Starry, starry night

This morning I will be having a back procedure: 30-45 minutes unconscious, pins stuck into my back to deaden nerve endings to give me pain relief. Having thought about that all night and having not slept, I got up at 5:30 a.m. and went outside for the paper, despite knowing I couldn't have food or coffee.

The sky was clear and clearly magnificent. One brilliant star stood out. One of the grand things about living in the Fitzgerald UMC parsonage is it's out in the country and the night skies are not diminished by city's lights. I paused in the cold and stared at the beautiful star that could have been Mercury or Mars or who knows what. I love night skies. The Dippers. Sirius, the dog star. The beauty is unmatched in the heavens.

Isaiah tells, though, of a time in the future when God's judgment will come. He writes in the 13th chapter, "For see, the day of the Lord is coming—the terrible day of his fury and fierce anger. The land will be made desolate, and all the sinners destroyed with it. The heavens will be black above them; the stars will give no light. The sun will be dark when it rises, and the moon will provide no light. “I, the Lord, will punish the world for its evil and the wicked for their sin. I will crush the arrogance of the proud and humble the pride of the mighty. I will make people scarcer than gold — more rare than the fine gold of Ophir. For I will shake the heavens. The earth will move from its place when the Lord of Heaven’s Armies displays his wrath in the day of his fierce anger.”

I dwell, rightfully so, on the love of God in my blogs, my sermons, my life. But there is no denying, or should be no denying that God will one day judge all of us, through Jesus.

We tend to put that judgment in the back ground, refusing to talk about or think about sin. The fact, though, is sin still exists. We have the joy of forgiveness, but for one to be forgiven, one must have sinned in the first place. Why we seek to change that thought process is part of the cultural problem that exists today. Sin is still sin. Biblical sin hasn't changed. It is what it is: not a mistake, not a momentary slip, not a little bitty woe.

Sin is sin, bitter and distasteful and deadly. God's Day of Judgment will be equally bitter, distasteful and deadly. God won't be mad at us. He won't be angry. He will be God, judging almost dispassionately.

That's why the blood of Jesus is so critical to us all. He shed that blood so that the Day of Judgment, woefully scary as it will be, won't harm those who turned to Jesus, called his wonderful name and were saved.

Starry, starry night indeed, when the beauty of Jesus outshines the terrible Judgment of the Father.