What Can the Righteous Do?

Psalm 11:3-4 — When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?  The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord is on his heavenly throne.  He observes everyone on earth.

When we look at the world around us today, it is easy to think that our society is falling apart.  The basic principles that our country was founded on sound like empty words.  Millions of people are out of work as people try to avoid the plague.  People fill the streets some seeming to have no regard for government, and sometimes government responds seeming to have no regard for the people.  It is easy to believe that the foundations of our world are being destroyed.  What can we do?

Two thousand years ago, when John and Jesus were beginning their public ministries, the situation must have looked much the same for the people living in Israel.  What had been a prosperous and influential nation centuries before was occupied by a foreign power who had no regard for the nation’s God, who subjugated the people, made them pay taxes and endure slavery, deposed their rightful leaders and put figureheads in their places.  It must have seemed that their society was broken down, that the foundations of their lives were being destroyed.  Into the middle of this chaos came John and Jesus, preaching a message that they called “The Good News.”  What was this good news?  That God was coming to destroy their enemies and set things right?  That everything would be “back to normal” soon?  That their country would once again be the great nation that they remembered from their history?

The good news was none of these things.  The good news was that God was still in charge.  “This mess that you see around you,” the preachers told them, “is the Kingdom of God.  He has not forgotten you.  He is in control, still in his holy temple, still seated on his heavenly throne.  Not only that, but you yourselves are the light of this kingdom.  You are the salt that preserves the world and makes it palatable.  He still holds you in the palm of his hand, and no power in Heaven or Earth can take you away from him.”

It is one of the great wonders of the Bible that, when Jesus preached this message, despite what the people saw around them, in their society, in their own lives, many of them believed him.  They believed that a world of apparent chaos, ruled by a loving God, was better than anything they could contrive by their own wisdom.  When it seems that our world is falling apart, the best thing we can do is to believe that God’s perspective is better than our own.  When Peter was speaking to Cornelius in Acts 10, he summarized the life of Jesus by saying, “He went about doing good.”  We cannot fix this world.  We cannot make the problems go away, or fix the broken institutions that perpetuate them.  But we can do good.  In whatever way we can find, with whatever power we have, we can choose to do good.  If we all did that, we might believe that the world would become better.  But whether it would or not, we can choose to do good, to bless the people we come into contact with.  We can choose to trust God to be in control, and to cooperate with him in whatever way we can manage.