June 5, 2020

John Piper:

But as for me, I would seek God, And I would place my cause before God; Who does great and unsearchable things, Wonders without number. He gives rain on the earth, And sends water on the fields. Job 5:8-10

If you said to someone: "My God does great and unsearchable things; He does wonders without number," and they responded, "Really? Like what?" would you say, "Rain"?

When I read these verses recently I felt like I did when I heard the lyrics to a Sonny and Cher song in 1969: "I'd live for you. I'd die for you. I'd even climb the mountain high for you." Even? I would die for you. I would even climb a high mountain for you? The song was good for a joke. Or a good illustration of bad poetry. Not much else. But Job is not joking. "God does great and unsearchable things, wonders without number." He gives rain on the earth.".  (https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-great-work-of-god-rain).

Most of us choke on the fumes of judgment; we so like to judge one another. Three and a half trillion dollars spent each year in America on health care, which amounts to about $10,000 per person. I don't know how long we can keep this up but we should be glad that we live in a country where its citizens have health care available and we should not easily judge those who spend our tax dollars on frivolous psychological "troubles" or run to the emergency room for just anything that comes up. It is so easy to prevent, so easy to be careful about eating/sleeping/working. I am a great believer in supplements such as vitamins, they're cheap and really do work. Of course, Western medicine, our Western medical schools teach young, health care professionals, "that as long as you eat a good diet, you do not need supplements". Who eats a good diet anymore? All the good minerals have been extracted/leeched from the soil. Surely you can look at the groceries, the counter with vegetables and see that most of them were just hanging on, "mostly alive when harvested".

My main "gripe" with harvested vegetables, the poisons that were sprayed on them in an attempt to control parasites. Needless to say, some young people do not have the intelligence to wash well, their lettuce/cucumbers/peppers/beans, etc., before using them. Not only should they be washed well but soaked in a solution of water and vinegar. I cannot imagine anyone eating a salad that has not been thoroughly washed or anything else that hasn't been thoroughly cooked. Heat still destroys most bacteria/parasites. If you want to know how clean the food that you put into your "temple"; examine it with a magnifying glass.

I must depend on someone else to prepare my food, buy it at the store, etc.; I like vegetables with boiled eggs. One of my assistants brought in a bag of salad mix. I said, "make sure you wash it well". She said, "I think it is already clean, right out of the bag. I see them put it out at buffets, right out of a bag". I said, "get a magnifier and look at all that trash and all of those bugs in that salad mix plus chemical residue". I thought she was going to "throw up" on my food. Since I graduated from the university, almost 70 years ago, 88 new chemicals and chemical compounds have been produced to put on food crops. And we wonder why people get sick...it is not just a small amount but a cumulative effect that does damage to the body.

Rat poison is mostly harmless cornmeal, it is that small amount of arsenic that kills the rat and the genome of the rat is just 5 degrees from that of the human species. Your writer was raised on a farm. My daddy used to say that something was trying to eat everything he planted from the time he put the seed in the ground until the very last. What did our ancestors do before all of these chemicals? They let the birds, chickens, etc., take care of the problem. One of my great aunts had her flock of turkeys trained to walk down the rows of any garden or crop field and rid the plants of insects. She did not spend her time watching soap operas on television, dreaming of having a relationship with one of those "he-she's" that were so good looking, so cute. Like most of the world, television actors pretending to be someone they are not; the doctors on television could not put on a band-aid. I doubt if Martha Stewart has ever seen a butter churn.

We are all living on the corner of function and dysfunction, having lost the ability to think with common sense...now too lazy to even look at a wristwatch, rather we ask Google what time it is; too lazy to even write a complimentary note to anyone about anything. It is so easy to use a cell phone. What are we doing with all of this time we are saving? Do you see anyone, anywhere, involved in God's mission, his work, his ministry? How well I remember the saints at our country church, cleaning their own church, cleaning their own churchyard...and then going to the graveyard and cleaning it. Most of today's young people have not set one foot in their ancestral graveyard, have no idea about the lives, the DNA, that they have inherited.

The greatest forfeiture of the people I know, millennials, baby boomers, even the elderly; a lack of humility. We think we are so smart, take so much pride in having all these blessings of healthcare, technical advances, just dumped in our lap. Pride is the beginning of every sin and we are so proud of what we have accomplished. I never knew my maternal grandmother to get into a car without talking about how "good it rode". You see, she had known bumps in the road, weather beating in the buggy. Even when I was young there were so few paved roads in Eastern North Carolina (highways 17 and 301 going north and south, highway 70 going east and west). Intimacy with God brings humbleness. You function better when you realize that all the power, grace, mercy, of the creator of the universe, available just as much to you as to anyone... this gets you through the difficulties of life and living.

When you consider your hardships, think of our blessed Lord's mother, nine months pregnant, riding on a donkey. Most church people today have the "Pilot's" syndrome, we know what is right but we just want to wash our hands of the entire matter.