I hear some voices today telling us they cannot promise an end to our current predicament. That if we let down our guard it will return in the Fall and we will be right back in lock-down. they seem to want us to stay in our homes all summer and Velcro ourselves to the ceiling until a vaccine is created, perhaps a year from now. I hear other voices saying that if we all don’t go back to work tomorrow the economic misery will be unending. They keep threatening us with another Great Depression.
All of these people should stop speaking in public. If you have nothing to offer us but gloom and despair please sit down. FDR famously told the nation “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Many voices today seem to be saying “the only thing we have…is fear itself.”
Psalm 11 gives faith’s response to fear’s counsel. David looked around at what seemed to be the collapse of his own society; his very life under threat, and he asked, “if the foundations are destroyed what can the righteous do?”
It is a good question, asked by many people in many ages; but not today. Our foundations are not destroyed, nor will they be destroyed by this pandemic or any economic fallout from our debatable response to it. We will do what we have always done, we will rebuild. We fought a terrible civil war once. We killed over 700,000 thousand of ourselves in pitched battles. We left half our population living in rubble. And then you know what we did? We rebuilt. In the 1930s, during a true global depression, our unemployment rate hit 25%. While we were trying to scratch our way out of that ditch we were thrown into the biggest war in history. When we came home from that war? We rebuilt. It’s what we do.
This will not become another great depression. Our foundations are not destroyed. In fact, they are not even damaged. As much as we like to complain about government we need to remember that our various governments, at all levels, are stable, because our founders were brilliant. This is not a banana republic. (no offense to bananas) Our economy, with its freedom of movement and enterprise; with its gargantuan mix of public, private, and philanthropic spending is the envy of the world.
We will recover, and rebuild commerce, far quicker than many are saying. We will trickle back to work and play. The unemployment rate will steadily drop. We will have a good summer and go back to yelling about politics in the Fall. And if this stupid virus pops up in September we will take reasonable precautions, like hardening our nursing homes, wearing masks etc. But we will not shut down. That’s how I see it, because our foundations are strong.
But what if I’m wrong? What if our little world continues to shake until the foundations are exposed and begin to crumble? What if everything that you trust in, government, courts, law enforcement, banking, etc. begin to shake, and all of our temples fall? What if the psalmist’s worst fears came true? The writer goes on to answer his own question when in the next verse he says, “The Lord is in his holy temple; the Lord’s throne is in Heaven.” Why did he write that? what is his point?
There is an ultimate reality far above and untouched by all the dark shadows of this place. We tend to think of God and Heaven as floating or ethereal, something that cannot be grasped, as if it were drifting and unfixed. But the Bible reverses this instinct. We are the ones described in such temporal terms as “mist” and “smoke”. God and Heaven are described in solid language like “seeing” and “tasting” and “walking”. It is described as a place of eternal foundation stones. It is the place where Jesus tells us to store up treasure because “where your treasure is there your heart will be also.” It is a realm of light and glory, of beauty and strength. Of a love so powerful that it raises the dead. It seems far, yet it is immanent, just beyond our vision, we get echoes and whispers from there; sometimes, we get direct confrontations. Gods plan is to bring these two realms together one day. It is His “end game”. (I read the end of the book.) This will become His eternal dwelling. “There” will be here. Those foundations will be here, and we are destined to inherit what the Bible calls “a kingdom that cannot be shaken” because it is “a city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” It is ours now by faith, and we can build there. Let not your hearts be troubled.
“Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.” – Jesus
“What we do in life echoes in eternity.” – Gladiator