Job 11:20

But the eyes of the wicked pine away,

   All escape is lost to them,

      Their Hope – One Last Breath.

 

We heard a sermon on government. We heard that the Revolutionary War was fought by people following the same passage in Romans. They each pulled out the part to fit their own narrative and killed their friends over it. History always portrays the Civil War as fought among ourselves but the Revolutionary War was little different. The truth is that both were fought over a difference of opinion no more important than any other stack of sin.

‘Pine away’ was also ‘fail’, ‘fail with longing’, and ‘gaze’. I wanted it to be a simple fail with longing, but it did not seem simple and my result seemed so much more open to interpretation while requiring thought.

‘Is lost’ was also ‘elude’ and ‘cut off’, with ‘escape’ also being ‘refuge’. I preferred the idea that they could not find escape more so than them being not able to reach refuge.

‘Hope’ was also something ‘to look forward to’. ‘One last breath’ was ‘to breath their last’, ‘a dying gasp’, ‘loss of life’, ‘giving up the ghost’, ‘spent in sighs’, and ‘turns into despair’. I pulled ‘One last breath’ out as the idea behind the choices and felt it captured both the wish for death and the worthlessness of their condition.

We are watching a show with a person making sacrificial decisions to care for those he loves. They are not seemingly wise decisions. But from his perspective, each is the least evil choice. The sermon mentioned the need to do right and not be frightened. But it also mentioned the fact that evil is around us and there is a need for a government to protect the people from evil people. Our choices should be grounded in ‘What does God say?’ and not what do other people say. If God tells me to do something, then I need to be prepared to suffer any worldly consequence of following His will. That is the point at which people push governments.

I remember a couple election cycles back when I wrote that we needed to be praying for both Hillary and Trump to find God and lead this country in a more godly direction. Then I wrote the same about Trump and Biden (more or less). But now we do not even have the names of our future options and I want to tell everyone to start praying today with all you have that the next choices we have are better than each of the most recent ones and that maybe, just maybe, we will have two godly options.

Its Easter, so: He is Risen Indeed.

(Written 3/26/23, Posted 4/9, Job 251)