Before him there was no king like him, who turned to the LORD with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might.
Josiah was a king who did what was good in the Lord’s sight. Repeatedly. Consistently. He wasn’t perfect, but he repeatedly returned to God. With all his heart, with all his soul and with all his might. And yet, upon meeting Pharaoh of Egypt, he was killed in battle. So the question arises, if he was so good, why did he die that way?
Again, I’m grateful for the accompanying reflection, this time by Madeline L’Engle (author of A Wrinkle in Time, and other kid classics). The reflection opens with the reminder that the stories of the great scriptural characters are not about fairness. Using a phrase made famous in my house by Scar (Lion King), she writes, “Life’s not fair”.
It turns out, she and Scar are right. Life is not fair. And it never was promised to be. It’s us, and our transactional tit-for-tat way of thinking that have overlaid the fallacy that things are supposed to be fair. She suggests that holding on to this notion that everything should be fair is crippling for adults, and that it takes great bravery to live in a world where fairness is not a real part of our world, and shouldn’t be expected.
Perhaps the most striking concept I’ve seen in a long time is one she so eloquently summarizes. “One of Satan’s most successful ploys is his insistence that things ought to be fair. The good should be rewarded; the bad should be punished. … That is not now grace works”.
All this time, I’ve been thinking that it’s my super-human adherence to right and wrong and to justice that has resulted in my sense that the world’s not fair, that somehow there’s something broken with God’s hearing or understanding, because CLEARLY, that’s not fair.
This will take some to totally sink in to my head, but I absolutely love this. It’s not God that’s ever promised fairness. It’s the insidious whispers of the devil that make me feel slighted because things aren’t fair. Fairness is a ploy of the devil, and one that I have followed blindly for years and years.
God’s grace isn’t transactional. We don’t earn it because we’ve been good. It’s not withheld if we’re bad. Redemption isn’t transactional. We don’t earn it because we’ve been good. And it’s not withheld if we’re bad. We’ve nothing to prove. Nothing to do. Just love God and love our neighbor. The rest is entirely God’s grace, and we’ve got nothing to do with it.
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