A City Of Refuge

 

 (Small Excerpt from CULTURE WATCH.)

Why Is This Happening To Us?

We need to see the bigger picture as we look around at what is happening to us. 

 In his 1983 Templeton Prize speech Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously said this: “Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: ‘We have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened’.”

 The biblical Christian believes that God is both transcendent and immanent. He is the creator of all that exists, but he is also intimately involved in his creation. So we can rightly ask if and how God might be involved when things like plagues or tsunamis or wars or governmental collapse take place.

We may not have the direct and clear prophetic word as to why these things are happening today, but we do have some general biblical principles that we can draw upon, such as:

-God cares about nations as well as individuals.
-Righteousness (and unrighteousness) does have a bearing on national wellbeing.
-A people living in defiance of the living God cannot long thrive and survive.
-God does seek to get our attention in various ways, and can use natural occurrences and other things to do so.
-God takes sin and rebellion against him seriously, and will respond, either now or in the future.

So the next time you cry out and ask, ‘Why is all this happening to us?,’ you need to bear in mind that there is a God with whom we all have to do, and he may well be in the events of the day – or can use them – as he seeks to wake us up and get us to where we ought to be.