The darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining. - 1 John 2:8
There has been quite a bit in the news as of late that smacks of anti-Semitism. Sadly, it appears that anti-Jewish rhetoric is alive in our nation and growing more intense. The faith we share is labeled “Judeo-Christian” for a reason. The roots of historic Christianity are sunk deep in the soil of God’s covenant relationship with the people of Israel. Our Scriptures contain sixty-six inspired books, thirty-nine of which are also included in the Jewish canon (we call it the Old Testament). Although I do not believe that national Israel (the current Jewish State) has a unique status in God’s economy (some will disagree with me here), I am one who believes that God still has a plan for ethnic Israel (see Romans 11 and Revelation 14:1-5). Regardless of what we believe about the Jewish nation today and God’s relationship with it, we are clearly called in Scripture to make no distinctions concerning people and their relative worth based on race, gender, social status or ethnicity (Gal. 3:28-29). Our prejudices are just that—prejudices—and when they lead us to mistreat humans created in the image of God, they are sinful, plain and simple. Christ-followers are called to run counter to this behavior. We can talk about how we were raised and the many ways we believe we have been mistreated all we like. All that is in the past, but Christ is our future. “Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:11).
Some years ago, a friend recommended that I read a book entitled Night, written by Elie Wiesel, a Jewish man from Romania who survived the Nazi’s “final solution” in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. He told me the book strongly impacted him and, I must say, it did me as well. I set aside one hour to peruse the book but ended up taking four hours to read every word.
Night is Wiesel’s memoir concerning the harrowing experiences he and his family lived through as the German Third Reich ramped up its pogrom against the Jews in German occupied Hungary. He survived, but his father, mother, and younger sister did not. It is heartbreaking, sobering, and soul-crushing to consider the ends to which human depravity can go- to understand the cold-hearted detachment by which one human being can consider another. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps presented him with a question he could not escape: How could the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these hellish events to occur?
After Buchenwald was liberated (incidentally, my father was part of Patton’s Third Army that liberated Buchenwald), Weisel and two surviving sisters immigrated to the United States. He went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986. His book forces the reader to ask some of the most important questions with which one can be presented. It makes one feel silly to live in a land where people clamber to see the lives of the Kardashians and Taylor Swift played out, or to know what dress or suit an A-lister from Hollywood wore to a premier, when such mind-numbing brutality is playing out across our world—where people who have had everything stripped away from them are asking the heart-wrenching question: Where are you, God?
Where is God? He is everywhere, from the death camps of WWII to the remote locals in our world where genocides are being carried out today. He was also there in 610 BC (roughly) when the prophet Habakkuk was asking him the same question. He is there with the child aborted or abandoned by her mother or father, in the hospital room where godly parents are saying goodbye to their only child who was taken by leukemia. He is there, he always has been there, and he always will be there.
Our study in Habakkuk reminds us that, despite prevailing circumstances, God is alive and well. He has called us, as he called Habakkuk, to seek him, to be astounded by him and to wonder. He calls us to trust in him completely and to know that he who is the Truth will bring forth justice and righteousness in its day.
Elie Wiesel was forced to live in a world where those who walked in darkness held power. We live in that same world today. Nevertheless, we can, and must, walk in the light. It is, after all, what demonstrates that we are God’s people. The darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining, my friends. Walk in that light!
Grace and peace,
Pastor Jym