Anyone Listening?

“But this [is] a people robbed and spoiled; [they are] all of them snared in holes, and they are hid in prison houses: they are for a prey, and none delivereth; for a spoil, and none saith, Restore. Who among you will give ear to this? [who] will hearken and hear for the time to come?” (Isa 42:22-23 AV)

These words are spoken by the LORD regarding what Judah had become.  God gave the law to His people so that all may benefit.  The law was the means by which an orderly society and moral government might bring to the people blessings and God’s providential hand.  They ignored the law.  What is worse is in ignoring the law, it made victims of the innocent.  Those who wished to live according to God's law were victimized by those who did not.  This is the context of the passage above.  It is the question that follows which spoke to my inner man.  The question posed was if there were any who cared enough for justice to make a difference.  Was there anyone who cared that those who wished to live right before God were made prisoners and martyrs for their desire?  Who will care that there are innocent people being treated as an enemy?  The parallels to our current world condition are uncanny.  But there is another way to consider this.  Sin is a cruel taskmaster.  It is relentless, and it does not care what cost it exacts from its victims.  The sinner is in a prison of his or her own making.  They chose to live as they do, but that does not excuse the saint of God from having compassion for those lost in their sin.  Note, especially there is a distinction between the present and the future.  Who will give ear to this now?  Who will harken for the future?

We can get tone deaf if surrounded by the cries ringing out.  I volunteered as a hospital chaplain for a few years.  One of our tasks was to make rounds.  We would go from floor to floor and check in with each nursing station.  We would ask if there was anyone they felt needed a visit.  This took several hours.  The Chaplaincy department gave us a free supper.  Then we would go home and wait for our pager.  If it went off, our duty was to go in and serve the spiritual needs of the patient in need.  When I started, the moans and cries of each patient on each floor tended to bother me.  The loader it was, or the more agony it seemed the patient was suffering, the more it ate me up inside.  All I wanted to do was to fix the problem and give the poor soul some relief.  After the many months of doing this, a strange thing happens.  You get used to the moans and cries.  You learn which ones needed immediate attention and which ones were chronic no matter what you did.  Almost all the time, cries for help were not an emergency.  So, you had to deal with the yelling, moaning, sobbing, etc as best you could so that other duties did not go neglected.  It soon became a habit to block out those cries for help and tend to the most urgent first.  It could get to the point when one didn’t even notice the cries anymore.

This is the world in which we live.  There are cries for help and those seeking it are not even aware they are.  There are the innocent who are victimized by the rebelliously wicked.  Unspoken evils lurk all around.  Living in a large city, it is easy to turn a blind eye to the injustice that occurs all around us.  The cries for mercy come in many forms.  Most subtle.  There are cries for friendship, affirmation, or hope.  There is a look of a half-smile and half-frown.  There are the seemingly pointless conversations with no more rhyme or reason other than to visit.  This happened to me the other day.  A very lonely individual who simply wanted to talk about anything that came to mind.  There are cries for God’s forgiveness all around us.  So, who will harken?  Who will give ear?  I know; once we harken or give ear, the agony of the suffering will overwhelm us.  We will see too much of it, knowing our efforts cannot solve it all.  We get discouraged.  We get calloused.  Until the LORD calls us home, we are debtors to those lost in sin.  We owe them the message of hope.  We must give ear.  We must harken.  Now and for the future.  Someone must be as the good Samaritan and care!