Word for the Week: Immunity or Identification?
Elijah said to Ahab... ‘there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word.’
1 Kings 17:1
Drought is devastating. Drought is also indiscriminate, a blunt weapon. The judgment fell on Jew and Gentile (as the widow at Zarephath was to discover), and on both the innocent and the guilty among the people of Israel – there was no exemption for the seven thousand who, as God later told Elijah, had not bowed the knee to Baal.
Some of the Psalms seem to suggest that believers will be spared. ‘If you make the Most High your dwelling’, wrote the psalmist, ‘no disaster will come near your tent’ (Psalm 91:9-10). But other Psalms lament the sufferings of the righteous: ‘Your wrath has swept over me, your terrors have destroyed me’ (Psalm 88:16). And the experience of our brothers and sisters in Christ in many countries, whose streams have dried up, whose crops have failed again, whose cattle have died and whose children are wasting away, remind us that glib answers only deceive.
Taking Scripture as a whole, we must concede that God doesn’t promise us immunity. We are all part of a fallen humanity in a fallen world. Very occasionally, as in the case of Elijah, God may make special, individual arrangements, but, as Jesus said, ‘Your Father sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous’.
Jesus, after all, took upon himself our human flesh and our human environment. His incarnation was a very physical thing. The one who promised living water also suffered from thirst and tiredness and all the other hardships endured by the people he came to serve. And it was because he himself suffered when he was tempted that he is able to help those who are being tempted (Hebrews 2:18).
And that surely gives us a clue to how we should respond to the disasters that sometimes engulf us. We may pray for deliverance, certainly, and sometimes the Lord will miraculously intervene. But by suffering with other people, we can offer them the comfort and hope that lie beyond suffering; and by our steadfastness can point to the one who promises that in the fullness of time he will make all things new.
Helen Parry
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