FERGUSON: We do and are thankfully able to develop means of alleviating human suffering.
So our nations are putting vast resources into trying to find an antidote and that's
altogether appropriate, it's altogether Christ like, He sought to alleviate suffering.
We also know that He didn't alleviate everybody's suffering and so I say there's a complexity
to the way in which God works that is beyond us, but it is appropriate that we take means
to alleviate the suffering and don't just say God sent and God will get rid of it.
We don't respond to anything in our lives with that kind of foolish simplicity.
I think the second thing to say is that from a biblical point of view, all suffering that
we experience exposes one, our frailty.
Two, our need of God.
Three, the sinfulness of our human condition.
And four, our need for repentance.
Think of, for example, what Jesus says when people come in Luke 13 and people come and
say, what about these people that Pilate slaughtered?
Were they worse than others?
I'm sure this is a question that some people will ask or those on whom the tower fell.
The application Jesus makes is not to say to us, try and work out who is responsible
for this, but this is actually a call to repentance.
Certainly the pattern all the way through scripture of this kind of event in a nation
or now on the face of the earth is that written into it, coded into the language of this cosmic
affliction really for us is, we do need to repent.
I actually think that in the midst of all the suffering, the great issue for us in the
West is whether we will heed that call.
I mean, very interesting after 9/11 as far as I could tell from a distance, the churches
were filled with people expressing their sense of need, dissipated very, very quickly.
So, as Burk was saying, I think the call for the church is that there will really be a
genuine spirit of repentance born in us out of this, a recognition that we thought we
were masters of the universe and here's some invisible, infinitesimal something has mastered
the earth at the moment and produced this fear.
That's such a Clarion call to us to return to the Lord.
But you know, people may say, I'll never be the same again after this, and we'll... the
dangerous will be exactly the same after it.
So, I think the note that Burk struck me on, which I think I was reflecting on the plague
at the time in Joel's prophecy, that was locusts.
But the whole pattern there is this is a summons to you to repent, to turn back to the Lord.
It's interesting, it's exactly in Joel that we get this great promise of the outpouring
of the Holy Spirit, which must have had an application to the people in his time as it
clearly had a significant application on the day of Pentecost.
So, we seek to relieve suffering, we pray for a baptism of repentance, and we look to
the Lord to send His Holy Spirit to bring conversion and awakening and revival in the
church.