into a constitutional crisis. We seem to have no compassion anymore for immigrants. We lived and breathed being 'born again' back four decades ago. Today we do not even seem to know what that means. We recruit more than evangelize.
The pandemic should have revitalized us in our faith....instead it mobilized us in our politics. What is happening in Russia and the Ukraine today should have by all rights if nothing else sobered us....but our minds are only on the November elections. We are so remarkably self-serving in everything that one as old as I am can only watch....amazed at how similar we in America are to rebellious Israel of old....and her "treacherous" sister Judah. We saw at first how half of America rejected God....we watched it happen....but we did not fear how God departed from them....rather we just pretended to return to the Lord. Jeremiah....astonished himself.....describing it thusly...."And the LORD said to me. 'Faithless Israel has shown herself more righteous than treacherous Judah'."
When I do get in that Ark....Lord willing....I intend to look around....knowing that surely these people did not travel hundreds of miles....not believing what it represents. I hopefully expect the same feeling of fellowship and edification as when visiting the Billy Graham library in Charlotte....for no one....or very few anyway....are going to stop by that rustic structure....without cleaving to that wonderful moment of their own salvation!
As for tonight....the lyrics to that 60s hit song written by Tony Jo White comes to mind....the song....Rainy Night In Georgia.....the constant refrain being...."Lord I believe it's rainin' all over the world"....and I do believe that....but right behind those clouds filled with rain....are those clouds that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be coming back in.....just as He was taken up.
