Day 120: The Danger of Apathy

Acts 23:23-24:9; Judges 20; Psalm 45

This story of the man and his "wife" in Judges from yesterday's reading really makes me sick.  Then he goes to the other tribes and tells them the not-so-exact truth.  They wanted to kill him and instead raped and killed his wife?  He threw his wife to the brutal, sick men.  Unfortunately, he failed to mention that disgraceful part at the meeting.  Why?  Because as humans, our desire is to protect ourselves.  We may see how people are being destroyed, heck, we may even try to run faster so that the slower ones get caught. Plain and simple:  this is not what God wants.  That man could have refused, on all accounts, to give in to the sexual sin facing him that day.  He could have protected the weak, rather than allow her to be victimized and killed.  One thing that I notice in my classroom and in the environment around me, is this infective attitude of apathy--people just don't care.  Well people, we need to get up and start caring.  God's heart is for the poor, the weak, the fatherless, the widows.  This man was wrong in the way he acted; he combated sin with apathy and a person ended up dead.  For a long time I ignored the issues of pain and destruction around me.  It's a lot of work to fix what is broken in our society, and on some accounts seems impossible.  But who is God, if not the doer of the impossible?  Let us consider what state our heart is in:  are we apathetic about the victims in our societies, in our own neighborhoods?  Or, are we willing to step up, get involved, put our hands in the messy stuff of life, in order to refuse and fight sin?

As per normal, one person's decision in scripture leads to thousands of lives effected.  The Israelites go to battle.  God blesses them, but wait, they get beat not once, not twice, but three times they are pushed back, the bodies of their brothers a strewn across the battlefield, and they retreat back to their home.  How is that a blessing from God?  Sometimes, as believers and followers of The Lord, we expect success, not just later, but immediately.  If we aren't given a sign or a blessing right away, we assume its wrong and give up and move on.  The Israelites asked God over and over, "do we keep fighting?" and God kept saying "yes!"  Thousands of people were dead, the men were exhausted from battle, it must have seemed hopeless, but God gave them hope, they were obedient and pressed on through the dark times, and ultimately they were victorious.  God wants to bless us.  He wants to lead us to success.  But sometimes, that success, those blessings, the outcomes we are looking for, are further away than what feels comfortable.  May we trust in The Lord God Almighty to provide and lead us to good things, even if we have to trudge or fight through the darkness first.

This psalm is cool.  It sounds like a wedding, but there is a section that makes me think it could also serve as a metaphor.  It talks about the Bride, forgetting her family and ignoring their temptations of precious treasures, that she needs to do the desires of her husband.  The Bride is the Church, the Husband is our Lord, and the "family" is the world.  The world will try to tempt believers away from the truths and calling of God with things that look beautiful but are worthless.  The thing that matters is this Bride's marriage to her Husband, our relationship and fatihfulness to God.