Yesterday five police officers were shot in Houston. When terrible shootings happen, and sadly they’ve become all too common, people in places high and low encourage us to pray, and we do, praying for those devastated by the violence and praying for peace. After deadly shootings in San Bernardino several years ago, the headline in the New York Daily News blared, “God isn’t fixing this.”
Of course, God isn’t fixing this! God is saying, See how your life goes, America, if you don’t live in true fear of Me. Read what Paul said about the worldly wise people of his day: “Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks for him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools…. Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind…” and then follows a catalog of sins that plague our lives still today (Romans 1:21, 22, 28-32).
Do you think gun control is the solution? Or the opposite, every citizen armed? Both solutions are superficial because they presume humanity is OK, that we can fix this, ignoring that these horrific crimes are symptoms of a problem between us and God. God has a fix, but as long as we imagine we can fix evil on our own, God will keep giving us over to our self-willed ways. Everything will stay imprisoned under sin (Galatians 3:22) until more and more Americans shudder in fear before the Creator and Judge. That’s the start of repentance, not just sorrow but sorrow spoken to God. Then God speaks His fix, and we are changed for life.
“If people desert God, God must desert people. The only way He could avoid this ‘divine necessity’ (if we dare call it that) was to place our sins on His own dear Son and desert Him in our place” (Francis Rossow, “Preaching the Creative Gospel Creatively,” 31). There’s God’s fix, and you and I need to be in it.
“Stir up Your power, O Lord, and come, that by Your protection we may be rescued from the threatening perils of our sins.”