Daily Lesson for August 31, 2016

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Job chapter 14  verses 18 through 22:

18 “But the mountain falls and crumbles away,
and the rock is removed from its place;
19 the waters wear away the stones;
the torrents wash away the soil of the earth;
so you destroy the hope of man.
20 You prevail forever against him, and he passes;
you change his countenance, and send him away.
21 His sons come to honor, and he does not know it;
they are brought low, and he perceives it not.
22 He feels only the pain of his own body,
and he mourns only for himself.”

One of the most serious things we as a culture have to come to terms with is the fact that modern medicine cannot save us in the end.

I know that sounds obvious, and we all know it is true generally speaking. But when we start talking specifics, say about this particular person with this particular problem at this particular moment then we very often hope modern medicine can stay a step ahead of death's shadow.

One of the saddest things in all of life is to stand at the bedside of a dying woman who in her 80s has staved off death for the last 10 years with every kind of drug and treatment known to man listen in shock when the doctor says there is nothing more that can be done.  "You mean with all the modern medicine you can't do anything?" she says as she gasps for air through the nebulizer's pipe.

"I am sorry," is all the doctor is left to say.

"Well what if we go back to see her doctors in Houston?" the woman's son asks.

"I don't know that they would do anything we haven't already tried," the doctor says.

Job says God "destroys the hope of man."

This sounds horribly cruel and perhaps vindictive until we realize at some point man's hopes need to be destroyed. In fact, it is a cruel thing not to dash the hopes of man so long as that hope is in anything other than God Himself.  Anything else is abusive.

My friend Ted Dotts told me in his final days that the gift death gives us is that it disabuses us of the notion that anything other than God can save us.

That is a truth it is better to come to terms with sooner rather than later.