The Forgotten Worst Tragedy

The Bible deals with the worst tragedy that human nature and the devil could concoct. We seem to have forgotten this nowadays. 

The Atonement of Jesus Christ that brings forgiveness of sin has been made into a kind of moral “wash basin” wherein a man can wash and go out and get dirty again. But when the truths of the Bible lift the veil from the basis of things (which most of us know nothing of because we are too dense or too remote from it), we find that the Redemption deals with tragedy of an appalling order.

When both the covid pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement broke out, the ruling note in Christianity was being struck not by the men and women who knew the basis of things, but by those who were clueless to the abominable tragedy at the basis of human life.  

Consequently something chaotic, confusing and vague and totally unlike the Bible has come to rule both our culture and the church.  With the help of social media, it is being expressed in strange laments and violent protests by angry militant people. A strange illusion of social justice is being built up by people who are not dealing with tragedy but with a misguided theory.

 

When civilized life is burst into, that's when we find that the basis of life is tragic. No education, no culture, no sociological movement, no critical race theory, or government can touch the fathomless rot at the basis of human life in its deepest down level. Most of us live in the twenty-second story level up, and the tragedies we touch, for the most part, are only personal tragedies. 

But the covid crisis and the political unrest are a mostly untapped opportunity God has given the church to come to understand the havoc that underlies everything. This line of thinking is absolutely important, not relatively important. 2020 will be a wasted year if the church misses this opportunity to come to understand and come to grips with the worst tragedy of human life. 

- Adapted from Oswald Chambers' The Shade of His Hand