Victory in Defeat

“Many prophets and kings wished to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.” Luke 10:24

Many leaders in our country today, our President, most of our Senators and Congressmen, the justices of the courts, people in government, are shortsighted. They work hard and cunningly for money and power, even though I am sure they have heard the Gospel saying that these things are worthless in eternity. Meanwhile, many of our people live lives of desperation. They are poor, oppressed, voiceless, killed for the flimsiest excuses, deceived by false news and misinformation. 

Is our situation hopeless? Corrie Ten Boom along with her father and sister, and 27 other people in their home, were imprisoned for helping Jews during the Holocaust. She wrote this in her book “The Hiding Place” about her experience: “In my prison cell I gulped entire Gospels at a reading, seeing whole the magnificent drama of salvation. Was it possible that this war, Scheveningen prison, this very cell, none of it was unforeseen or accidental? Could it be part of the pattern first revealed in the Gospels? Hadn’t Jesus been defeated as utterly and unarguably as our little underground group and our small plans had been? But if the Gospels were truly a pattern of God’s activity, then defeat was only the beginning. I would look around at the bare little cell and wonder what conceivable victory could come from a place like this.”

We too can look around our beleaguered country, torn into opposing factions by a leadership intent on dividing and conquering us. But there is no defeat in Christ Jesus. Only victory. Let us just keep praying and thanking God for He is “able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to His power that is at work within us”. (Ephesians 3:20).