Advent
Meditation
November
26th
4.
Think again about Chance
Luke
1:8-11 Once
when Zechariah's division was on duty and he was serving as priest before
God, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood,
to go into the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And when the time
for the burning of incense came, all the assembled worshipers were praying
outside. Then an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing at the
right side of the altar of incense.
There
are times in life when it seems that just being in the right place at
the right time opens up a whole new set of circumstances, which leave
us wondering about what theologians call ‘providence'. A basic dictionary
defines providence as beneficent care of God, but theologians
would expand that to talk about God's foresight and activity in bringing
things about to fulfil His purposes.
There
are probably three sets of people in the world when it comes to thinking
about this subject. First of all there are those who simply believe
that everything is pure chance. There is no meaning, no purpose, everything
just happens. At the opposite extreme there are those superstitious
people who believe there are ‘forces' or even ‘spirits' at work in the
world that need appeasing, and such people usually live in fear, because
how can you be sure you've got on their good side?
The
third group are those who believe that there is an all-powerful single
deity at work behind all things. This group are subdivided according
to the nature of the deity. For some His presence is bad news! For Christians,
the presence of God is good news; they understand that ‘God is good'
or as the Bible says specifically, “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). They also
believe He gives them free will and so doesn't force them down any good
path – except on rare occasions, as we'll see later in the story. So
it is they believe God does intervene in the affairs of men and always
to bring good.
So
here we have this priest, Zechariah who has been chosen to go into the
innermost part of the Temple to burn incense. He's chosen by lot (chance?)
from a large number and, in fact, each man would only receive this honour
once in his lifetime. It's pretty amazing, therefore, that he's got
this job at all. After all, he's getting on in age now, and it's never
happened before and will never happen again.
Now
of course the Temple was originally to be the place where the people
came to meet with God, but for a variety of reasons you can find in
the Old Testament, God hadn't been turning up there for a very long
time. In fact it was over four hundred years since Israel had really
had any sign of the presence of God with them. So when childless Zechariah
goes into the innermost part of the Temple, he is not expecting anything
out of the ordinary, which makes the presence of an angel somewhat unnerving!
The
problem with life and God, is that most of the time He doesn't warn
you that He's going to turn up. There we were minding our own business
and suddenly things start happening out of the ordinary. Could it be
that God might start talking to you about your life as we go through
these meditations this Advent? You thought you were just reading them
to be spiritual, whereas God put them before you to speak specific stuff
to you. Hmmm? How open are you to that? Chance, that
you're here reading these things? Possibly not! And when other
stuff starts happening in your life that starts you thinking, is it
just chance? Perhaps not!
If
you wish to e-mail us any comment on this meditation please click here
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tony.thomas@rochfordcc.co.uk
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