If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night," even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.' Psalm 139
I’ve just come back from holiday, where I was looking at views like this, buying my children ice creams, and reading about the heartbreaking suffering of Christians in Iraq. The kind of suffering that chills me to the heart, makes me hold my children tighter and drives me to my knees to pray. How can the world be so beautiful and so terrible all at once?
I am glad I have just read Revelation. Because reading the news and reading Revelation are very similar right now. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that ‘this is the end of the world.’ Apparently they thought that in the time of Oliver Cromwell. Perhaps it’s just that Revelation gives its own kind of peculiar comfort in each generation.
On actually reading Revelation it doesn’t feel very comforting. It is full of terrible trouble that is going to come upon the world. It’s frightening to say the least. But there is some comfort in knowing that when the world seems to be a place of carnage and suffering, God hasn’t taken his eye off the ball. He knows.
What comfort is that, I hear you ask? He knows and he does nothing? He lets people go through that?
Here is the comfort that I think Revelation does offer. All through he has his children safe- perhaps not safe as we would like to be, but ensuring their place in heaven with him.
And as the forces of evil gather, they seem huge, all powerful, undefeatable- but when Jesus turns up on the scene, poof! They’re gone. No one is more powerful than our God.
And then of course there is what comes afterwards. God on his throne. Us with him. A new Jerusalem and a new earth. God himself wiping the tears from our eyes. And justice, like the world has never known.
I am rereading Corrie Ten Boom’s ‘The Hiding Place’. I read it last during my struggle with Alice’s illness and it helped me enormously in how to trust God. Now I am reading it not because of a personal crisis but to learn how to live as a Christian in a world full of evil.
Corrie and her family sheltered Jews during the second world war. They were eventually caught, and Corrie and her sister were sent to a concentration camp. Words actually fail me trying to describe this story. If you haven’t read it, read it. If you have, read it again.
There are so many things I could tell you about how Corrie’s testimony has helped me. But for now, I am just going to tell a couple.
As war broke out in The Netherlands, Corrie was given a vision of her family being taken away in a cart. She shared it with her sister, who said that if terrible things were coming, she was content that God knew them. She also said ‘the only safe place is at the centre of God’s will’. The vision came true; Corrie, her sister, her father and other members of her family were taken away and imprisoned.
As I read on, as Corrie and Betsie were taken to Ravensbruck concentration camp, and I read about how they were able to smuggle in a Bible, a jumper and vitamins, and how the vitamins did not run out, how they were enabled to share the Bible without interruption from the guards, a question arose in my mind. ‘God, if you could work all those miracles in the middle of Auschwitz, why didn’t you just stop the holocaust?’ But I was stopped in my tracks. Because Corrie and Betsie didn’t ask this. Daughters of a loving father, they had learned to trust God as a loving Father, to ask him to carry knowledge too heavy for them, to give them His love for people when their own failed. That God would give them the strength they needed at just the right time. And before she died Betsie said to her sister, ‘tell them there is no pit so deep that God isn’t deeper still. They will believe us because we’ve been here.’
There is one more book I want to talk about. I am reading a book called ‘Heaven’ by Randy Alcorn. I will be honest, I’ve been reading it for a year already and not got halfway through. But what I have read has been transformative for me. It’s convinced me that Heaven is far better, more real and solid, than I’ve ever dreamt of, and that God’s rescue plan is bigger and better than we realise too. Here is what he says:
‘God has his hands on the earth. He will not let go- even when it requires that his hands be pierced by nails. Both his incarnation and those nails secured him to Earth and its eternal future. In a redemptive work far larger than most imagine, Christ bought and paid for our future and the earth’s.
God has this beautiful, terrifying, confusing world in his hands- his scarred hands.
I am glad I have just read Revelation. Because reading the news and reading Revelation are very similar right now. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that ‘this is the end of the world.’ Apparently they thought that in the time of Oliver Cromwell. Perhaps it’s just that Revelation gives its own kind of peculiar comfort in each generation.
On actually reading Revelation it doesn’t feel very comforting. It is full of terrible trouble that is going to come upon the world. It’s frightening to say the least. But there is some comfort in knowing that when the world seems to be a place of carnage and suffering, God hasn’t taken his eye off the ball. He knows.
What comfort is that, I hear you ask? He knows and he does nothing? He lets people go through that?
Here is the comfort that I think Revelation does offer. All through he has his children safe- perhaps not safe as we would like to be, but ensuring their place in heaven with him.
And as the forces of evil gather, they seem huge, all powerful, undefeatable- but when Jesus turns up on the scene, poof! They’re gone. No one is more powerful than our God.
And then of course there is what comes afterwards. God on his throne. Us with him. A new Jerusalem and a new earth. God himself wiping the tears from our eyes. And justice, like the world has never known.
I am rereading Corrie Ten Boom’s ‘The Hiding Place’. I read it last during my struggle with Alice’s illness and it helped me enormously in how to trust God. Now I am reading it not because of a personal crisis but to learn how to live as a Christian in a world full of evil.
Corrie and her family sheltered Jews during the second world war. They were eventually caught, and Corrie and her sister were sent to a concentration camp. Words actually fail me trying to describe this story. If you haven’t read it, read it. If you have, read it again.
There are so many things I could tell you about how Corrie’s testimony has helped me. But for now, I am just going to tell a couple.
As war broke out in The Netherlands, Corrie was given a vision of her family being taken away in a cart. She shared it with her sister, who said that if terrible things were coming, she was content that God knew them. She also said ‘the only safe place is at the centre of God’s will’. The vision came true; Corrie, her sister, her father and other members of her family were taken away and imprisoned.
As I read on, as Corrie and Betsie were taken to Ravensbruck concentration camp, and I read about how they were able to smuggle in a Bible, a jumper and vitamins, and how the vitamins did not run out, how they were enabled to share the Bible without interruption from the guards, a question arose in my mind. ‘God, if you could work all those miracles in the middle of Auschwitz, why didn’t you just stop the holocaust?’ But I was stopped in my tracks. Because Corrie and Betsie didn’t ask this. Daughters of a loving father, they had learned to trust God as a loving Father, to ask him to carry knowledge too heavy for them, to give them His love for people when their own failed. That God would give them the strength they needed at just the right time. And before she died Betsie said to her sister, ‘tell them there is no pit so deep that God isn’t deeper still. They will believe us because we’ve been here.’
There is one more book I want to talk about. I am reading a book called ‘Heaven’ by Randy Alcorn. I will be honest, I’ve been reading it for a year already and not got halfway through. But what I have read has been transformative for me. It’s convinced me that Heaven is far better, more real and solid, than I’ve ever dreamt of, and that God’s rescue plan is bigger and better than we realise too. Here is what he says:
‘God has his hands on the earth. He will not let go- even when it requires that his hands be pierced by nails. Both his incarnation and those nails secured him to Earth and its eternal future. In a redemptive work far larger than most imagine, Christ bought and paid for our future and the earth’s.
God has this beautiful, terrifying, confusing world in his hands- his scarred hands.
