September 2021
Dear Friends
Where is God when skies are darkening, relationships are not
working, family members are not thriving, businesses are failing, illness is
not retreating and help is not arriving?
Is he far away?
No. “He is not far from each one of us. `For in him we live and move and have our
being.’” (Acts 17:27-28)
Is he uninterested
in us? Nope. “The Lord is good to all; he has compassion
on all he has made.” (Psalm 145:9)
Is he
powerless to help us? Na. "I am the Lord, the God of all mankind.
Is anything too hard for me?” (Jeremiah
32:27)
Is he
unkind or cruel? No way. “I am the Lord,
who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth” (Jeremiah 9:24)
So where is
he then?
Some people
were recently reminded that people they have never met live within a few feet
of them. They were near enough to
someone the other side of the wall, in the next-door flat, with Coronavirus,
for the NHS app to ‘ping’ them. It is
possible to live close to someone but not to know them at all because you are
separated from them by a wall.
God is also
the other side of a wall. He is not unable
or unwilling to rescue us but our rebellious disobedience towards him is a wall
that makes him seem like a distant stranger: “Surely the arm of the LORD is not
too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. But your iniquities have
separated you from your God” (Isaiah
59:1-2)
That’s
it. God is not far away, but there is a
wall of our own making. This barrier was
represented in the Jerusalem temple by a huge curtain (reckoned to be 60 feet
high and 4 inches thick!) that kept people out of God’s presence. As Jesus died
on the cross, carrying the sin of the
world, “the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth
shook and the rocks split.” (Matthew
27:51) The invitation was clear: put all
your trust in Jesus Christ and the wall comes down, there is a way back to the
one who made you.
Sincerely
Graham Burrows