What in the world is going on?

The Word for today:
Jeremiah 46, 47


What in the world is going on?

Turn on the TV news.  Scenes from around the world flash across the screen.  Suicide bombings in the Middle East; failing currencies in Europe; collapsing economies; epidemics and pandemics; earthquake upon earthquake; genocide; revolution; ethnic unrest; drug trafficking at unprecedented levels; famine; state-sponsored terrorism; tyranny; nuclear proliferation into rogue countries pledged to annihilate their enemies.  The mind reels, trying to take it in.

In the United States a culture of dependency leaves stupefying deficits in its wake; citizens lose trust in their government; citizens lose trust in financial, educational, and media institutions.  Immorality of every sort--which has always been rampant behind closed doors--emerges from the closet and parades down 5th Avenue with the mayor.  As a nation, we have voted out God and made ourselves the legislators of right and wrong, the arbiters of life and death.

What in the world--and in the neighborhood--is going on? 

***

In chapters 46 to 50, Jeremiah gives a portrait of a world which, we sense, we've seen somewhere before.  In these chapters we flash, by imagination, from one country to the next, viewing all-too-familiar scenes of global disintegration.  But the Bible reader comes away with a very different sense of things than the TV viewer does.

TV news leaves the viewer with a dizzying feeling that chaos reigns; while the Bible shows, paradoxically, that God is in control.  The Bible reveals that history is not just "one thing after another," but is subject to God's purposeful direction.

What's going on is exactly what the Word of God says will go on.  There's nothing on the newscast that's news to him.