Good evening brethren and Happy Sabbath!!!!!!

Time for a good adventure!

When I was a kid, I used like 'Role Playing Games' or 'RPGs.'  In these games, you would play the role of an adventurer of some sort - like Indian Jones or the like - and you would go on an adventure collecting objects and information along the way to solve various puzzles.  These puzzles would often involve using seemingly un-related objects: a piece of rope, a coffee cup and a stapler for instance. When you first collected them, you had no idea what you'd use them for later in the game, but eventually, somewhere along the line, you would use them together to solve a puzzle and unlock the next piece of the mystery.

Using them together

Reflecting over these types of games as an adult, I couldn't help but think of a scripture - my mom's favorite, in fact - that reminds us different things work together.  Romans 8:28 NKJV says, "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose."

While the events of life are far different than that of a video or board game, this particular scripture reminds us that things do eventually work out.  Eventually... That's hard to see at times, especially when so much of the news we see is so hard to take.  Random shootings, sickness and poverty grow worse on a weekly basis, and yet, we're supposed to believe it will work out for good?  How is that possible?

Solving the Mystery

While answering specific questions of how any good can come of such terrible acts of violence are impossible for any of us here and now, we do get an insight into putting all the pieces together in Romans 11.  Here, Paul is writing to a group of Gentile converts in Rome, and is working through some of the difficulties the Hebrew people were having with the Gentiles. There was an attitude of arrogance on some of the Hebrew people's part that it was the nation of Israel that God had called to salvation, and not the Gentiles.  Paul explains in verse 11 and 12, that it is because Israel rejected God, that the message of salvation was taken to the Gentiles. He then goes on to use the analogy of a branches being grafted on to a tree to show that Israel would be given an opportunity once again, and that God was working out His plan.

Put yourself in the sandals of a Roman citizen reading this letter at that time.  You were trying to figure life out, trying to respond to the calling of God, but you were living with tension between yourself and some sects of the nation of Israel - the people you were supposedly to look up to as an example of God's way.  Looking back at their history with all its wars, captivity and turmoil and thinking to yourself, "Do I really want to be a part of this?" Then there was the matter of living under Roman law and in the midst of a society steeped in false religion.  It'd be pretty hard at that moment to see how all of this was going to work together for good.

Putting yourself back in your own modern day shoes, are your questions any different than what the Romans were asking themselves?  Mine aren't. How is all the garbage that goes on in the world going to work for good? How is it all going to work for good, eventually?  Paul answer in Romans 11:25-28, "For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written: 'The Deliverer will come out of Zion, and He will turn away ungodliness from Jacob; For this is My covenant with them, when I take away their sins.'"

The mystery of how it would all work out is that the Deliverer, Jesus Christ, would come to turn them away from ungodliness.  While this is specific to Israel, we understand the principle applies to the world at large - the mystery will only be solved with the return of Jesus Christ and the world turning from its ungodly ways.

While no good comes of people taking up arms to kill one another, one thing is for sure:  It is a testimony to the fact that rejection of God's way doesn't work. Some day, when mankind will look back on the bloodshed, pain and misery of his choices, and is done trying to do things his own way, we will finally see and understand, "all things work together for good to those who love God."