Worry about present hardships and trouble distorts our faith in God’s future.
Much has been made among Christians in 2020 about systemic sin—the collective fault of institutions, societies, and their norms and laws to engender injustice and cause harm. Most evident in heated debates over race, politics, policing, education, and the economy, systemic sin implies a capacity for wrong on the part of structures that individuals could not accomplish on their own.
But racism still requires racists; unjust institutions and arrogant corporations require people who are corrupt and arrogant. Systemic sin implicates individual sinners whether we realize it or not. In a previous era, inhabited by those Pilgrims whose gratitude we emulate every Thanksgiving, sin was understood as chronic, spiritual corruption solved by salvation alone. Once saved, redemption pressed the saved sinner into obedience, a good tree bearing good fruit (Matt. 12:33).
Jesus taught his disciples how a wise man built his house on a rock before the rains fell and the flood came, the rock being obedience to Christ in every aspect of life (Matt. 7:24–25). As the Pilgrims courageously crossed the Atlantic for the sake of religious liberty, their courage derived from their conviction that not even a sparrow “will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care” (Matt. 10:29). Shaped by what they long held in their hearts, they viewed their journey’s ultimate end as a heavenly country, a city God had prepared for them (Rev. 21:2). When stalked by exposure and starvation in the New World, they recalled the words of Jesus: If “God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith!” (Luke 12:28).
They would ...
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