RENEWED

 Look carefully: this is a forest coming back from a devastating fire several years earlier. Some trees survived, their trunks blackened. Toothpick-like ghosts of dead trees and emerging new trees and shrubs fill in the landscape. This area is prone to fire and it is also a major east-west highway through Washington's Cascade Mountains. I remember traveling it one year as a fire burned itself out. A state vehicle with a blinking red light on its roof led a limited numbers of cars at a time through the still-smoking pass. But there was no smoke on our most recent trip, just the marvel of how the land regenerates while still leaving reminders of the old fire.

Life also has times when we pass through a “fire zone.” Speaking of his wayward homeland, Isaiah prophesied: “When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze, for I am the Lord, your God” (Isaiah 43:2b-3a). For the Israelites, the “flames” would be the searing sorrow of being yanked away from their homeland as captives of Babylon. But the whole section of this prophecy emphasizes God's enduring love through their difficulty. Renewal, new life, would come.

I've lived long enough to watch many people I cared about (and prayed for) make bad decisions. Big chunks of their lives were burned up as they walked away from God. One day I answered the phone to the sobs of a young woman who'd attended a Bible study in our home. She'd yielded to her boyfriend's demands for sexual intimacy before marriage. Now, she regretted it and felt God would never forgive her. As I rushed over to her apartment and hugged her, trying to comfort her with God's counsel, I recalled this verse for those who truly repent of their sin: “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12). She cut off the relationship and sought a fresh start with Christ. Later, God did bring into her life a committed Christian man, and they married.

Trials will come in life. That's a given. But so is God's renewing presence:

...for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. (1 Peter 1:6-7)

In central Washington, where I live, we've had our share of runaway, destructive fires. But every spring, forest management teams plan “controlled burns” to reduce the fuel for future fires. In many ways, that's a picture of what happens when people get “burned” by their bad decisions, then confess and turn away from them. Such times of sorrow are God's reminder: Don't go there. Don't make those choices. The pain isn't worth it. Renewal, though it may take time, will come. Stay the course—God's course.

Think tank: "just"

One of the most symmetrical of cultivated flowers, the iris seemed
 to me to best represent the balancing scales of justice.

Part of a series on Philippians 4:8.
“Lady Justice” is among classical statues greeting visitors to the Supreme Court building in Washington D.C. She is blindfolded (for blind justice), and holds balanced scales (for fair judgment of good and evil) and a sword (for punishment for evil). She symbolizes the hope of law: that decisions will be balanced and fair, and that wrongdoing will be punished. In other words, that there will be justice.  When Paul wrote to urge believers to think about things that are “just” (Philippians 4:8),  he used a Greek word meaning “righteous toward God and man,” “right by divine or human standards,” and “not dualistic.”

So how do we “think on” things that are “just”?  My first thought is to dwell on God, whose justice is linked with undeserved mercy:

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and purify us from all righteousness. (1 John 1:9)
What a verse for someone who thinks he or she has “sinned too much”!  One evening I got a phone call from a distraught young woman who had been in our home Bible study group. I rushed to her apartment and found her emotionally out of control after her boyfriend talked her into having sex with him.  Gone was her dream of saving herself for her groom on her wedding night. She was ready to confess and accept God’s forgiveness, but didn’t think she deserved it. Then I shared with her Psalm 103:12, which says God removes that confessed sin as far away as the east is from the west. East and west never end; they just keep encircling the earth. Because she feared God might punish her for this sin for as long as she lived, she found this a freeing hope. She broke up with that man, moved away, grew in her faith, and eventually married a Christian man.

 God is just!  He is also our Justifier through the death of Jesus for our sins. That bedrock of faith, long ignored,  gripped the heart of Martin Luther who helped return the church to Biblical truth in a movement that became known as The Reformation.  Luther’s rally cry--“The just shall live by his faith”—came right out of scripture:  Habakkuk 2:4, Romans 1:17, Galatians 3:11, and Hebrews 10:38. That truth exposed the lies of working for or paying for salvation, which the church had added on to fatten the clerical purse.

A just God is also one who opposes that which is not just. An extreme illustration of that is believed to be at the bottom of the Dead Sea. In the time of the Abraham, a terribly wicked and sexually immoral city, Sodom, existed in that area. God wanted to obliterate it. Enter Abraham, who asked God to spare Sodom for the sake of his nephew Lot and family, who lived there. Appealing to God’s mercy, Abraham said, “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25). Finally, God agreed spare Sodom if ten righteous people lived there. Not even ten righteous were found, so God in His blazing holiness extracted justice and punishment in a cataclysmic event. Only Lot and his two daughters survived as they fled; Lot’s wife perished as she looked back in a momentary yearning for the old life. A just God will not wink at sin.  He will “do right” and judge it.

Meditating on “just” is a reminder that God’s holy standards never change. At the end of time, He will fully judge good and evil in absolute fairness.  As I watch the world’s moral decline, the prospect of holy justice gives me hope…and a reason to keep telling about Jesus.

Next: “pure”