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Freed from our oppressors
by the mighty hands of God,
We once heard and believed
His Word and obeyed His law,
and He gave us victory.
But, like Achan¹ in the
desert,
God's favor wasn't enough.
We wanted more.
Victory ran on ahead of
us...
and out of sight.
From the beginning, we have
not been satisfied with God's gifts.
Adam and Eve wanted more,
Noah's brethren wanted more,
King David wanted much more,
Even Judas wasn't satisfied and
Ananias and Sapphira too.
We have taken what God said
don't
and buried it deep beneath our tents.
We have taken from what
is His truth
and twisted it to fit our own realities.
We have taken what is only
God's job
and have sought to make it our role.
We are taking our greatest
victories
and making them our worst defeats.
What was given to us by
God's hands,
we are treating as if made by ours.
We think we can keep doing
all this
and get away with it, paying no price.
Continuing on still, we are
not
satisfied to leave what is God's alone.
Margaret Sanger wanted more,
Noam Chomsky wanted more,
Madalyn O' Hair wanted more,
Even Vashti McCollum, and
Benjamin Spock as well.
It's not always our oppressors
who defeat and imprison us.
It's not always satan who
scatters
and divides us from one another,
more than not, these days.
But, like Achan in today's
desert,
God's favor hasn't been enough.
We've wanted so much more.
Imagined victories feels
like a beating...
oh, our Achan¹ bones.
Joshua 7:1-26
¹Achan, meaning 'troubler'
in Hebrew, was
a member of the tribe of
Judah who appears
in the Book of Joshua as
an Israelite who dis-
obeyed God by taking for
himself spoils of
the battle at Jericho. |
