THE MESSIANIC PILGRIMAGE

Is it a hope for freedom? We all want freedom. When we look around the world there are places where freedom doesn’t exist… Gaza, Sudan, Venezuela… there will be others we might want to mention.

And then we see the news in Venezuela with the president of the USA going in and grabbing, some people call it kidnapping, the president of Venezuela. Nobody is saying the president of Venezuela was a nice person. He had turned the country into ruin. It has the highest quantity of oil in the world. It could be richer than Saudi Arabia. But it isn’t.

Many people think that getting rid of President Maduro is the right thing. There is immense complexity in the situation: Potentially the question of doing the right thing the wrong way.

And yet some would argue that doing the wrong thing the right way doesn’t work. For decades evil regimes have run countries causing ruinously bad things for their populations… no, let’s make that for centuries evil regimes have run countries causing ruinously bad things for their populations… or for millennia…

To talk about the right thing the wrong way assumes that God is all about the end result. But God sees the end from the beginning, so the result and the way you go about getting it are all part of what God sees. In short, God wants us to do the right thing the right way.

And how do we quantify the other countries that we don’t categorise as ‘evil regimes’? Maybe not good but not quite so evil? Capitalist countries increasing the income for the rich and making others poorer in the process. What when the control of the economy comes down to a cartel of business owners…

Are you impatient for change?

For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us.

We are all groaning. We see the New Reality that the Messiah announced here in our decaying bodies in the Holy Spirit within us.

The first covenant between God and Abraham… to be a blessing to all peoples of the earth… that covenant down through millennia to us who see the New Reality and are lighting candles not cursing the darkness. Candles… tiny sparks of light and life that those in the darkness see and sometimes they join us and sometimes they try to stamp it out.

What does it really mean to not curse the darkness? What would it mean for the people of Gaza… for the people of Sudan… for the people of Venezuela?

I’m enthusiastic about remaining alive on this earth. Not because I love the creeping darkness but because the Messiah, my Lord and my friend, has announced this New Reality and God, who is our Father, longs to build a community of those who love him to share eternity with him as his friends.