He has made everything beautiful in its time. Ecclesiastes 3:11a
Behind our property is a twelve acre parcel that was originally owned by a winemaking couple in the nineties and operated as a plant nursery. It was sold some years ago to Amir *, a self-described “Persian.” We met him as we were building our home. Friendly and talkative, he gave the impression that he had a fair amount of money, but liked living in a recreational vehicle on his land. In 2017, the Tubbs fire had swept across six lanes of freeway directly east of this area causing massive destruction. Amir’s place had also burned and now piles of building debris, concrete chunks, and metal pieces of who-knows-what, abounded. There was always activity: little skid steers running around moving piles of this and heaps of that into other piles and heaps. Once in a while a lean-to would appear, thrown together for some mysterious reason. We viewed all this seemingly-pointless activity with fascinated disbelief.
When we first bought our property, twelve huge greenhouses on Amir’s parcel were the largest production facility of CBD in our county, with the accompanying odor wafting around the general area. It closed down while we were building our home (color us happy), and the place continued to lapse into a junk-filled eyesore.
A For Sale Sign appeared. Months went by. We knew that just the cost of cleaning up the place would be enormous. Who would do that?
Then, a few weeks ago, the sign disappeared and heavy equipment started rolling in. Fantastically efficient crews from some planet of mind-blowing clean up expertise got to work. Tractors, bulldozers, water trucks. Debris was collected in giant piles, then disappeared. Day after day, tractors with shovels scraped up soil day and poured it on to a giant, teeth-rattling sifting machine. The resulting clean soil was shoveled into huge piles and spread strategically around the site. The sifted out wood and whatever-else was hauled off. It was like a machine ballet.
Who would do this? An out of state nursery with multiple locations throughout the west and specializing in selling fully grown trees would.
Were we pleased with this new neighbor? Yes! Did we mind the dust? No! Did we mind the noise? Sort of, but not really! Are we thinking about the end result of the dust and noise? Yes!
The back of our property has a slight swale and my study window looks directly out onto the mass of activity that begins before 7 a.m. And in this early morning—on the summer solstice—with my OYB, the Book of Second Kings begins.
However, it is the account of the life of David that has been on my mind since mid-May. The moral lessons are, one commentator remarks, beyond number. For me, it was the tragic effect on his legacy of his sin with Bathsheba and the deliberate killing of her husband. His house was polluted with incest and murder. The rending of his empire began in his own day and the kingdom was torn in two under his grandson, Rehoboam, the son of Solomon.
And yet the psalms he wrote in the dark depths after his sins of adultery and murder, and those written during his flight from Absalom, are some of the most spiritual and, yes, edifying of all the psalms. Read the “penitential” psalms (6, 32, 38, 102, 130, 143) and see if the anguish doesn’t penetrate your own heart. Ponder how the forgiveness and restoration of God which he sought with his whole heart prevented him from drowning in absolute despair. Receive as your own these words of David that minister confidence in the love and mercy of God.
For the next four hundred years after Solomon there will be a constant accumulation of spiritual and moral debris, including idol worship and child sacrifice. The cyclical rejection of Jehovah and His Law, the terrible consequences of that rejection with constant war and oppression, the warnings of the prophets who themselves were often in fear for their lives—it is like ugly mounds all over the histories of these books. When a king does occasionally repent, God is faithful to clean up the mess and provide a fresh start. And then. . .
But I suspect we all experience this to some degree in our own lives. In a few weeks I’ll arrive at Paul’s very honest struggle, and know it as my own:
For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I do not carry it out.
So I find this law at work: though I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law, but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind. . .
What a wretched man that I am!
Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 7:18, 21, 22, 24, 25 NIV)
Make no mistake, the Holy Spirit has the power to help us overcome and stop endless cycles of failure. It doesn’t mean the enemy stops probing. It does mean we don’t fear him or his destructive devices. Because the machine ballet of God’s Spirit is, on our behalf, fantastically efficient. And He makes everything beautiful in its time.
*Not, of course, his real name