Daily Lesson for September 4, 2014

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Psalm 37 verses 1, 2 and 14, 15:

1 Fret not yourself because of evildoers;
be not venvious of wrongdoers!
2 For they will soon fade like the grass
and wither like the green herb.
14 The wicked draw the sword and bend their bows
to bring down the poor and needy,
to slay those whose way is upright;
15 their sword shall enter their own heart,
and their bows shall be broken.

These are anxious times for us in our world. There are wars and rumors of wars. Mothers send their children northward across our border to escape terror and exploitation. The Russian bear is on the prowl. Ghastly cruelty has been unleashed in Iraq and Syria.  Here at home we anesthetize ourselves with a new football season and rounds of golf while the church and the world fall apart. I am reminded of Yeats's words:

    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

If you are paying attention at all then you've got to be concerned. If you ever put a loved one on a plane to Israel or New York or even Burlington, VT then you probably are. If you are awake at all then you must know this is a dangerous world with great evils on the loose.

Today's lesson comes to remind us that though evils may have their day in the sun, their night always comes.  The weeds grow up with the wheat and some wheat is lost to the weeds; but the harvest is coming. A day of reckoning and right-making always comes. This is God's promise; evil  does not prevail.

Not long ago I ran across an old 1940s sermon by the great Baptist preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick. It was titled "God Talks to a Dictator".  The text was from Isaiah, "Ho Assyrian, my rod," which is what God said to the evil Assyrian empire which He used to chasten Israel for its injustice and idolatries before then subjecting it to the same fate of all evil empires. The context of course was the war with Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy and Tojo's Japan. The point was to say that like in the days of the Assyrian swarm, so too in the day of Nazi blitzkrieg; God allows evil to have its day in the sun, and uses that day to turn the hearts of God's people back toward Him and His just ways. But inevitably the sun goes down on all evil. "Ho Assyrian, my rod!"

The earth seems to be on the brink, rocking and reeling. The worst of men are full of passionate intensity. But we must not allow ourselves to be terrorized by them. For that is their aim - terror. Instead we must heed the words of the psalmist, "Fret not over evildoers . . . for they shall fade like the grass."

And they shall.