Wednesday, November 16, 2022

 

Wednesday, November 16, 2022


Psalm 38

Zechariah 10:6-11:3

Revelation 8


Observance: Margaret of Scotland, queen, helper of the poor (d. 1093)


When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.


How long does it take for God to do something? The Psalm this morning, a Psalm to cry out in prayer when we are sick or injured, is an excellent example of how Christianity lives in the real world. Suffering happens; the Psalmist knows this better than most. But he ends with confidence that the Lord will rescue him. God will do something about it. The question is not if, but how long.


We have now reached the last of the seals which made the scroll, the title deed to creation, official. Jesus is officially Owner of creation, and the final seal concludes this part of the spiritual history which the scroll has been describing.


Our prayers, which the incense explicitly represents, are answered as the coals are let out from heaven onto the earth. The Psalmist confidently asserted that God would not forsake him, and now he is vindicated.


The silence is because of the atonement. Jesus is on the cross, bearing our sins, redeeming His people. Heaven, up until now thundering with music, has fallen silent in awe of this moment. There is no greater movement of God than that which Jesus accomplished when He saved us on the cross.


John describes this moment of time as “about half an hour”. He is deliberate in this phrasing. John is taking a standard measurement of time, an hour, and splitting it in half, to demonstrate how quickly it happens. He does this in his gospel too: the time between Jesus’ death and resurrection is three and a half days: half a week. The prophet Daniel does the same thing (“half the week”) in his own prediction of Christ’s work on the cross (Daniel 9:27).


So how long does it take for God to do something? Not very. Any suffering we endure is over very quickly indeed, all things considered. While we are in the moment, pain may seem like it takes a lifetime: but this is more so because we have the attention span of a goldfish, cosmically speaking. And when God moves to save us, to redeem us of our faults or to heal our wounds or to relieve our suffering, the goodness into which He brings us is so swift, marvellous and heavenly we forget how bad things really were. Zechariah describes this moment as though God had never rejected us. God’s goodness is on a level so much higher than any evil this world has to offer that when we taste of God’s goodness we forget the evil as if it had never existed. Setting these things into context helps us endure the very short amount of time it takes for God to save us. And may we be ever more thankful and joyous when God does perform these miracles of salvation in our lives.




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