Overcoming injustices

If there is one thing I really like about God (amongst many things) is is that he is willing to do anything possible to help us overcome the world.

Sometimes it is easy to get our focus on the injustices that people do to us, or the injustices that we see happening in the world. And while we do need to work toward overcoming injustice, ultimately our focus must be on God.

Philip Yancey, in his book, "Disappointment with God," writes this:

"Author Henri Nouwen tells the story of a family he knew in Paraguay. The father, a doctor, spoke out against the military regime there and its human rights abuses.

Local police took their revenge on him by arresting his teenage son and torturing him to death. Enraged townsfolk wanted to turn the boy's funeral into a huge protest march, but the doctor chose another means of protest.

At the funeral, the father displayed his son's body as he had found it in the jail—naked, scarred from electric shocks and cigarette burns, and beatings. All the villagers filed past the corpse, which lay not in a coffin but on the blood-soaked mattress from the prison.

It was the strongest protest imaginable, for it put injustice on grotesque display."

Yancey goes on to write, "Isn't that what God did at Calvary? … The cross that held Jesus' body, naked and marked with scars, exposed all the violence and injustice of this world. At once, the cross revealed what kind of world we have and what kind of God we have: a world of gross unfairness, a God of sacrificial love."

I am thankful for the cross today. I am grateful for God's sacrificial love.

"Father, we stand in need of you today. Words can't express our gratitude to you for what you did in sending your Son to die on the cross for us. In the midst of all of the injustices we see and face, in the midst of an unfair world, we know that you are fair and that you are just. Amen."