“But sir,” Gideon replied, “if the LORD is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our fathers told us about when they said, ‘Did not the LORD bring us up out of Egypt?’ But now the LORD has abandoned us and put us into the hand of Midian.” (Judges 6:13, NIV 184).
My Musings – Perhaps we grew so used to the LORD being with us that we can scarcely comprehend His apparent abandonment when not so pleasant things happen to us. Where are all the wonders when He brought this backwater fledgling Republic to a place of world prominence? Has he indeed abandoned us? Our perspective is that He has moved away from us, when in reality it is we who have moved away from Him. Barely perceptible while it was happening, because it was not abrupt, yet as we look around and see the vast distance between us, we might wonder how in the world did we get this far away?
We grew comfortable, complacent and confused. Comfortable with our blessings to such and extent that we feel a bit entitled? Did we become so complacent that we mistook these blessings as our own achievements (Make America Great Again implies we were the ones who made it great in the first place)? Have we confused maleable post-modern relative morality (“having a form of Godliness“), with the absolute righteous standards (“I change not“) of a Holy God?
My Advice – “Why has all this happened?” Has the LORD “abandoned us?” Or might there be a different perspective? If you read the context of today’s verses, you’ll find that it was indeed the people who had drifted away. The difference between them then and us now, is when they began to reap the consequences they cried out to God for deliverance. Our tendency is to scream at to God to blame Him. Let’s cry out for deliverance, rather than blame.
The Brew Is A Musing 