An Empty Ballpoint Pen
Poor little humans! They only have one tiny life and for so many it’s one long crucifixion until they die of exhaustion, unmissed and unmourned. Dear God they haven’t time to become great sinners because they’re too busy covering their heads while someone is beating them senseless and to death; they’re too busy trying to figure out how they’re going to feed their children and they’re so exhausted that their hearts can’t carry the crushing emotional burden! There’s so much pain, disappointment and unanswered prayers; so much undeserved suffering.
All right, so they’re all sinners but what chance was there that they could be otherwise? Here’s an actual case. His name’s John, he’s eighteen, eighteen! And he’s no vicious hoodlum and his mother is no “Beast of Buchenwald”. Yes, yes, they’ve done wrong things in their lives—did God expect them to be sinless? Born into a world like this and He fully expects them to get out of it without sinning? He knows better though there are many who are friends of His who don’t seem to know what He knows perfectly well!
Here’s one of them: John Risso’s mother. Multiply her by a billion!
“On January 25th, 1973 in Memorial Hospital, John Risso,
red-haired, laughing, tall, eighteen, tractor-driving, cow-scratching,
flirtatious, shy, died after two and a half years of leukemia. After six
weeks of a raging temperature, experimental drugs, bleeding, and an
abscess in his rectum that became gangrenous, he died soft and gentle,
finally, after six hours of violent death throes. His face was so thin,
his hair only a memory, a soft red fuzz, arms blue and green from shots
and intravenous feeding, he looked like an old picture of a saint after
his tortures were over…
Why would a kind God do what was done to John, or do
such a thing to me? I’m poor, have only secondhand furniture and
clothing. The things of value were my husband and sons…How can I live
with the agony he suffered?
Part of the time he was in a comma, and when conscious
he kept saying, ‘Mama, help me, Mama, help me.’ I couldn’t and it’s
killing me. I whispered in his ear, ‘John, I love you so much.’ All of a
sudden his arm came up stiffly and fell across my back, and very
quietly he said, from some vast depth, ‘Me too.’ “
There are no currently fully satisfying answers to
the agony of the world because it isn’t “answers” or “explanations”
these people want—they want it to stop! And yet, despite the silly
advice from silly OT professors who tell us to keep our mouths shut on
the subject, the sufferers keep on asking “why?”
I don’t know very much but I but I know I’m tired of scholarship with
all its wisdom—a wisdom that can show a mass of opposing ways to
understand the same texts and prove to me that I haven’t got a clue
about what the Bible is really saying. I know Jesus knew the Holy
Scriptures back to front and inside out. Scriptures that those who take
the high moral ground these days sneer at, texts that the wise ones in
their wisdom can prove shouldn’t be there—Jesus knew them all. He read
the same OT we have (the one with all those ‘offensive’ texts) but the
Holy Scriptures never offended Him. He said, “Look closely at them with a
trusting and obedient heart and you’ll see Me in them! They’re all
about Me!” There must be a “Jesus way” of reading the Holy Bible that’s
holier than the way the morally upright ones read it; a way wiser than
how the wise ones read it. (John 5:38-39; Luke 11:52)–“Woe to you
scholars for you take away the key of knowledge…” I’ll rest on that!
I’m tired too of the banal moralizing that I listen to week after week
after week from various sources. Preachers armed with a database of a
hundred favorite verses and their favorite topics that they present in
something of different suit and yet, more often than not, with the same
tired illustrations, platitudes, words of correction, suggestions and
clips from the Andy Griffith show. I’d rather have the scandal that I don’t know how to respond to.
Colin Morris, a prominent British churchman some years back
told us that during the night a couple of hundred yards from his door
people found a little man lying on the pavement–-dead. An Asian. His
sole possessions were the pair of shorts he wore, a pair of worn sandals
and his shirt with an empty ballpoint pen in the pocket. The autopsy
found a ball of grass in his otherwise empty stomach.
Arrrrrgh!
Dear Mrs. ‘Rissos’, poor little Asian men we’ve nothing to tell
you other than that there is a God and that He is like Jesus Christ and
that He WILL do what is right and He WILL right all the wrongs. The
resurrection of Jesus Christ is His assurance that that’s true (Acts 17:31).
(Holy Father, you remain to me in so many ways the “unknown God” Paul spoke about. But I can’t deny that Jesus has persuaded me that what I think I know or what I know I don’t know changes nothing about who you are essentially. I and multiplied millions like me are trusting Him and so we are trusting you. If you can actually experience pain that rises out of your sadness at the agony of the world’s great wrong and the consequences of it, you are a strange God indeed. Many truths help me live at peace with my ignorance but that you showed us yourself in Jesus of Nazareth, the resurrected One and that He is image of where you purpose to take us is a life-sustainer. By Him I’m greatly helped to believe that there is a glorious, happy and righteous ending to all this. Thank you in the name of the Living Lord Jesus.)
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