It’s Always Been Him

“It was I who brought you up from the land of Egypt,
and who led you through the desert for forty years,
to occupy the land of the Amorites.”

Amos 2:10

Through the Prophet Amos, the Lord reminds the people who they were and how they go to where they were at the point. The people seemed to have forgotten about God and they were doing to others and even to each other what the Egyptians did to them. The people seemingly had forsaken their name sake and the One who led their ancestors out of slavery through the Red Sea dry shod. During the Exodus the Lord led them as a column of cloud or a pillar of fire and when the Holy of Holies was constructed His very own Presence was manifested there. The God who walked with them became irrelevant to them and they began to live as it it was themselves that have earned the comforts they enjoyed. But soon their sinful behaviors — not just because they abandoned the Lord, but also because of how they treated each other, as slaves, as foreigners, and as enemies — will meet their natural consequences. Their pride and their lack of faith will lead to their fall to the Assyrians and then the Babylonians, becoming slaves once again, and this time by their own choosing.

The Israelites forgot that it has always been the Lord who guided them, led them, protected them, and loved them. It was the Lord and His mercy and compassion towards them that sustained them. Yet, they refused to acknowledge this but instead subjected and submitted themselves to their own yokes, leading them to slavery and death. When we come to serve ourselves — the world calls this freedom, by the way — we really become slaves to ourselves. That is not freedom. A life of pride and self-indulgence is not “the good life,” but rather the fleeting life because what appeared so good and felt so pleasurable quickly fades. A life in service to others and to God, which the world calls silly, dumb, and stupid, is truly the good life, the life that is truly free, free because we live in a manner knowing that all that we have and all that we have experienced and all that is to come is a gift, unmerited and undeserved. When we come to see that all is gift and grace, we will be able to live without the yokes that cause us anxiety and fear because we will have realized that in all things and in all times, it has always been the Lord.

Brothers and sisters, do you know that it has always been Him? Whenever we look back in life and remember the moments of sadness and sorrow and disappointment and grief and at the same time recognize the very fact that we are here today and see how far we’ve come, do we pat ourselves on the back for being resilient because we got through it ourselves, or do we feel within our hearts a deep sense of gratitude to those who have helped us during those difficult times, realizing that it was all part of God’s plan to send them into our lives. It was not simply our grit or resilience or luck, it was Providence. May we remember today that it has always been the Lord.