News from the Pews
...A newsletter for the merged congregations of Broad Avenue-North & Conklin Presbyterian Churches

May 2013 Newsletter                         

Faith and Struggle

A Psalm says, “The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth he has given to the sons of men.” (Ps. 115:16) That is still where we are. We have sent rockets into space, and a few humans have made it to the moon. While the moon may be an nice place to visit, I would not want to live there. For the time being at least, we are stuck with earth, and with the fact that God gave us the earth.
It so happens that on earth we have human leaders. We have human leaders in government, in school, in work, in church. The biblical view of our responsibility to God, and to our fellow humans seems to be this: God comes first, and we should respect human leaders too, but be careful of human leaders. “It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to put confidence in princes.” (Ps. 118:9)
Israel was liberated from slavery in Egypt, spent 40 years in the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land, and then moved into the Promised Land under the leadership of Joshua. After Joshua was a time of “Judges,” which were kind of like your local volunteer fire company. If there was a threat from an enemy, the judges called for a volunteer army to defend the tribes of Israel. The idea was that God would give strength and protection as needed, no permanent army was required. The time came when the vulnerability of Israel to enemy attack became more than people could stand, and they called on the prophet Samuel to give them a king. Samuel was against the whole idea, but God said to Samuel, “Hearken to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.” (1 Sam. 8:7)
Samuel obeyed God, anointing Saul as the first king of Israel, a tall strong warrior leader. But Samuel put a “Product Warning Label” in his address to Israel: “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots.” (1 Sam. 8:11-12) Like Dwight Eisenhower thousands of years later, Samuel warned that the “military industrial complex,” which is supposed to protect us, would become a great burden, maybe even get out of control.
We live in a time when people–Christians included–look to government, not to God, to meet our safety needs. We expect not just military protection from our government, but protection from poverty, from hunger, from expensive medical costs, from the cost of dying (nursing homes etc), in fact, most government “programs” are supposed to make life easier. One little negative in all this is, our government is borrowing about a trillion dollars a year to cover the costs of all this “safety.” As a long range plan, this may not work. Jesus, unlike the government, does not promise safety, but rather calls us to take up our cross, and follow him. To obey Jesus means we need to put less trust in “princes,” and more trust in the invisible God who made us, and gave us the earth, “to test us, to do us good in the end.” (Deut. 8:16)

Barry H. Downing, Interim Pastor