We really need to understand that we are not held hostage to the circumstances of injustice in our society– we are still called to change it.
If the foundations [of law and order] are destroyed, what can the righteous do? (Psalm 11:3 my emphasis added)
The Psalmist writes about a chaotic time in his life, when his country was falling apart. The Psalmist does not mention whether the bottom was falling because other nations ravaged his land by war; or whether it was simply poor leadership; or even simply corruption. We do know from what the Psalmist writes in this passage that lawlessness was prevalent and it might have been safer if the Psalmist had run and hid in a bunker in the hills. It was not a good time for good people. People either needed to become bandits or run away because good people, as the Psalmist writes, were backed into a corner and had no other options than a hard place. We sometimes question what we can do, as a single individual, in a world full of horrible evil when nobody else seems to care and when people doing blatantly wrong things make headlines as visionary and heroic. I mean, it sometimes makes me want to throw my arms up in the air and give up. That is the what Psalmist is saying. Why not just take a walk in the dark side? It appears life would be better if I did. The reason we don’t walk on the dark side, the reason we don’t give up and live defeated though, is because the fallen world we live in is not king over us. Just because our society is broken, and we celebrate evil as heroic deeds, and we find honor in compromising principles, doesn’t change the fact that our God, the one we place our faith in, still rules from heaven (v4). It does not change the fact that when we look upon God’s face, we are empowered and emboldened to be righteous– to change the world as we know it. If you’ve been defeated as of late, look at God sitting on his throne because there is plenty that we can do to change the world.
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