How God Fixes Things

The cry has come up from our national journalogians at the NYT and the Daily News: “God isn’t fixing this. No more prayers. Let’s get some action.”

If God – the living God – were to get busy fixing things, they may not like the way He goes about fixing things. 

He isn’t a safe and distant God. He doesn’t stay politely above the fray. He takes sides. For some, this is appalling. For believers, it’s the ground of our hope. Early or late, the Judge of all the earth will do right.

Sometimes, so the Apostle Paul says, He judges by turning people over to their passions and sins. He turns idolaters to their idolatry. He turns people over to unnatural sexual desires. He turns the violent to their violence, until they eat one alive.

As Psalm 18 puts it, He is pure with the pure, just with the just; but with the perverse He is a God of twists and turns, a trickster to beat all tricksters.

And that raises the frightening prospect that what our elites see as evidence of God’s absence is precisely the opposite. Perhaps all the visible slaughter of the past few years is the result of God turning us over to the bloodsport we like so much. Those stats about gun deaths – they pale to nothing next to the stats for abortion.

Perhaps we are seeing the living God’s answer to our prayers. Because if believers are praying aright, we are praying for the Lord’s Advent: “For He comes, He comes to judge the earth. He comes to judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity.”

And if that’s what is going on, then no legislation in the world can fix this. Only God can, the living God, the God who hears and answers prayer.