Next Sunday's study is the death of John the Baptist (Mark 6:13-29). While considering the situation surrounding his death, I was presented with a great example of the current state of mankind.
Mobile data technology allows us to check the path ahead before we leave. If I had the discipline I could check the routes to my house or work before I leave and know of construction, accidents, and slow traffic and take an alternate route. It is a brilliant thing. No one enjoys sitting in traffic especially me - all my vehicles have manual transmissions and my clutch leg tends to quiver and cramp up after a while. But this is what we have become accustomed to and it surely bleeds into our spiritual lives.
In his infinite wisdom, the Lord allows traffics jams, accidents, and construction on the highways of our lives. So we are cruising at 65 mph on the straight and narrow road and we come to a dead stop because there are orange cones in the road - the road is washed out from under us, a rock slide throws us off the path or there is some other bottleneck, after all, it is a narrow road. I am convinced that his desire is for us to lean into Him for help and wisdom and then to serve in the situation. Instead, we tend to rant, rave and rail against the failure of our plans, the things we want and do not have because the Lord has not allowed it. We wail at the Lord instead of waiting on and waiting for him (there is a difference). When Americans say, "Wait on the Lord or wait for the Lord", they usually mean the same thing - hang tight. When the English say, "Wait on the Lord," they mean be a waiter, gird yourself and serve Him (Luke 17:8). When they say wait for the Lord they mean hang tight where you are until you receive further instructions. We are to do both. The Bible has many accounts of men and women in similar situations.
Abraham and Sarah's life seems to revolve against getting a male heir as the Lord promised. Like us they tried to handle it, find a way around the issue by introducing Hagar into their marriage bed and that created a whole swarm of problems. They had Lot to rescue and minister to, flocks to tend, local geopolitics to deal with - fiascoes with Pharaoh and Abimelech for example and many things that happened to them. They were all opportunities to wait on and wait for the Lord until his time was right - she turned 99 and she was ready to give birth. (Gen 12-21)
Ruth had aspirations when she married the Jewish boy who had moved into her home town. She had been married a while, life was cruising along and the man died, his brother died, his father died and here she was with her two female in-laws heading back to Israel to be a foreign widow. She went along with the flow of things and the Lord intervened and blessed her with a good husband, a good son and a reputation worth more than the other two put together. She has her own book in the Bible. (Ruth)
John the Baptist was doing what God called him to do - proclaiming the kingdom. He told it like it is and that landed him in trouble with Herod Antipas and his (new) wife Herodias (who is new because she used to be his brother's wife). He ends up in prison, being called to preach when Herod needed a bit of religion. In a drunken moment, he promises his step-daughter up to half his kingdom after she dances for him and his drunken buddies (inappropriate!) John has been sitting in prison wondering where he took a wrong turn, He sent word to Jesus to check if he had performed his duty because he was not sure (Luke 7). Things should have turned out differently, right? Like us, he was not sure how they should have ended but this did not look right. And then he saw the executioner coming and someone behind him with a huge silver plate. According to one fictional history book, Genghis Khan died at the hands of one of his wives who remembered how he massacred her family. A sad way for a mighty warrior to go. A sad way for the greatest among those born to women (Luke 7:28) to go - at the whim of a teenage girl. (Mark 6:14-29)
But this is EXACTLY what the all-knowing God had planned. We do not see far enough ahead, we do not see his motives, his plans, the outcomes he has in store. He sees through eternity. Everything that has been, that is and that will be is as an instant in his mind. How can we even conceive to know what is best for us as individuals when he can sort out what is best for ALL mankind. Every situation we would look at and see one person coming out on top and another getting the raw deal and another somewhere in between he worked out so that each person comes out exactly where they should be to the greatest glory of his name. And here come me with my prawn brain thinking, "I know what is best or at least what is good for my life." The nerve of some people! I will mention in passing that in all this we have absolute free will to do as we please. Do not ask me how because it makes my brain hurt.
There are two ways of ending a thing and the best way to end is in fulfillment of one's purpose. You can end an acorn with a hammer or by planting it. In the first it is destroyed, in the second it is fulfilled. Consider this - in Alaska the mighty salmon swim upstream to lay eggs and die. We find that tragic, but in their death, they feed the birds and the bears. They replenish the water and the soil of nutrients like nitrogen so that the trees grow and produce a good percentage of the oxygen in our atmosphere. They die a seemingly pathetic death, but they are fulfilled in that death. The alternative is them dying onto my plate under some mango salsa, and even then they are fulfilled for sustaining my life and providing for me the protein and omega-3-fatty acids I need. There is no waste in the kingdom of God and on an eternal scale, every single event in the lives of men will be shown to bring glory to the Almighty God.
The Lord will fulfill His plans for our lives. We need to realize that though we have a semblance of control over much else in our lives it is a semblance, we actually have very little control. Get comfortable with being out of control. It makes it easier to wait on the Lord and wait for the Lord when there is an accident blocking the road, construction or some other traffic jam.
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