Daily Devotional – May 1, 2020

End world, are you wearing a mask? You're just talking into a computer screen. Well, here's the deal. I can't guarantee that you are more than six feet away from your computer and I'm only about 18 inches away from mine.

So we all know how easily viruses can pass in the computer, right? I mean, how many times have you had some kind of a virus in your computer? It travels those viruses. They travel through the internet.

They infect your computer. And listen, I do not want to be responsible for you or any of your electronic devices getting any virus of any kind. So I'm just going to play it safe. Well, perhaps you saw the news item on KWQC about a group of pastors who suggest that what we do when you go into a store, you have to have a mask.

So what you do when you go into a store is that you tip the mask. You tip it like this. You know, you take the mask and you go like this and then you put it back on. And that's supposed to be some kind of a goodwill gesture saying that you're just there to shop as opposed to what, holding up the place or something, I suppose.

So understand this. Let's get this right. If I take my German, touch my German fested mask that's on my German fested face and pull it down to say, howdy, I'm a customer and not a robber. And then I proceed to the store touching stuff with my German fested hands.

Well, I'm sure they're also telling you to keep a bottle of hand sanitizer handy and all that good stuff. I know they mean well. All right. Well, I suppose you've also heard that a church up in Lena in Northwest Illinois is suing the governor for prohibiting churches from gathering.

I'd kind of like to see them win. I don't imagine they're going to win a full opening opportunity. Nevertheless, I was disturbed by the governor's initial response to all of this. While he said that no one's going to show up and break up a church service that's gathering, he nevertheless chided people and said the churches just need to do the right thing, as he put it.

And then he went on to say he understood how badly the parishioners wanted. Now, here's the thing that really disturbed me a little bit. He said, I understand how badly the parishioners want to reconnect with their faith leaders, but they should just be content to do so online.

Well, I'm thinking that statement reveals that he has no real clue about the nature, the true nature of a local church. There's a reason that the New Testament presents the church or uses the analogy of the local church as a body, the body of Christ.

And he says, Paul in 1 Corinthians, he talks about the body, the church, having various members like your physical body does. You have eyes and hands and feet and so forth. And so preventing the church from gathering isn't about parishioners being disconnected from their faith leader.

It's about disconnecting the fingers from the hand and the hand from the arm and the arm from the torso and the feet from the legs and so on and so forth. In the last six weeks, I've yet to hear anybody say, man, pastor, I can't wait till we can come back to the church building and we can see you live and in person.

I haven't heard anybody say that. I have heard a lot of sentiment that goes along these lines, like I miss our church being together. I miss the other people in the church. I miss our family being together.

I feel like I'm missing something. And the fact of the matter is we are. We are. That's something our governor just doesn't seem to understand. You know, as beneficial as these Facebook times are and the live streaming can be and everything else, watching a video cannot replace the gathered church.

It can't do it. I suppose someone who's not really a member of a New Testament church just really can't grasp that. But there has been a development since that church filed that lawsuit. The governor has since modified his edict to declare that churches are now essential.

It means that churches can meet. Well, that sounds great, right? Well, as always, the devil is in the details. And here they are. Churches can meet as long as there are no more than 10 people congregating together.

And they can meet those 10 people, but they have to maintain social distancing. The governor recommends that churches use drive-in services. That is, you know, you go to the church parking lot. You maintain social distance.

You don't roll down the windows. Nobody gets out of their cars. Cars park at least six feet apart. So you're parked in the church parking lot with your windows rolled up. The sun's baking down. Well, hey, bring along your Sunday dinner.

Set it up on the dashboard, and you can cook your dinner while you're cooking inside. Oh boy. Well, we've been talking this week about how to respond to all of this. The wheels have come off of our nation, of some of us even, of our personal lives.

So how do we respond to this? And we've been using Joshua chapter 7 as the basis for that discussion. I've suggested all along that the only satisfactory response is the biblically Christian one. That is, we ultimately go to God with our questions.

We go to God with our concerns. We go to God seeking answers, seeking direction. We don't simply go to God asking for relief, telling him we want this all to stop. We go asking for help, for direction, for insight.

We go to him. And so far, what have we seen? What are the responses we've seen in Joshua when the wheels have fallen off? They've lost this battle at Ai. Joshua is perplexed. Well, in the first place, we've seen him being humble before the Lord.

He and the other leaders, they went, tore their clothes, they fell to the earth with their face before the ark of the Lord till evening. They put dust on their heads. They expressed humility. They did not have an attitude that says, we can handle this.

We can do this. We don't need God. The second response is that of being quiet, being quiet. They got down on their faces on the ground until evening. That gives time to think things through, for things to settle down, process what's happening, clarify thinking, and so forth.

And then the third response was to be honest by asking honest questions. Joshua did that. And those questions that he asked, they kind of rattle us in terms of our typical way of thinking about how to address God.

He's asking God, what have you done? You brought us over this Jordan River to kill us? He's asking God, what can I say? What do I say to the non-believers, to the pagans, to the heathen who don't think you exist and don't think you're real or powerful?

What am I supposed to say? And then he asks, what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? The fourth response that we looked at yesterday was the response to listen and be teachable.

In verses 10 through 15, God responds to Joshua and basically says, listen, get up off the ground. What are you doing on the ground? This is not me. This is you. It's not what I have done. It's what you have done.

And he's speaking of the collectively as the people. And God is saying the blame is not with me. The blame is with you. And one of the things we pointed out yesterday that we can learn from this is that God does not have to act in judgment for calamity to occur.

This is what Joshua said. What have you done? God simply has to pull back his restraint and his protection. And then what would otherwise naturally occur takes place. But Joshua here needed to look, needed to listen and be teachable.

And so do we. And finally, the last response, the last response is to be obedient, be obedient. So we saw in verse 11 that God gave some insight. He gave some, he helped Joshua see what the root of the problem really was, the root of this disaster.

It wasn't that God brought them to kill them. The root of the problem was that there was sin that needed to be rooted out, that needed to be dealt with. And so then in verses 13 to 15, he gave some pretty clear instructions on what to do about that, how to approach this problem, how to deal with this sin.

And he gave him step-by-step instructions on how to find the person responsible for the sin that stole the goods and all the rest of that stuff. And here's the thing, Joshua did it. Joshua got up off the ground.

He heard what God said to do. And in verse 16, through the rest of the chapter, he carried out those instructions explicitly. He was obedient. Now, what does that have to do with us? All right. We need to ask what would God have us to do in this virus crisis?

Now, we can go to the scriptures and we can find instructions on a personal level. We can find them on a corporate level, for example, with the church. Let me just give you a couple of thoughts. Romans 13, for example, verses one to seven, make it very clear that our responsibility as Christian citizens is that we are to obey the government authorities that are placed over us.

And we may not like it. We may not agree with it. We may not think that what they're telling us to do makes any sense, that it's reasonable, et cetera, et cetera. There are no real caveats in Romans 13, but there is one significant caveat, and that's what we read of in Acts chapter five, when Peter was told, stop preaching Christ.

And Peter said, no. He said, we must obey God rather than men. And so the principle is that if the governor finally says, okay, all churches now have to disband and no more churches. All right. No, sorry.

We're not going to do that. We're not going to obey that. We have to obey God rather than men until men tell us to do something that violates a clearly revealed biblical mandate for us as individuals and as a church.

So that's why for the time being, we have to content ourselves with this very inadequate accommodation of live streaming and so on and so forth. And we even have to go around masquerading a little bit, I guess, at least when you go to a store in Illinois and you want to actually purchase something.

All right. So what are our responses? Be humble, be quiet, be honest, be teachable, and in the end, be obedient. May God give us the grace to do so. Our Father in heaven, we do thank you for this instruction from the book of Joshua.

May we be able to live it out by your grace. Grant us, O Lord, a good day in our walk with you, we pray. In Jesus' name and for his sake. Amen. All right. Going to be another good weekend. Warm weather, plenty of sunshine.

Get that vitamin D. Let me really encourage you. Get outside and get that vitamin D. All right. Have a great day.