"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Paul Lytle

At one time, one my greatest pet peeves was those people who thanked God for everything. They would thank Him for sunshine and rain and avoiding a car wreck or getting into a car wreck if something good comes of it. Anytime anything good came about, even if that good result was utterly in control of a person, they will praise God. But when something bad happens, they do not curse God. No, then it is someone else's fault.

I saw this state of mind as a kind of blindness. It is ridiculous, I thought, to think that God has taken personal control over your life when something good happens, but He was, apparently, not paying attention when you lost your job. I did not doubt that He did influence the world, but some things were simply the results of common causes. Or, if God did control these events, then He controlled all events, meaning the bad ones too. It seemed to me to be either one or the other.

And then, one day, I found myself thanking God for a rain storm. To be fair, we were in a mild drought, and we really did need the rain. But the fact that I was thanking God for rain, when only a month before I had been happy about the sunshine, struck me as odd. Why was I not blaming Him for the drought to begin with? Surely if He can control the rain, He could have brought it sooner! Why had I not prayed, "God, thanks for the rain and all, but what took You so long?"

The answer is not simply that it is not a terribly good idea to curse the Almighty, although that is part of it. We have accepted Him as Good, and so what is produced by Him must be Good. To paraphrase a little from Job, we really have no idea what's going on, and so it is a touch dangerous to start demanding answers on issues that we cannot possible understand. I am not terribly afraid of being zapped by lightning if I ask questions about the way things are, but I do realize that God is playing this game on a level so beyond me that it is presumptuous for me to even believe I can comprehend what's going on.

So I came to the conclusion that, if God is indeed controlling it, there is a timing to the rain, and it is worthy of praise. But that's not the whole of it, I think.

As I was in my car that day, driving home through this wonderful storm, I realized something. The rain is a mercy that should not exist.

This is what I mean. I don't know how the rain worked before the Fall, but I don't think it was away long enough for a drought, and I don't think it was around long enough for a flood. But then we fell, and with us all of nature fell, and that old way disappeared.

We entered, quite literally, death. Genesis gives us God's warning that went unheeded: "The Lord God commanded the man, saying, 'From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.'" (Genesis 2:16-17)

They ate. The price for that disobedience is death. Paul points out this fact in the first part of Romans 6:23: "For the wages of sin is death."

And all of Creation shared in this death. God tells Adam, "Cursed is the ground because of you" (Genesis 3:17).

Thus started the new order of things. In this order, it is the natural inclination of this world to crumble. We know that from science, if not by sight. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that without outside influence, things fall apart. This is known as entropy. Without repair, a building will simply fall over in time. Artwork will fade. A car will stop running and rust.

These things are dying, and we try to keep them in good repair. It is by our efforts that a building does not fall or that artwork does not fade. For a house, we do simple repairs to keep the pipes from leaking or the foundations from cracking. In art, we are careful not to leave a painting in the sun, or perhaps we restore an old work. But our efforts are incomplete. When a painting is caught in an accidental fire, that death consumes it. It cannot be repaired. Someone can repaint it, but the original is gone forever. It is the same with a building. It can be, perhaps, rebuilt, but there is a point when maintenance is no longer an option.

Likewise does our world need constant repair. The actions of Adam and Eve made this world a dying one, but God is constantly maintaining it with life. In other words, it is the natural inclination of this world to slip into drought and disease. It is the mercy of God that causes the rain to come.

Let me put it another way. I've always liked the story of how God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. It is a striking picture of God's power and wrath (and the pillar of salt thing was pretty cool). But I would like to look at it another way. God did not randomly pick those cities to be destroyed. No, it was the sin of those cities that doomed them. If we take Paul's maxim at face value, then those cities deserved death a thousand times over. Not only did they deserve death, but their actions brought death.

It was their sin that destroyed those cities, and it was God's mercy that held them up so long.

Do you doubt me? Abraham prays repeatedly for God to spare Sodom if only a few righteous people were found in the city, and God grants Abraham's every request. And even when those people are not found, God still sends his angels to rescue Lot and his family.

The death comes from sin. The life comes from God's mercy.

It is God's mercy that even in a fallen world, life can continue. There is no perfect government, but God has allowed it that workable ones can exist. The ground is hard, but God has made it so that it will yield.

Paul knew this truth well, and his description of this mercy we see its literal truth:

"For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities — all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together." (Colossians 1:16-17, emphasis mine)

It is God's mercy that death is held off, and it is God's mercy that we can be rescued from that death we brought on ourselves. I quoted part of a verse from Romans. Let me finish the quote: "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Again we find the theme. We are dying, and God sends life. Only this time it is not a temporary fix to the problem, but a way to undo what Adam did so long ago. He has been creating life within this world all along, but this time, He has sent LIFE. In the ultimate act of mercy, God recast the world to make it new.

Noah, on the ark, praised God for sunshine. I, in my car that day, praised God for rain. Both were miracles, because both brought life into a dying world. Both were mercies. Blessed be the name of the Lord!

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