As I look around at our world, and especially at our government (in the US and other Western nations) I can’t help sometimes wondering why we don’t see God strike certain people down in front of us all. They are utterly corrupt and arrogant. They have no shame. They make decisions for the detriment of their own citizens. They bear false witness against others. They are being bought by powerful globalist forces and figures. They lie incessantly. They use their positions of power for themselves and people like them.
Where are you Lord, I wonder? Do you not care? Do you not want to bring justice to our world, at least to some degree? In my darker moments, I confess to you, I wonder if what these wicked people do matters to God after all. Ah, but then I begin to come to my senses.
Bible writers sometimes felt the same way as I, and you can find several Psalms with the same sentiments. Asaph penned these words in Psalm 73:
But as for me, my feet had almost slipped;
I had nearly lost my foothold.
For I envied the arrogant
when I saw the prosperity of the wicked (verses 1-3).
Asaph continues to observe how the wicked prosper and never seem to have any setbacks as upright people do. He confesses that what he observed made him sick to his heart, so that his very faith and hope were threatened:
When my heart was grieved and my spirit embittered, I was senseless and ignorant; I was a brute beast before you (verse 21).
This is what can happen to us sometimes…we’re tempted to think we may as well act as they do, without conscience and without concern for what’s right.
Asaph came to his senses, as I did, and as all of us who are determined to follow our God should. This is what he went on to conclude:
When I tried to understand all this,
it troubled me deeply
till I entered the sanctuary of God;
then I understood their final destiny.
Surely you place them on slippery ground;
you cast them down to ruin.
How suddenly are they destroyed,
completely swept away by terrors!
They are like a dream when one awakes;
when you arise, Lord,
you will despise them as fantasies (verses 16 to 20).
In my own observations of reality, I acknowledge that Jesus Christ himself-the Son of God-suffered at the hands of men like Pilate and Caiaphas. He suffered to the point of death. John the Baptist was beheaded by Herod within a few miles of the Son of God. Couldn’t the Son of God have delivered him?
Here’s what Jesus said on another matter of wickedness:
“Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come” (Luke 17:1).
The wicked have their time. They have their chance and their opportunity to choose life and righteousness, but they fail the test. And as I’ve observed before, for evil to be evil, and for free-will to be free-will God has to allow it to happen. In that way, no-one, through all eternity, will be able to accuse God of judging without reason. His judgments, unlike our own, will be seen to be entirely holy and proper.
Where are the workers of hate and evil of Christ’s time now? Jesus, having humbled himself to the point of death, is at the right hand of God. Pilate, Herod and Caiaphas failed the tests of their character, hearts and motivation. They’re lost, forever. Their reign of wickedness and arrogance and selfishness are long gone. They are no more. They are of no consequence, and all the wealth they possessed is forgotten.
As with Herod, so with the wicked rulers of our time, who serve themselves at our expense. In a little while, they will be no more. And unless they repent and turn in humility to the only Son of God for the forgiveness of their sins, as we also need to do, they will shortly be of no consequence. Whatever conscience they then have will be full of anguish and pain, because they will be, at their own choice, separated from the only source of truth and light and happiness.
Fuel for Faith 