From Golgotha's Hill

There is little to no argument that we are living in times of great peril.  After watching a few minutes of the local news full of homicides, rapes, and burglaries, people sit paralyzed behind locked doors and drawn curtains.  There is a war going on, but it is spiritual.  Those enlisted in God’s army can not hide behind a fleshly armor and refuse to go anywhere or help anyone out of fear that they will become the next victim. 

While some believers of the faith, who are convinced that every destructive act of nature happening in the world is God’s judgment, do nothing but shout, “Revelations…This is the end times”, others are gathering their chicks like a mother hen to make sure that their own will be saved.  But what about those who are widowed, orphaned, poor, oppressed, and still bound in fetters and chains?  What will become of them?

From the beginning God has planned to do good towards His people.  Throughout the history of man’s existence, God has called and equipped prophets to see, speak, and hear His divine plan for those who would believe in the coming Savior.  But the constant struggle between good and evil has wearied our faith.  When we see people living recklessly not wanting a better life, we resolve they are not worth fighting for and impetuously deem their soul a lost cause.  But God has not changed His mind about His people possessing the promise land. 

The places where many people dwell in, is a far cry from the land flowing with milk and honey, which God showed Moses from atop of Mount Nebo.  Instead of the emergence of this sweet combination, the land is flooded with unkempt men with red eyes, unshaven beards and crooked, toothless grins, who prop themselves up on every five and dime store in run-down neighborhoods.  It’s a place where men on bicycles not built for two carry three, spewing profanity and vulgarity as if it were their first language; and a short skirted woman in high heels pace the street corners working a nine to five from five until the rent is paid and she has enough money to feed her starving children.

Whose dry bones did Ezekiel prophesy to in the valley?  Consider the barefooted infants with uncombed hair and grimy faces who stagger in droopy diapers along cracked sidewalks; or the next generation blind to their identity, who aimlessly walk the streets trashing the already filled ditches of empty beer bottles with their chili stained 7-Eleven Big-Bite wrappers; or the sedated, silver haired legacies who are not only sentenced to sit on recliners pushed onto front porches in solitude, but silenced because no one believes they still have dreams. 

When Martin Luther King stood on a hillside and gave his unforgettable “I Have A Dream” speech, he impacted a world and brought people together for the common cause of equality.  Is it impartiality when we see black men and white men stripped and junked like discarded cars in the high grasslands of empty lots behind paint chipped buildings with rusty water streaks from corroded lead pipes?  Or when the cries and movements of innocent babies of all races are deliberately stilled before they are born? 

What do you suppose Christ saw from the hill of Golgotha where He yielded Himself to the horrific crucifixion on the cross?  He saw the way to redeem the unsaved souls of man from the empty graves waiting to be filled.  God has a remnant in the earth that He has not forgotten or abandoned; but it will take us dressed in our full spiritual armor, positioned in prayer for God’s will to be done on the earth as it is in heaven.