At times, my lonely soul cries into aparent darkness, “Who is there that will understand me, who will care for me? To whom do I matter, or who respects me as a person worth loving? Only God you say? He is mostly silent!”
Yes, He may be silent, but he is not without understanding; His situation is worse than my own.
The differential between the amounts of honor and respect God is owed, to that which he actually receives is vast, and exposes the pettiness of my own plight. The amount of appreciation He receives, the amount of honor He receives, the amount of worship he receives are all highly deficient compared to what He is due. An abject lack of sincerity, habitual hypocrisy, lip-service, and a dearth of fear and trembling are His return on His investment in His own creatures. For my part in this, I am undone. I am a man who has learned to survive without encouragement, respect, or the amount of love that I want, and I have been doing it for many years, but God has been unjustly disrespected for thousands of years. I know, when I start feeling the effects of loneliness, I can turn to God for comfort, but He has no one to turn to, no one to look up to, no one to whom He can pour out His lament. Most of the time I am treated like “the waterboy” by friends and family, but God is most often treated like a first-aid kit, shut-up in a small metal box, tucked away under the sink, kept only in-case-of-emergency; like a subservient genie-in-a-bottle, kept under cork, untended, ignored, unneeded, and unwelcome unless something erupts that is too big for the person to handle, saying “Stay out of my affairs. I’ll call you if I need you!” This makes me very sad, not only because it is prevalent in my surroundings, not only because I am personally party to this incessant charade, but because few tolerate even hearing about it, or having it openly exposed as the vast injustice that it is. Many may speak of one horrible morning of injustice, 2000 years ago, the prejudicial trial, sentencing, and subsequent punishment that Jesus endured for a short time, but then add that He quickly recovered. It pacifies personal guilt and covers criminal complicity by suggesting “After He suffered, He got up, was ushered into heaven, and suffers no more, so it was kinda all worth it for him”. He made it through the torture and now He is alive, waiting at my beck-and-call, ready to put sugar into my tea and fresh biscuits on my plate."This makes me weep. Mankind does not like to consider, nor cares to be reminded, that their salvation was not bought with a momentary injustice event. Injustice toward God is unrelenting, God has endured it from the first man He created, and it continues in every moment, and from every person, ever since. Idolatry did not begin or end at the cross. What did end there was the all-but-sure conclusion that injustice and it’s incumbent death would prevail for eternity for all mankind. While suffering injustice and disrespect from His own creatures, God chose to save them from the conclusion of their insolence, “with His own arm”, “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us”. Jesus still suffers injustice, the maltreated still loves the maleficent.
When we gather on the first day of the week to remember the broken body and shed blood of our Savior, we are not remembering only a momentary injustice, but an eternal one. We are remembering that through that broken body and shed blood God conquered the resultant death of injustice, God defeated the eternal separation that the prideful insolence of man had brought upon himself. Pride and injustice did not cease at the cross, but their promise of death did for those sheep who Jesus calls His own did. We still must learn true and full jusrtice, we have much personal change in store, He that began this work in us, will complete it. Father forgive us, we surely don’t know what we have done.
KP