Christian Mingle takes your safety very seriously. Good to know.
But we all take our safety seriously. Some
of us are too immature, unwary or inexperienced to recognize potential dangers
when we encounter them, but that’s more a matter of failing to apply a
principle than failing to believe it. If you ask a group of average folk how
important their safety is to them, you’ll find most answer “Very”.
Drug safety, food safety, bike helmets, pre-nuptial
agreements, fine print, motorcycle leathers, sunscreen, shark cages, air bags,
seatbelts, life preservers, parachutes, fire alarms, escapes and extinguishers …
everybody wants to be safe. Nothing intrinsically wicked about that.
Except when you do it at someone else’s
expense.
What interests me here is the motivation of
the Chaldeans. At their most caricatured, we’re used to seeing the Black Hats
cackling madly on TV and in books and movies about world domination and the
like. But the Chaldeans, it seems, were primarily interested in
self-preservation. In this they were either surprisingly modern, or else
concern for safety is a feature of every age in human history. The Chaldeans
plundered nations and built towns and cities in the hope of making themselves
immune to the predations of other nations. As the prophet says:
“Woe to him who gets evil gain for his house,to set his nest on high,to be safe from the reach of harm!”
Sounds suspiciously like the motivation attributed
to the American government during the Bush years. Whether or not going into
Iraq had anything to do with U.S. oil interests, enough people found the idea
plausible that it was generally believed.
Because we all want to be safe. To have what we think we need. To be immunized from the fear of poverty or hardship.
Sadly, guaranteed personal safety is
neither a realistic goal nor a Christian one.
God spoke to Baruch, Jeremiah’s faithful
scribe, in a time of similar national distress and told him:
“Do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not, for behold, I am bringing disaster upon all flesh, declares the Lord.”
More relevant to our situation as believers
in the Lord Jesus, our Master spoke to Peter and said “Follow me”, right after showing him by what kind of death he was to glorify God.
Would that stop you cold? Me too.
It shouldn’t.
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