Sunday Message: Maybe He's a juggler to you...

God is a tremendous juggler from our perspective- He can "keep a lot of balls in the air at once".  Of course, that is a simplistic way of looking at it; though our perceptions can only focus on one "ball" at a time, the truth is, He always holds ALL things together.  Sometimes that can make us think He is working at cross-purposes.  He's trying to move in two different and incompatable directions at the same time.  But in the expanded view, He's still working the one purpose- getting as many of us as will listen into Heaven.

Two things brought this home to me recently.  The first involves the Tower of Babel; the other, something in the total opposite direction.  Let me start by bringing the Babel story into today's age.


Genesis 11 Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2 And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” 5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. 6 And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech.” 8 So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9 Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused[a] the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.


Now, if I were doing the Wednesday message, I would add in thoughts about Nimrod, and how that direction that all man was going was a path WITHOUT God- or even AGAINST Him.  But this morning we will focus just on the thought here.  They had come up with a technological innovation that allowed them to join together and accomplish things they would not have otherwise- and it would be able to unite them and lift them to heights unknown before.  And God forsaw where this would take them- apparently somewhere He didn't want them to go.  So He "confused" their ability to communicate.  He didn't take away the bricks- He simply removed the bricks ability to UNITE them, by changing something else in the dynamic.


My point?  Replace "bricks" with "internet".

Lately you see a lot more people lamenting that social media has turned us into a society who A) does not listen to what the "other guy" says, and B) responds to that which he doesn't listen to with his own preconceived notions, and C) usually phrases it in a lot of hate and anger and insulting.  And the internet, a marvelous device, capable of uniting us with people all across the planet, in nearly every household, with which we could do marvelous, amazing things- well, we started using for games, and pronography, and fraud.  And then, after a time, it suddenly started facilitating a culture war- dividing us hopelessly (for the most part) along lines of race, politics, and good and evil.  Even the more enlightened of us only go so far as to blame politicians for stirring up the divide for their own gain.


But what if it was God doing it?  What if the internet's massive potential for good, for lifting us up, has served to give us new ways, new reasons to IGNORE and resist God- and he "confused" our language with division, hate, and anger?  Curiously, the word here used for confuse is bâlal, which means in its simplest form, "to overflow (especially with oil)."  Have we been overflooded with words, until it is so mixed up (the secondary meaning comes from a word for "fodder", indicating a mixing of grain like you would in livestock feed) that the "one direction" we started in is impossible to find?  In the Wednesday Message last week, we learned that God purposefully does the same thing over and over, so this is NO stretch.


Now here's where the juggling starts.  I came to this conclusion one day; that evening, I saw this headline on FoxNews:

Contemporary Christian artists see ‘Third Great Awakening’ coming

And I said to myself, "In this world?  They are kidding themselves."


But you read the comments that Fox got from worship leader Josh Baldwin and singer Lindy Conant:


“It does feel like we’re on edge, like something’s about to break and there’s about to be another big awakening,” Baldwin said. “I feel like the younger generation – millennials – sometimes can get a bad rap, but the thing I love about it is that they are all-in on whatever they’re going for…and the ones that are going after the Lord they’re so passionate about it that I feel like that’s what changes our nation – their passion and their hunger.”

Conant said: “It’s like Jesus needs to be re-introduced to a whole generation, like He’s not mad at you. He’s not up there waiting to strike you with a lightning bolt. He is a God of love. For God so loved the world that He sent His son, and now Jesus wants to send us with that same love to reach a generation…that’s where I go we’re all missionaries…Jesus said as the Father sent me so I am sending you…OK, well, that’s pretty gangster if that’s the truth.”


And after a moment of cynical grumbling, I said, "Hey waitaminit- why COULDN'T God do both at once? "  I realized that if ALL I look at is the effects of Babel's fall, I am missing the powerful potential of God's reaching out to those who ARE listening, who HAVEN'T been confused.  I stopped to remember that at the approximate same time as Nimrod's fall at Babel, Shem, Noah's son, was passing on his faith to Abram, who was about to birth a new thing upon the earth- a people peculiar to the Lord.

Sometimes it suits our purposes to just look at the "fallen" end of this fallen world.  That way, we can sit back, await the Lord's return, and condemn the fallen instead of praying for them, reaching out to them.  But God gave us TWO eyes for a reason- literally AND figuratively.  Close one eye, then switch- you see the same thing, but with a subtle difference.  That's what God wants us to understand.  There is more than one way to look at this world.

Or, look at it this way- if there were no fallen, we'd have no one to reach with salvation.  Having someone to save is a GOOD thing.