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Thursday, December 9, 2021

Hope and Trust

The message given in the Sunday night service in the Gettysburg United Methodist church.  The Bible verses used are Zephaniah 3:14-20.

            God decided to send the Savior into the world a little over two thousand years ago.  Did you ever wonder why God chose that particular time to send the Savior?

We’re not told--the Bible does not say why God chose that particular time.  We assume God must have had reasons.  I don’t think God ever does anything for no reason, and God certainly would not have let the coming of the Savior be done at random.  There must have been some way in which the conditions were just right for the Savior to come into the world at that specific time.

I’m sure God took all kinds of things into consideration in making the decision to send the Savior to the world right then.  But it seems to me that one of the things God took into consideration had to be that the world would be ready for the Savior.  In other words, there had to be a significant number of people who would be willing to accept a Savior when He came.  Not everyone, of course.  Everyone did not accept Jesus then, just as everyone does not accept Jesus now.  But a significant number.  Enough to be able to spread the word about Jesus, and to continue to spread the word after Jesus went back to heaven.

And one of the things necessary for people to be willing to accept a Savior, would seem to be that people knew they needed a Savior.  And maybe we think, well, everyone should know they need a Savior, but if we think about it, we know that’s not true.  There are plenty of people today who don’t realize they need a Savior.  That’s probably always been the case in human history.

How do you make sure people know they need a Savior?  By letting some things go wrong.  Maybe letting a lot of things go wrong.  And that’s what God did.  Israel was allowed to be taken over by other countries.  So was Judah.  They were allowed to be subject to oppressive political leaders and systems.  Their economy went bad.  They were sent into exile.  All kinds of bad things happened to God’s people, the people of Israel and Judah.

Now, understand, I’m not saying God deliberately caused bad things to happen.  What I think God did is make the people of Israel and Judah to deal with the consequences of what they’d done.  They’d abandoned God.  They’d chased after other gods.  They thought they did not need God anymore.  They became arrogant.  And their arrogance, and their abandonment of God, caused them to make mistakes.  Their political opponents took advantage of their arrogance and their mistakes, and a lot of bad things happened as a result.

When these bad things happened, people reacted.  At first, they did not understand.  But God spoke to them through the Old Testament prophets.  God explained why things had happened as they had.  But, God said, things will not be like this forever.  There will come a day when things change.  God wanted them to know that, as bad as their situation was, it was not hopeless.  In fact, with God, our situations are never hopeless.  God is hope, just as surely as God is love.

God, speaking through Zephaniah, tells the people better days are coming.  There will be a day when the people of Israel and Judah sing and shout.  God will take away their punishment and turn back their enemies.  The Lord is described as a mighty warrior, and God, speaking through Zephaniah, tells people what that mighty warrior will do.

God will “deal with all who oppressed you”.  God will rescue the lame.  Gather the exiles.  Gather them and bring them home.  God will “restore your very fortunes before your eyes.”

That had to all sound good to the people of Israel and Judah.  But the thing is, God never said when God was going to do all this.  In our reading for tonight, we keep reading phrases like “on that day” and “at that time”.  But God never said when “that day” or “that time” were going to be.  

God made a promise to the people of Israel and Judah--but God did not say when that promise would be fulfilled.  God gave them no idea about that.  It might be soon, it might be a long time in the future.  It might be in their time, it might be in their great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren’s time.  Or later.  They had no way to know.

God gave them hope.  God gave them hope that things would not always be the way there were at that time.  God gave them hope--God gave them a promise--that things would get better.  But that’s all God gave them.  I’m sure people wanted things to get better right now--we all want things to get better right now--but that’s not how it had to happen.  They had to wait.  They had to hold onto that hope, and that promise, and wait.

But it was not just a matter of waiting.  It was a matter of trusting.  Trusting not only that God would keep God’s promise, but a trusting that God would keep it at the right time.  Again, I’m sure people wanted God to keep that promise right now.  I’m sure they did not understand why God was not keeping God’s promise right now.  But when God did not act right now, they needed to trust that whatever time God chose to keep God’s promise would be the right time, even if they did not understand.

That’s when we find out whether we really have faith in God--when we keep trusting God even when we don’t understand.  When we continue to believe God will keep God’s promises even when God does not act when we want God to act.  When we continue to trust that whatever time God chooses to act will be the right time, even when it seems to us that the right time is now.

A lot of us look around at our world now, and we see a lot of things going wrong.  And please, don’t take that in a political sense.  No matter what our political beliefs are, we can all agree that there are a lot of things going on in the world that don’t seem right.  And we wonder why God is not doing something about that.  We wonder why God is letting things be as they are, and in fact why God seems to be letting things get worse.  A lot of people are praying to God, asking God to do something, but God does not seem to be doing anything.  We wonder why not.

And I wonder, too.  And I cannot give you the answer–I don’t claim to know the mind of God.  But I think two things are possible.  Well, there are probably more than two things that are possible, but two that came to my mind.  One is that, just as with the coming of Jesus, God is getting us ready.  Maybe God is waiting to act until people are ready to recognize that it is God that’s acting.  Again, I’m not saying God is causing the bad things to happen.  But God may be allowing them to happen so that we will realize that we need God to act, and that the only way things will get better is when God acts.

Another possibility, of course, is that God is acting now, and we just don’t see it.  God may be doing all kinds of things right now that we’re not aware of.  After all, think about what happened when Jesus came to earth on that first Christmas night.  How many people knew what was happening?  Mary and Joseph, of course.  Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth.  The wise men.  Herod, once the wise men told him.  The shepherds, on the night that it happened.

And that’s it.  That’s the list.  How many people is that?  Ten?  Twenty?  Out of the hundreds of millions of people living on earth two thousand years ago, these few people, not even a handful of people, knew what was happening.  Those few people were the only ones who knew that the Savior of the world was being born.

For all we know, something similar may be happening now.  Not the Savior coming to earth again–the Bible makes it pretty clear that when Jesus comes again, he’s going to come in glory and everyone’s going to know about it.  But God may have started something that’s going to be huge, momentous, world-changing, and we just don’t know about it yet.  And we may not know about it for some time yet.  But eventually, we will know.  Everyone will know.  And it will be awesome.

Until that happens, remember this:  God never acts at random.  God has reasons for everything that God does.  We may not know the reasons, we may never understand the reasons, but God has them.  That’s true of the times God acts, and it’s true of the times God waits to act.  

God acted to bring the Savior to the world at just the right time.  God acts in our world at just the right time.  God acts in our lives at just the right time, too.  And God will send the Savior back to the world at just the right time.  That’s the promise we have from God.  That’s the hope we have from God.  Hold onto that promise.  Hold onto that hope.  Wait.  And Trust.  God is always faithful.

 


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