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Into the Eye of the Storm
Presenter: Larry Kirkpatrick
Location: Mentone Seventh-day Adventist Church, Mentone, California, USA
Publication: GreatControversy.org 2005-09-24 22:54Z
Type: Sermon
URL: http://www.greatcontroversy.org/gco/ser/kir-intotheeye.php
The tropical cyclone, called by us here in North America a hurricane, has been much in the news lately. Tropical cyclones occur in many other places. The same weather phenomenon has, on repeated occasions, caused the loss of 1,000,000 or more lives in places like Bangladesh.
A tropical cyclone is a vast heat system generating winds that may in the most powerful storms exceed 200 MPH. Most of their damage is done when they come ashore. A hurricane rotates in a circular pattern around a central gap or “eye” of relative calm in the storm. There are many ways in which the hurricane presents an illuminating illustration of Christian expectations at time’s end.
Contrasting Worldviews
People have very different ways of looking at life. One is the balloon view: you fill yourself up with as much stimulation as you can, and then you pop. End of story. A hurricane is like this. Under certain conditions it comes into being, develops into an enormous, stimulating storm, comes ashore in all its destructive power, inflicts damage to life and limb, and in short order disintigrates. A hurricane is a system of processes that involves a lot of hot air moving around.
Across recent centuries there has also been a lot of hot air moving around. Shifts in worldview have included the enlightenment, humanism, modernism, and today, because no one knows for sure what to call it yet, post modernism. If you follow the track of these philosophies, you see a shift toward a heady optimism in what man can accomplish on his own, enormous strides made in medicine, high energy weapons, and aeronautics, then the moon landing, but afterward a rapid deflation to pessimism and uncertainty. The curve comes down again at the other side, and we see the outcome.
The audacity and hutszpa that reached its maximum in the last century has receded to a tiny squeek. The emphasis today is on how little we can actually know, how modernism failed. The destruction of millions in the Holocaust, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the pall of global terrorism, new evidence of melting glaciers and changes in weather patterns on a planetary scale, and an increasingly convulsing nature make it seem as though our world not only is characterized as a perpetual conflict of man-versus-man, but increasingly, nature-versus-man. Not only does it seem our neighbor doesn’t like us, but nature itself would nearly lead one to think that it is unhappy with us.
Increasing Disruption of the Global Environment
A hurricane is nothing new. But consider the following data:
1992 Aug 1st most costly—Hurricane Andrew, FL, LA, Cat 5, 165 MPH, 36B
2004 Sept 8th most costly—Hurricane Jeanne, East Texas, Cat 3, 120 MPH, 7B
2004 Sept 4th most costly—Hurricane Ivan, FL, AL, Cat 3, 165 MPH, 14B
2005 Sept new most—Hurricane Katrina, LA, MS, Cat 4, 140 MPH, 125-200B?
2005 Sept 24—Hirricane Rita, TX, Cat 2, 120 MPH, ??
(For more than you probably want to know about hurricanes, go here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane.)
If Rita and Katrina are added to the list, then five of the ten most costly and devastating storms on record will have come in just the past 13 years. Is this normalcy? Is this a mere die roll, mere random chance on display?
Human Nature on Display
But whatever we think of nature, we cannot fail to see human nature on display. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the devastation in New Orleans, looters took to the streets, exchanging gunfire with police. Hospital evacuations had to be stopped while guard units restored order. A refugee from Katrina who had received a 2000 debit card was reported found murdered with five gunshots to the head in Chattanooga yesterday. Other tales are heard of lawlessness, rape, and inhumanity in New Orleans.
When you hear about these things, you want to say, “I don’t know these people. I don’t know what planet they are from. I am not related to them.” that may be how you feel. But how does God feel?
Seeing inhumanity on this scale has led some to think there could not possibly be a God. If there is a God, then if He is good, why would He allow so much evil? If He exists and has ultimate control over this world, then why does He not act? Why does He permit sin and suffering and torture and rape and war and inhumanity and cancer and death and evil here? If He can clean up the neighborhood, then why doesn’t He clean up the neighborhood?
Spiritual Hunger
The Bible says that God designed us as worshipping beings (Revelation 4:11; Colossians 1:16). We have a hunger built-in. Did anyone have to teach you to like the taste of sweet things? No. Did anyone have to teach you to center your attentions, your very affections, on certain kinds of people, music, activities, or food? No. No one had to teach you how to be selfish. You learned it and learned it well. The Bible says that “all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).
Even humans who had no exposure to the Bible had a sense of right and wrong. How do you account for that? Some strange gene defect? But if natural selection removes these weaknesses and inefficiencies and is constantly breeding better and better people, why are we so affected by these universal defects? Why is it that selfishness and an inclination toward self- worship, afflict us all?
Why do we have spiritual desires? Isn’t it true? You long for something deep, something real, something authentic. Obviously there are numerous flavors of spiritual error running through the world. You can choose from Bhuddism, New Age, Russian Orthodox Christianity, varied flavors of Islam, Judaism, Mormonism, or Western Christianity in its several flavors.
All roads do not lead to the same God. Each flavor gives you a God who has a different character than every other. If the religions represent God’s character in different flavors, and if man was made in God’s image, to reflect His character, and if in worshiping we emulate, we copy, we mimic morally, then the different religions will not produce the same kind of people.
A Fountain is Open for Healing
One of the biblical pictures presented over and over again is that of the fountain or spring. The Bible lands tend to be hot and parched. Water held special significance.
No matter who we are, where we have been, where we have come from, we recognize in our world and in ourselves something lacking, something missing. We thirst for more. Of something.
When we see human nature on display in murder and mayhem in Iraq, in riots in LA, or looting in Louisiana, we see not the world as God intended, but the world as failure to operate as per the Designer’s instructions works itself out.
The Bible is not an idle curiosity or a hodgepodge of aged folktales assembled midst campfire and camel smell. Its information about how to live, God’s predicted interventions in the world, what is right and moral and what is wrong and sinful, ought not to be thoughtlessly laid aside. The Christian understanding is that because the Designer constituted us with free choice, and because the first humans chose to use that free choice unwisely, the original communion between the designed and the Designer was broken. Humankind was—catastrophically—impacted.
His being, so wonderfully organized by the Designer was dramatically reconstituted, deeply disordered. The very arrangement of his being was changed. Whereas as designed, his intellectual and religious faculties would dominate and his basic unselfish viewpoint would aid him in exercising self control, now sensory data and feelings would flood in upon him in an overwhelming tide. His own being would betray him, seeking out to worship those things which were destructive rather than positive.
He might try to persuade himself that he could undertake vast projects on his own, to leap tall buildings in a single bound, to boldly go where no man had gone before, but apart from God he is a wisp, a momentary flame, a fragile, dependent, self-destructive creature. He has no life within himself.
A hurricane, once it crosses ashore, looses its water-engine, it looses its source of energy, its fountain. It rapidlly dies. You and I, when we try to exist apart from our Creator, lose our energy, and tend to walk out into the bombing range instead of in the safety of the park. Its our nature, or at least, our nature after the Fall.
Apart from God we are looters, rapists, bomb-makers, snipers, child-molesters, murderers, and above all, worshipers—of our own selves. We are spiritually hungry because we were designed to be. And the world, even with all of its glitter, cannot satisfy. The solution must be spiritual. And the kind of spiritual solution must not be a loose assembly of mere human design, a cafeteria buffet of our own making. We will surely make it wrong, and stack up the sweets and most unhealthful items on our plate before we do the broccoli and peas and carrots and corn and apples—the healthy stuff. It is our nature.
So our nature needs changing. Christians understand that God is the only one who can change it. Rather than our own hurricanes, we should drink from His fountains.
Hear now from God’s Word:
For with Thee is the fountain of life: in Thy light shall we see light (Psalm 36:9).
If you want to understand what life is about, if you want to understand what you are, if you want to understand that which you cannot understand by looking at rocks and trees and the creations of humans, then you must realize that God is the source. He is our source, not only of life, but of knowledge. In His light, in the information that He intervenes to give to humankind through the Bible, in His light, we will see light, we will gain true understanding.
The fear of the LORD is a fountain of life, to depart from the snares of death (Proverbs 14:27).
If we are created beings, and if God is our Creator, then we would be wise to respect Him, to take Him seriously, to realize that while we may understand some of His counsel, it may be wise to take other parts of His counsel on faith even if we don’t understand. We would show wisdom were we to have an attitude much more like that of the child, who although she does not understand all of her parents prohibitions, accepts them on the basis of trust. Our heavenly Father’s counsels are given us, not to enslave but to protect.
For My people have committed two evils; they have forsaken Me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water (Jeremiah 2:13).
As those who are by nature worshipers, we will turn to the rocks and the trees, or to our BMWs and favorite musicians or actors, or to our careers or to that which makes us feel good, rather than to God. What difference is there between the worshiper of the chololate chip cookie and the entrepeneur addicted to power who must build a larger building than his peers, or make a larger profit? When we turn from God, we will—inevitably—invest our energies in digging vast, leaky cisterns that can hold no water, in building levees around low-lying places in our characters that cannot survive the storm. We live in a hurricane-infested world. How long will your human levees hold? What will you do in the storm surge? What will you do when your cistern fails to hold water? Turning from God means an inevitable drift toward self-destruction. And it is all so unnecessary. Why dig holes that are useless, that lead to nowhere?
In that day there shall be a fountain opened to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin and for uncleanness (Zechariah 13:1).
A day is coming when God will intervene again. Actually, this is His world, and He intervenes in it all the time. But He intervened 2000 years ago and sent His Son to die for the race. The Innocent took upon Him the sins of the guilty. Jesus was the Innocent. We are the guilty. He paid a penalty. He upheld the law of the Infinite, He made clear that that law, representing His own character, was seen as perpetual. God’s character is perfect and so changing it, annulling some part of it, is out of the question. Jesus’ sacrifice of His life on the cross to pay the penalty for sinners who had gone against God’s character. But even more…
Jesus did not stop saving us when He died on the cross for us on a dark Friday. He rose again two days later. His Father had accepted His sacrifice on behalf of the human race, and called Him forth from the tomb. He came forth then. He resurrected. But then He went to heaven, not to have a big party, not to celebrate man’s completed redemption. Man’s redemption was not yet completed. Jesus bought us back, a fountain was opened for cleansing, the damaged and disordered nature of man could now be repaired, but still there was the repairing to do.
Jesus took up now His role as our heavenly High Priest. The Doctor was in. Now, the needed help for living right was available from the Source. Jesus opened the fountain for cleansing; now He would wash and cleanse.
Moral power is ready. Power to live right is ready. In all the havoc wrought by the intrusion of sin into His world, God never forsook righteousness, He never left aside justice. Judgment is coming to planet earth. You and I are accountable. Real spiritual help is ready. He will show us the way home. He will give us an experience of heart-change. He will heal us and make us whole.
Revelation 11:17, 18 show us that God at time’s end has not forsaken His commitment to goodness or His hostility toward badness. Notice what is spoken by the “24 elders”:
We give thee thanks, O Lord God Almighty, which art, and wast, and art to come; because Thou hast taken to Thee Thy great power, and hast reigned. And the nations were angry, and Thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that Thou shouldest give reward unto Thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear Thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.
Who is destroying the earth? It is not greed, or entrepenuership. The weight that rests so heavily upon our planet is the weight of sin. Sin is frothing and foaming and manifesting. Sin is damaging and destroying and impeding. So sin will be ended. God will take it away. A fountain of cleansing is opened on this planet. Jesus does not redeem man merely to whisk him away from a finally cracked and broken planet. Jesus restores those willing to be restored even as He restores the environment he designed for us.
We have opportunity now to have Jesus change us, or to simply float downstream with the outgoing tide of sewage, joining ourselves to it, and in the end being destroyed with it. God in the end destroys those who are determined to persist in sin. But Jesus prefers to save you, to change you, to restore your soul, to cleanse you, to make it possible for you to win the fight against self and sin.
Into the Eye of the Storm
You need not look long at this world to sense that the challenges we face are deepening, worsening by the day. The national debt of the United States escalates at a rate of 1.5 billion dollars a day. That’s debt, that’s spending 1.5 billion more per day than the government receives per day. At this rate, is eventual economic collapse theory, or inevitability?
Socially, economically, meteorologically and environmentally, and morally, the signs are screaming all around us. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita are only very small signals against the larger backdrop.
When Adam and Eve chose rebellion, they initiated the beginning of humankind’s participation in a vast, boiling spiritual war. Their sin began the formation of a hurricane that escalates to maximum fury at time’s end. The showdown with evil has long been underway. At some time, insome generation, it climaxes. Whether we look into Bible prophecy or just the world around us, we see the approach. The storm approaches landfall.
Where must the Christian be in this final storm? The only safety for us is to place ourselves at the eye of the storm, to pass through the close of the war in company with Jesus. No boat ever sank with Jesus in it. I commend to you today Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, as your safety in the ultimate hurricane. He is seeking you. Are you seeking Him? Are you willing to put aside threadbare philosophies, human inventions, religions that give evidence of serious problems in their understanding of God, are you willing to put all these on the line and replace with a spiritual experience with Jesus that can truly fill you and help you and make you whole? All your life you have sought it. All your life you have needed it. All your life you have avoided it.
But you still have—for a little space—today—opportunity. Jesus invites you to join Him in the eye of the storm—the only place of safety and fulfillment and peace.
And your choice is...? GCO
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