The rising sun...
...shows our feet the way to peace
I visited my 102-yr-old mother a week ago, and I reflected on the stillness of her face as well as the trouble of our world. I read to her the words of Zechariah the priest who became speechless after not believing God’s promise for a child. He prophesied about the future of John, his son:
Luke 1:76And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High;
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways,
77to give knowledge of salvation to his people
in the forgiveness of their sins,
78because of the tender mercy of our God,
whereby the sunrise shall visit us from on high
79to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.”
Several things came to mind as I looked at Mom’s still face. She had experienced more sunrises than most people. At 102 she had seen the impact of over 37,000 sunrises whether or not she watched them.
That was the import of Zechariah’s prophecy. Many people sit in darkness and the shadow of death who have some recognition that the sun rises. Prison cells for centuries have been marked up to show the passing of days, months and years. Some have perished in that darkness and death. Some lived to see the light of a free day.
In these past days the awful rule of President Assad of Syria has ended. Day by day new discoveries are made that reveal his cruelty and the suffering of his people. By contrast, Zechariah’s prophecy was that the mercy of God would guide His people into a way of peace. God’s promise was not just for a single befuddled people in Israel. It was for all the people of the middle east and the world.
So perhaps we can use Zechariah’s words as both gage and gauge for what is happening in the middle east and the world. They are a gauge because only the knowledge and repentance of the sins of greed, power and corruption will show when forgiveness rather than revenge is present. That is true in Assad’s power-vacuum as well as in the Washington DC scramble.
But it is also a gage, or God’s guarantee given towards His promise. To Zechariah and his wife were given a son John, who proclaimed the Peace-Bringer Jesus. So John as the last of the Old Testament prophets was a peace builder who prepared the way for the Peace Maker. When the Peace Maker blessed His disciples he promised them a Peace Keeper, the Holy Spirit.
The world will now scramble to fit back the pieces in the middle east. The destruction of the Israeli Defense Force bombing has indeed broken down a lot of physical walls even as it has created stronger emotional and social barrier walls. The political forces that rush into the vacuum behind Assad’s departure likewise will stumble over the same basic “peace paradigm” that the UN has been using. For many years the UN has defined peace as a process of peace building, peace making and peace keeping, the very process that God called out so long ago. But the UN has missed a key part.
Zechariah spoke about that key part: day by day people walking in the light of repentance and forgiveness. So, in the midst of pain and destruction, don’t fail to show God’s good news.
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