“A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.” (ESV)
This verse leapt to mind as I heard the news that a fifth Westerner has been savagely executed by the terrorist organization known as ISIS. This young man, a humanitarian worker in his mid-twenties, was a recent graduate of the high school where I teach.
There are no words in the face of such savagery, such brutality. Anger and well-intentioned platitudes are equally pointless. Such events do, however, remind us that we live in a world at war. There is darkness that wars against light, and so it will be until the One Who is Light from Light, true God from true God, even Jesus Christ our Lord returns. He was born into just such a world, and savagery and brutality sent Him from it. The bedrock of our hope is that He triumphed over such evil. The wickedness of today is the same wickedness of Cavalry, but as Christ’s resurrection showed, that evil was foiled, for He took death and turned it into life for all who would accept the offer of His grace.
As the old hymn sings, “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’s blood and righteousness. I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus’s name. On Christ the solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand.”
Copyright © 2014 by Steven R. Perkins
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