That he might heal her.
That he might give her a hope and a future.
At the last possible moment, she is miraculously healed.
Joy flies high, beyond the stars.
Gratitude is poured out in pounding rivers.
Her life, her future, has been saved from the brink of destruction and your prayers are responsible.Fast forward twenty years.
She has a son now, a child born out of flying joy and pounding gratitude.
But her son begins to hurt your child.
When their paths cross, pain flies high and hatred is poured out in pounding rivers.
Fast forward forty years.
She has a granddaughter now.
Her granddaughter carries nothing but loathing for your grandchild.
Generational hatred and pain are the result of your prayers for healing.
If you could climb into a machine that took you back to the moment of those agonizing prayers, would you?
Would you change your prayers?
Would you pray at all?
Does your heart pound at the injustice of it?
Of your heartfelt prayers causing your descendants pain?
If Abraham knew that his plead to save Lot would cause millennia of fighting between their descendants, would he have made that bargain with the LORD?
The Ammonites and Moabites, descendants of Lot, were a stench in the nose of the Israelites. They were like a persistent bully, a prostitute wooing them from faithful marriages, and an unfaithful daughter leading them away from their God into worship of the detestable Chemosh and Molech.
God saved Lot from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah out of his great love for Abraham, but Lot’s descendants become a holy terror to those of Abraham.
God used them to punish Israel, to wake it out of its boastful slumber. They were alternately a blessing, a curse, and a teaching tool for Abraham’s descendants.
Abraham’s answered prayer seems more like a curse.
But God.
There’s always a “but God”, isn’t there?
But God chose a descendant of Lot’s son and grandson, Moab, to be in the lineage of grace. You remember Ruth. What had broken when Abraham and Lot separated, began to be put back together when Ruth and Boaz, descendent of Abraham, joined in marriage.
But God also chose a descendant of Lot’s other son and grandson, Ammon, to be in the lineage of grace. You probably don’t remember Naamah, but there she is, hiding on the pages of Scripture, begging to be remembered for her contribution to the fulfillment of the promise.
But God can redeem any evil, bring light to any darkness, can return any faithless one as a faithful spouse, can turn a bully into a buddy and generational hatred into the seed of something more beautiful than life itself.
You may be living in the midst of pain, of sadness, of evil, of apathy, but God is there.
His answers may not seem good to you, they might make no sense to you, they might even seem like curses to you.
But as Isaiah learned, “[God’s] thoughts are not [our] thoughts, neither are [our] ways [God’s] ways.” (Isaiah 55:8)
Listen to God’s response to Job in the video below. How will you respond to his greatness? Will you fret and despair over not understanding his ways, or will you fall to your knees?
It’s your choice.
0 Comments