Rom1:28 (RSV)

A question many people ask is: “If God is a loving and all powerful God, why does He allow evil to exist? Can’t He just destroy all evil?” I’ve personally heard a lot of non-believers cite this when asked why they don’t believe in God.

The answer to this question is very simple, but might not be comprehensible at first glance. The apostle Paul alludes to it here and throughout Romans 1, and if we’re to understand it, we must have a clear understanding of the Father’s heart.

Turn to Luke 15 and here we find the Lord spinning the yarn of the parable of the prodigal son. There’s a father with two sons, and one decides to leave with his inheritance to a distant country. The analogy here is that man turns from God like this son, and the father waits eagerly for the son’s return.

This is the kind of heart the Father has for man. He allows the evil of separation to persist only to eagerly wait for the return of His children.

When the son in the parable returns, the father rejoices and calls all his servants to assemble a welcome for him. So although he gave him up to leave for the distant country, he rejoiced when he returned.

But we might ask: couldn’t the father have done something to stop his son? Use force or manipulation? If we turn to 1 John 4, we see that God is love, a god who loves perfectly. That’s why He would not use force or manipulation. To put it another way, if God was to use force or manipulation, then how can you see His perfect love?

Like the father of the prodigal son, God waits for all those who have turned away from Him. He does not destroy evil because of the trust He has that one day we will turn back to Him, like the prodigal son.

Reflection

Do you feel that the Father is showing you something you hadn’t seen before? Have you misunderstood something about His heart, or the heart of fathers generally?

Prayer

Dear Lord, I’m sorry that I’ve blamed the evil of this world on You. You refuse to compromise Your love for me by using force or manipulation, but You’re calling me with gentleness, urgency and patient suffering. I want to come home to You. Please bring me back to You. In Jesus name I prayed, Amen.

(Rom1:18) Translation: ESV

My neighbour is an experienced retired dog trainer who is raising two puppies in our apartment complex. He has been training them and nurturing them but one day, one of the pups stopped responding to his instructions. Nothing the dog trainer did seemed to work, and it even attacked him when he got close to pet it.

The misbehaving dog would bark at late hours of the night, and the neighbours raised noise complaints to the apartment management, threatening to take action against the trainer. Hearing of this, the dog trainer called for a meeting with his neighbours to come face-to-face with them to confront the issue.

“We can’t sleep at night!’ one neighbour cried. “When your dogs bark, it makes our dogs bark and it’s complete chaos! Why haven’t you put the dog down yet?”

“I have done everything I can and will keep trying,” the seasoned dog trainer replied. “How could you ask me to put my dog down? Do you ask fathers to put their misbehaving sons down?” he questioned back.

“Of course not! That’s inhumane,” the neighbour quipped back. “A real father would never do that.”

To that, the man said nothing, leaving the answer hanging in the air.

–

There is something very striking in this verse, and we owe it to ourselves to look at it more closely if we are to form a better picture of God’s character and heart.

As Christians giving testimony, the first thing we tend to go for is the love of God, right? It feels easier to convince someone to come to God through the love of God. So the question is: why does Paul start off with the Wrath of God?

When I first read the letter to the Romans, I pictured a Zeus-like figure standing on a cloud, raising a thunderbolt towards the earth. I thought that if God is a god of love, then here Paul must be saying that he’s a god of justice, too. 

But from verses 18-32, there is no mention of God dealting punishment, no scene of retribution, no act of vengeance. Instead, we get a confronting sequence of how humankind turned away from God. And what is God’s response to this?  ‘God gave them up to impurity, ‘God gave them up to dishonourable passions’, ‘God gave them up to a base mind”.

Not the reaction we expect, huh? All the Father did was give us up to our sin, which seems so powerless, so helpless, or is it indifference? Did God give up on us? 

If we consider what the Lord did on the cross, then we quickly realise that He didn’t. Quite the contrary, there is nothing that God wouldn’t give to save sinful man. 

So why does He not do something about man’s sin? He did, but not in the way that we thought He would. Instead of eradicating evil, He endured and suffered all the consequences of sin just as the dog trainer endured the scorn of the neighbours. And God endures until the time is fulfilled, when His patience will pay off, and the way of rebirth opened up through the coming of Jesus Christ.

Can you feel God’s wrath that also contains His patience and love?

Prayer

Dear Heavenly Father, I confirm in my heart that You did not give up on us and that Your wondrous love is greater and more stubborn than our sin. The Apostle Paul shows us that You’re not a vengeful God, and I testify in Jesus Christ that you are a fair and loving God. In Jesus Name we prayed, Amen.

(Rom 1:1) Translation: NLT

To start the history changing Letter to the Romans, why does the Apostle Paul introduce himself as a slave of Christ Jesus?

When I think of slaves, this is the image I get: If you ever watched Sparticus, a film on Roman slavery, you get a glimpse of the sort of life slaves were forced to lead. Or if you studied American history, you find an even crueller meaning of the word. And this was very much the kind of image the Romans in the Church in Rome got when they received Paul’s letter.

So these are hard words to swallow today: Are we to re-introduce the cruel practice of slavery to the church?

To understand his introduction to the letter to the Romans, we have to look carefully at the implications of the word he uses and what it could mean for us who follow the Lord today.

The difference between Paul’s ‘slavery’ and our understanding of ‘slavery’ can be found later, where Paul explains in the letter that we are slaves to whomever we obey. If we obey our sinful callings, then we are slaves to sin, and if we obey the Lord, we are slaves to Him (Rom 6:16). If you look carefully at what the Apostle says, we have a choice to whom we are slaves to.

This is not the case for slaves who were not able to choose their masters.

Paul emphasises this point here, which often gets lost in preconceptions: We have a choice of whom we are slaves to, and we get that choice through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The Lord does not take our free will from us! He does not enslave us like sin does. In our prayers, we should never lose sight of this love, this great love that Jesus Christ showed us on the cross, in that he saved us from sin.

Should we not also remember what it means to choose Jesus Christ? If we look at chapter Rom 6:22, we see that we don’t serve to no end. But rather, we who serve our Lord Jesus to result in holiness and eternal life. If there was ever a result worth serving for, wouldn’t this be it?

Do you fast?

The disciples of John the Baptist is asking Jesus question: “How come they do not?” But Jesus in his reply is indirectly asking: “Why do you fast?” On our walk of faith as Christians, we should always be aware of falling into mannerism, to do thing for the sake of doing them. The question the Lord is asking we should always ask ourselves: “Why do I do what I do?”

Sure there are benefits in just obeying the Lord without question, in fact by faith we should not always know the ‘why’ before obeying the Lord’s commandment by stepping out in faith. But, after we obey, we should not simply be a robot and do it just because we were told to. God gave us intellect to think about the why, and the Lord seeks for ‘cheerful’ givers (2 Co 9:7) – those who are doing what they do out of their hearts.

So why do we fast? In fact let’s go one step further, why do we do anything as part of our Christian faith?

Jesus answered, “How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them?

When we are in the presence of Jesus Christ, who is our bridegroom, it calls for celebration not mourning. The Lord is saying: who mourns during the joyful union of love? So why do we attend services, prayer meetings, Bible studies and personal devotions? Surely it is to seek for the presence of the Lord, and to be joyful in that presence. Let us not do these things simply as a religious routine, and therefore emotionlessly or even grudgingly. As we come to the Lord, let’s come with a heart of anticipation to find His presence and the joy that comes with His presence.

Then, coming back to the original question: why should we fast?

The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.

When is the Lord far away from us? Actually the Lord is the Immanuel God, He is NEVER far from us. But often WE are the ones who are far from Him. And very often it happens when our bellies are full, when we’re in the land of ‘Milk and Honey’. Too often, we forget about God when we don’t need Him, and we only crawl back to God when we encounter crisis of some kind (Just like the Jews in the Promise Land, only turning back to God when neighbouring countries invade).

The very act of fasting, which will be well understood by those who have practiced it, makes our physical body weak, and in those moments when our stomachs growl in hunger, it enables us to remember God, it reminds us that we need Him. That if we do not go to Him, our spirits thirst and hunger for Him like deer pants for streams of water.

Fasting brings us back into His presence.

So let’s hear the question made by the Lord today to each of us: Why do you fast? Why do you go to service? Why do you pray? Let us prepare our answers to respond to our Lord today.