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Faithguard

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Just before Jesus went to be tortured to death, He said something strange to Peter:

“Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat. (Luke 22:31)

Regardless of exactly what Satan had in mind to do, it doesn’t sound like fun.  In most church circles, our response would be to pray and ask Jesus not to let that happen.  Most of our prayer requests are for God to remove some kind of suffering, right?  But not Jesus, at least not in this circumstance.  He said:

“But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail. ” (Luke 22:32a )

Apparently, Jesus was going to grant Satan’s request.  The disciples (the word “you” in v. 31 is plural) were going to experience a time of “sifting.”  In Jesus’ perfect understanding, this time of suffering would produce something good, either for the disciples or for His Kingdom in general.  So Jesus did not take the suffering away.  What He prayed for, instead, was that Peter’s faith may not fail!    Jesus prayed for the continued sufficiency of Peter’s faith, so that he would remain connected to God by it as he went through this period of undefined suffering  –  through, and then by faith, out the other side.  Jesus continues:

And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers. (Luke 22:32b)

When the coastguard sends a ship out on a rescue, their desire is not to keep the ship in the harbor, where it will be safe from the storm, but that their radar and radio systems would remain intact as long as they need them during the rescue mission.   There are lots of flaws with that analogy, but you get the idea:  Jesus doesn’t promise us freedom from suffering, He doesn’t remove us from all temptation and trial.  In fact, Jesus promised us that in this world we will suffer.  But, no doubt, He prays for His followers, as He did for Peter, that our faith may not give out.  He guards it.

When Jesus taught us to pray, the last part of the prayer was that God would lead us from temptation and deliver us from the Evil One.  As we are tempted, He leads us.  As we are attacked, He delivers, or rescues us. We are empowered by our faith as we go through suffering.  We are led on the right path through the suffering  and are delivered out on the other side of the suffering because our faith keeps us connected securely to God.

Think about how those observations fit into all we have been saying about faith (See: “Loud and Clear”  and  “Basic Faith”).  Then ask this question:  Whose job is it to make sure your faith doesn’t fail?

Stay tuned…

Basic Faith

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Perhaps if I gave it a chance, I might get into Downton Abbey, but something about watching stuffy aristocrats having tea just makes me restless. Give me heart-pounding, thriller action. Maybe that is why I’m drawn to Hebrews 11. It is about giants of faith who resolutely held on to what they believed was true, in the face of painful and life-threatening coercion. Some of those guys (and gals) were sawed in two and thrown to the lions because they would not deny their beliefs. Dozens of jaw-dropping acts of faith are attributed to sixteen individuals by name. But the first act of faith listed isn’t specific to any one of them; it was shared by all of them – and, hopefully, you too. After first explaining what faith is (See: Loud and Clear), the author of Hebrews gives examples of faith, beginning with this one:

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. (Hebrews 11:3)

Since that was written, we’ve advanced quite a lot, from swords to drones, from parchment to the cloud. But how the universe came about is still being actively debated. Faith understands that God formed it, by commanding it to be. That sounds old and religious. But, more contemporary and mind-bending, it says faith knows that the tangible universe was formed out of something invisible. Scientists in the field of quantum mechanics talk like that.Notice, please, that the quote from Hebrews didn’t say faith knows when God did it, but that He did. The understanding that God made everything out of nothing (or at least out of something intangible) is a foundation stone for faith. Why start there? Perhaps because, with that understanding and perspective, everything else we do in life is colored by deep respect and reverence for God. We live with a profound awareness that this is His place, He made it.

The antique tea cart in our living room was hand-made by my wife’s great grandfather. It is a thing of old beauty, adorned by hand-carved, swirling trim, and slender, wood-spoked wheels. It is a visible expression of great skill and passion. We don’t put cans of paint on it, don’t use it as a workbench. Sometimes I gaze at it, losing myself in the details of its construction. I imagine the man I never knew, hunched over in his shop, wiping sawdust off his glasses and leaning in to get just the right cut from his old, but carefully sharpened gouge.

That type of humility and reverence (greatly multiplied), in the midst of God’s awesome creation, is foundational for the faith that connects us to Him in a living relationship. Conversely, the arrogant attitude that dismisses such awe and humility disconnects us from that relationship with God. With tragic consequences. As the Apostle Paul said, it’s not that people don’t know that God created the tangible universe, but that they suppress this truth.

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. (Romans 1:20-21)

Looking for faith, real faith? Open your heart and mind and take a good look around at all that God has crafted so intricately and beautifully.

Stay tuned; there’s more…

Loud and Clear

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Maybe someday we will understand how God connects with salmon and butterflies.  From our perspective, His connection with them seems built-in, automatic.  But the connection between God and humans is conditional.  It depends upon our being in the right condition.  You’ve seen the thriller movie scenes in which the guy in the airport tower is frantically calling to the pilot of an airplane but can’t get through?  That’s a conditional communication; the airplane radio must be set on the right channel and be in good working order or the communication doesn’t get through.  

But what is the necessary condition for communication with God?  God has designed our interaction with Him to depend on faith.  Think of all the other conditions He could have chosen.  He could have given us radios that we needed to set on the right channel.  He could have required us to bring burnt offerings.  We could have been required to follow His tweets.  But God chose faith.  Interesting…  Why faith?   The answer begins by considering  what faith is.

The essence of faith is solid belief that exists in the absence of tangible proof.  The Bible says it like this:

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. (Hebrews 11:1)

(By the way, the word “hope” in that sentence did not mean wishful thinking, it means a confident expectation.   It’s not like, “I hope it doesn’t rain on Thursday,” but like our “hope” that Summer will follow Spring.)

If you think about it, if what you believe is true, then faith frees you from the cumbersome process of seeking proof.  When you walk in the dark in an unfamiliar place, every step must be tentative until you know you have solid footing.  But when you walk in the dark in your home, walking by faith that your home is unchanged from when you turned out the lights, then your steps are freer and more fluid.  Scientific measurement methods, by contrast,  are necessarily tedious and plodding, designed to help us feel our way in the dark and they work well for that.  But they don’t work well for an activity that is done with spontaneity, like dancing.  Dancing is done by faith.  And so is talking with God.

God designed us to communicate with Him, not on the basis of touch or sight or measurement, but on the basis of faith.  The more I consider His design choice, the better it seems.  Can you imagine how suffocating it would be to a relationship if you had to stop and measure how much you loved each other several times a day?   Do you remember how cool it was when you didn’t need training wheels?  We are meant to swoop and glide when we communicate with God, not wobble along in tentative fear.  

Without faith, we are not in touch with God.  We are left to our own devices and guesses.  Adam and Eve discovered that in the Garden of Eden.  When they stopped trusting in God, they were left wandering in the dark.  When Jesus came, it was to restore our connection with God.

Then they asked him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?”  Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”  John 6:28-29

To believe in Jesus is also to believe God loves us.  Faith is sure of that.  To believe in Jesus is to believe God will forgive us our many sins, that Jesus willingly paid with His life to settle our accounts.  Faith nails that down.  More than that, faith opens up our communication and relationship with God.  Wow!

When I dish out caramel fudge ice cream, my scoop seeks out the mother-lode veins of gooey, rich, stuff that clusters in the middle.  When it comes to faith in the Bible, one of the gooey, rich, mother-lode veins is found in the 11th chapter of Hebrews.  You saw the first verse quoted above.  Most of the rest of that chapter is a Hall of Fame listing of great acts of faith.  But there is something else, too, something surprising and thought provoking.

Stay tuned…

God’s Name

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The bumper sticker said, “God is too big to fit into just one religion.”  Hmmmm…  If they meant that Jews and Christians worship the same God, okay, I agree with that.  But if they meant that all religions share the same God, then we got a problem – sloppy, illogical thinking.  If one person’s God says He has chosen a small tribe of people and will use them to extend blessing to the world, and another guy’s “god” says that that same tribe of people must be eradicated from the earth before his blessing can come, then those two guys are not hearing from the same God.

Because we humans cannot fully perceive or understand God, we have a tendency to define Him according to what we think He should be like.  We say things like, “If there is a God, then why do people starve?”  Questions like that presume that we have the capacity and the right to define God’s character.  We give God a make-over, according to our own preferences.  And we wind up with many different gods.

News flash: We are not in charge of Who God is.  He is.  When He called Moses to rescue the Israelites from slavery, Moses asked Him for some ID:

Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’  ”God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation.  (Exodus 3:13-15)

What a perfect name: “I Am Who I Am; deal with it!”  Throughout the Bible, humans try to redefine the character of God and pretend that He is the way they want Him to be.  Tragic things ensue.  But God doesn’t change; He says, “My name (the essence of Who I am) is I AM WHO I AM.”

An acquaintance,  who is in recovery, talked about how, in AA meetings, everybody seems to have a personal “Higher Power,” each of them with different personalities.   Then he said, “But I am the lump of clay; I am the one who needs to be molded and changed, not God.”   My friend may have done some dumb things in the past, but he has discovered the beginning point for wisdom.  He knows Who God is: He is Who He Is.

You turn things upside down,
as if the potter were thought to be like the clay!
Shall what is formed say to him who formed it,
“He did not make me”?
Can the pot say of the potter,
“He knows nothing”? (Is 29:16)
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”  (Proverbs 9:10)

When Jesus taught His disciples to pray, He said they should start out by praying that the Name of their Heavenly Father would be held in high reverence.  Once you know God’s Name is I AM WHO I AM, everything else can fall into place.

One Plus Two Equals One

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… or at least that is what we’ve been told.  God is One and God is Three.  He exists in three Persons, the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  But explanations of how three can equal one usually fall short.  People resort to tortured analogies (“It’s like three sides of a triangle…”) that don’t really help.  It’s a lot like asking a software engineer to explain what he does for a living.  Beyond answering you with “techno-speak” (“I manage the cloud-based infrastructure of network algorithms…”) your engineer friend is hard pressed to help you really understand.

The Bible explains the mystery of three in one by focusing on Jesus’ part in it.  Like this:

The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being,  (Heb 1:3a)

No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only (i.e. Jesus), who is at the Father’s side, has made him known. (John 1:18 – with my added explanation)

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.   (Col 1:15)

God is invisible to our limited human senses.  Even if we could somehow see Him, we would not be able to understand what we were seeing.  But Jesus, these verses say, is an exact representation of Who and What God is, given to us in a form we can understand: human form.

My favorite (and somewhat tortured) analogy begins with a desktop computer.  If you look at your computer, what you see is really just its case, not the actual computer.  You open it up and look at the circuit cards inside and you still cannot see any computing going on; you don’t have any way of knowing what it is doing.  What “it is doing” happens at a microscopic level, the invisible flow of electrons and “holes” (whatever those are…), in complex patterns, and at the speed of light.  Even if you invented special goggles that enabled you to see that flow of energy, you still couldn’t make any sense of it.  Balancing your checkbook would look very much like a game of Angry Birds.  Nevertheless, this invisible computing process is being done for you!   But there is no way for you to take advantage of it unless the process is somehow translated into a form you can see and understand.

That is why your computer has a monitor.  When you turn on your monitor, voila!, it translates the invisible and inscrutable flow of energy in the desktop unit into words and pictures that you can understand.  Assuming your desktop unit is connected correctly to your monitor, the monitor is the “exact representation of” the computer’s “being.”  The monitor has “made the computer known.”   It is the “image of the invisible” computer.  That’s why, when you talk about your computer, you are referring to all three parts of it as one thing – the processor, the monitor and the connection between them.  Like God: The Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Who is the wireless connection between the Father and Son!).

If you follow all of that, perhaps it will give greater understanding to these words of Jesus:

Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?  Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work. (John 14:9b-10)

Does that make it clearer?  Two plus One equals One.

Ancient Glimpses

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Long time no post…  We’ve been wandering for a month or so, from Colorado up over Lake Superior in Canada and back, by the little squiggly roads.  We’ve encountered beautiful sights and some really crappy WiFi.  Worth it though…

So then, back to the “Fresh Bread;” here’s a mind-bender for you…

Isaiah saw glimpses of Jesus, 700 years before His birth; we’ve mentioned that before (See “Ancient Sroll; Secrets Revealed”). Go back 300 years earlier, and King David saw glimpses of Jesus, too:

The Lord says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.”  Psalm 110:1

The puzzle in that first line of David’s psalm is that David says that God (“The Lord”) speaks to his God (“my Lord”).  Who does he say God is talking to?  Jewish theologians from antiquity agreed: David was referring to the Messiah.  But the Messiah was understood to be a king from among David’s descendants.  How could David call a descendant of his “my Lord?”   Jesus posed this question for the theologians of His day:

While the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them, “What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?”

“The son of David,” they replied.

He said to them, “How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls him ‘Lord’? For he says,

“ ‘The Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet.” ’  Matthew 22:41-44

David had been given a glimpse of Jesus, 1000 years or so before His birth.  In that same psalm, David talks of Jesus’ powerful rule.  In poetic imagery, he alludes to Jesus’ eternal life, saying that each new day…

Arrayed in holy majesty,
from the womb of the dawn
you will receive the dew of your youth.  (Psalm 110:3b)

But then David calls back an event from the life of his ancestor, Abraham, that took place 700 years earlier, 1700 years before Jesus.  Abraham was returning from a battle he knew God had caused him to win, seeking a way to give thanks and honor to God, when a mysterious stranger showed up.  His name was Melchizedek, which means “King of Righteousness.”  He served Abraham as a priest, receiving an offering of thanks for God, serving as one through whom Abraham could connect to God.  He then vanishes from the pages of Scripture.  In addition to not having any record of his lineage, Melchizedek has no death recorded in Scripture.  But the really unique thing about him is that he served as both a king and a priest, something no other king or priest has ever done.

David, in his psalm, says that God says to the Messiah:

“You are a priest forever,
in the order of Melchizedek.”  (Psalm 110:4b)

This may sound confusing, but David was saying that one day, a descendant in his line would be a righteous, powerful, supreme leader, a man who would live eternally, and who would serve as both a king and a priest.  Jewish scholars and theologians who puzzled over that psalm generally agreed.  1700 years later, Jesus acknowledged that He was that Descendant, Righteous King and Perfect Priest.  He would serve to connect us to God in a perfect way.  The author of the Book of Hebrews later gave a rather detailed explanation about how all those pieces fit together (Read Hebrews 6:13 – 8:2).

When I consider how unlikely it is that such ancient glimpses of a Messiah would ever fit together, much less be realized in the Person of One Man, my head swims.  And all of  that just skims the surface…

Check Engine

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Are you getting tired of all this talk about what makes God angry?   You might be thinking, “Alright already! I get it; let’s get on to something more pleasant!”   If that is how you feel, imagine how God feels!  Fact is, God wants us to get on with the good stuff.  That’s why He gave us the Bible!

When your check-engine light comes on,

Check Engine light on a 1996 Dodge Caravan.

Check Engine light on a 1996 Dodge Caravan. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

you can either get upset about it, or you can think, “Wow! My car just informed me of something I can do to get it running better.”   Sure you can  also be bummed out about the cretin who just serviced the thing and who probably left a wire unplugged…   But the point is, Isaiah 5 is a “Check Engine” light.  Ignore it to your own peril.  Here’s what lies ahead for those who do:

So man will be brought low and mankind humbled, the eyes of the arrogant humbled.  (Isaiah 5:15)

The problem, at its root, is arrogance, the attitude that presumes it knows better than God how to live in His garden.  The opposite attitude, humility, is held by those who really do know they need to pay attention to God, the Creator and Designer of all this and to submit to the ways He has said work best.  If you are only recently reading these posts, go back and read about the key verse in Isaiah, the one that reveals the message of the whole Bible.  The short version is this: God will dwell in the souls of the humble, will forgive them, restore them and bring them to full life (Isaiah 57:15-19).

Here is what lies ahead for the humble:

But the Lord Almighty will be exalted by his justice, and the holy God will show himself holy by his righteousness. Then sheep will graze as in their own pasture; lambs will feed among the ruins of the rich. (Isaiah 5:16-17)

The “sheep” in those verses are the humble who pay attention and submit to God.  And to His Son, Jesus.  Here’s what Jesus said lay in store for His “sheep”:

Therefore Jesus said again, “I tell you the truth, I am the gate for the sheep. All who ever came before me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture.
(John 10:7-9)

Real Freedom

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Tucked into the hills of North Carolina is a campground that has been under the watchful, squinty eye and command of an 88 year-old lady.  Abigail (not her real name) is laid back and nice, but she has her rules, runs her place by what she reads in the Bible and doesn’t put up with anybody who doesn’t like that.  We spent a night there, along with maybe 200 other campers.  It was a little slice of heaven, nothing like inner, what-used-to-be-a-city, Detroit.  You don’t want to set up your tent there.  I know I’m painting with too wide a brush, and there are exceptions for sure, but the big difference between Abigail’s place and inner-city Detroit is that Abby respects the ways of God and the gangs on the streets of Detroit do not.

It might seem that the old-fashioned, Southern, campground lady, bound up with her Bible principles isn’t as free as the folks who go ahead and do whatever they feel like doing in Detroit.  But in reality, the opposite is true.  Abigail’s respect for God’s operating instructions for His garden allows her to breathe free.  I know, I know: there are a whole bunch of “yeah-buts” with which you could poke holes in that comparison, but the point I’m trying to make is true.  God isn’t trying to restrict us with His rules and principles, but set us free to make the most out of life.  Those who don’t pay attention, or who deliberately thumb their noses at God will ultimately be hurt by what they do.  That is the point of Isaiah 5 (This topic begins here.).

The next four “Woe’s,” next four things that make God mad, from Isaiah 5, sound like they are critiques of our current culture.    I won’t quote them here; read them for yourself and see how close they fit.  God is angered by:

Verse 18-19 – People who put real effort into doing things God forbids and by their actions ridicule God

Verse 20 – People who say that evil is good, and vice versa.

Verse 21 – People who think they are smarter than God and that they know better

Verse 22 – Corrupt officials who peddle influence and deny justice to those who are not connected

Sound familiar?   Our culture is shot through with all of them!  The people who do these things think they are being smart, squeezing the most out of life.  Fact is, they are missing out, lurking about in Detroit when they could be having lemonade at Abigail’s place.  Here’s what God says lies in store:

Therefore, as tongues of fire lick up straw and as dry grass sinks down in the flames, so their roots will decay and their flowers blow away like dust; for they have rejected the law of the Lord Almighty and spurned the word of the Holy One of Israel. Therefore the Lord’s anger burns against his people; his hand is raised and he strikes them down. The mountains shake, and the dead bodies are like refuse in the streets.   (Isaiah 5:24-25)

God’s Hot Buttons

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If you want to know what makes God mad, there is a pretty clear list in the 5th chapter of Isaiah. Each one is marked by the word, Woe! That’s Biblespeak for “Beware! Bad, bad things are coming unless big, big changes are made. When God says “Woe,” He’s upset about something.  God is angered by human behavior that, if left unchecked, will destroy His Creation. He says “woe!” with the same tone of voice that a homeowner uses when he sees termites destroying his home.  And for the same reason.

The first “woe!” in Isaiah 5 had to do with unchecked greed (See: “What Kind of Termites Anger God?”.)  The next one reads like this:

Woe to those who rise early in the morning to run after their drinks, who stay up late at night till they are inflamed with wine. They have harps and lyres at their banquets, tambourines and flutes and wine, but they have no regard for the deeds of the LORD, no respect for the work of his hands.  (Isaiah 5:11-12)

Perhaps you are thinking, “It’s official: God is a killjoy and hates it when people party.”   No way!  If that’s what you think, you will be surprised as you read through the Bible.  God loves celebrations. Jesus provided the wine for one.  No, the problem here is that this drunkenness is constant (from early in the morning until late at night), it has become the new normal.  Beyond that, it has obliterated their capacity to appreciate and respect God and the wonderful oasis He created and provided.  

Imagine that you had inherited a beautiful mountain cabin that was carefully and lovingly built by your great-grandfather. It is nestled among pine trees, alongside a crystal clear, spring-fed lake. From childhood, you have forged deep and satisfying memories at his cabin and you consider it to be a precious and sacred refuge. Can you picture it?  Now, how would you feel if your kids hold a party up there, inviting their friends, who proceed to get drunk and wreck the place?  They break the windows, smash the plates and park their old and leaky pickup in the garden. Mad yet?  That’s how God feels when He sees insensitive, drunken louts trashing His garden.

But let’s look at the nature and extent of the damage:

Therefore my people will go into exile for lack of understanding; their men of rank will die of hunger and their masses will be parched with thirst.Therefore the grave enlarges its appetite and opens its mouth without limit; into it will descend their nobles and masses with all their brawlers and revelers. (Isaiah 5:13-14)

This warning was written to a people God had given special, privileged treatment.  He intended to use as the Jewish nation as a model, to show others how much better life could be if you loved God and lived according to His design and principles. He had set them up with their own land, and promised to provide for them and protect them.  But these privileges would only continue if they cooperated.  Their irresponsible behavior wrecked the place.  Consequently, instead of being protected in their own place, they were exiled to a foreign land. Instead of being physically and spiritually satisfied in God’s presence, they drank to find satisfaction and wound up with an unquenchable thirst.  Instead of finding life, they fell into death. Woe!

This warning, specifically written to the people of Israel and Judah, was tragically fulfilled in their history.  But it contains a principle that pertains to us all.  You and I live amid God’s amazing and beautiful Creation.  The more you pay attention, the more you seek to appreciate it and harmonize with the One Who gave us all this, the more wonderful life will be.  The key to living like that is given to us by Jesus.  Find Him and find real life.

Or, you could just get drunk and miss it.  Woe!

What Kind of Termites Anger God?

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If that question doesn’t make sense, go back one post and read “On the Other Hand, God Really is Angry“.  When termites threatened to destroy my house, I exterminated them.  In Isaiah 5, God explains that He is going to eradicate the “termites” that threaten to destroy His garden.  He doesn’t use termites as a metaphor but, rather, a vineyard that does not produce good fruit because of people wrecking the place.  What kind of behavior does wreck the vineyard, so to speak?  What kind of termites does God see?  Before we answer that, have a look at verse 7, to see what “good fruit” looks like to the eyes of God:

And he looked for justice, but saw bloodshed;
for righteousness, but heard cries of distress.  (Isaiah 5:7)

What does God desire for this world?  Justice and righteousness.  Not what we think of as justice, but perfect justice.  A world where a person’s position and wealth does not change what rules apply to him or her.  A world where corruption of any kind is non-existent.  A world full of people who intuitively do the right thing in a harmonious way.  (For more on righteousness, see “Jamming in God’s Band.”)  God desires a world in which there is no bloodshed – none.

But if that was all He said, it would resemble a vacuous speech at a beauty pageant (“I want world peace!”).   Specifically, what kind of human behavior does God see as termites?  He gave Isaiah several specific examples, beginning in verse 8.  These are representative examples of things people were doing in that time that wrecked God’s vineyard.  Many of these sound pretty contemporary.  Let’s just consider the first one:

Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.  (Isaiah 5:8)

When God sees wealthy people gobbling up vast tracts of land for themselves, building themselves house after house, not because they need a place to live but just because they have the money to do it, God sees termites.  Think about it:  God designed the Earth as a perfect garden and invited humans to live in it and enjoy it.  Whose garden is it?  How is it that some of the guests in God’s garden think they should fence off hundreds of thousands of acres, saying to everybody else, “Keep out! This is mine?”  It is not that God is opposed to holding property in a family in trust and passing it along.  What God sees as termites is the people who greedily attempt to own and control much more than they could ever need and who wind up isolating themselves from everyone else in the process.

I could be wrong about this, but I believe God sees termites when He looks down on how much of this country is “owned” by so few – not because they need to but simply because they can.  I think God sees termites in places where huge conglomerates make it impossible to make a go of a family farm.  It’s not just agriculture; I see similar things going on with the decline of “Mom and Pop” stores and restaurants, too.  I’ll bet that there are aspects of the forces behind enormous conglomerate corporations that God sees as termites.  Just sayin’

Of course the argument for those who do such things is that they do it to be successful.  Listen to what God says will be the outcome:

The Lord Almighty has declared in my hearing: “Surely the great houses will become desolate, the fine mansions left without occupants. A ten-acre vineyard will produce only a bath of wine, a  homer of seed only an ephah of grain.”  (Isaiah 5:9-10)  (Note: the words, bath, homer, and ephah, all refer to an extremely paltrey amount for such big places.)

God says, “What you think is success will lead to utter ruin.  Mark My words!”  Why?  Termites!  Living like that wrecks the place.  That’s not the way God designed for the world to work.

That’s just the first example.  Next time we will go further