History through glasses

I have just completed reading through the Psalms, and as is inevitable, I have struck upon a favourite. Psalm 136. It is a song of praise, interestingly recounting most of the events of Israelites history. What I most like about it though is the fact that after each line comes the phrase "His [God's] love endures forever."

I should confess now that I love to study history. The events, the effects of that event, the people involved, the reasons involved, the legacies of that event. History is an endless flowchart, infinitely complicated, but still all connected by lines all heading the same direction. What I like most about history though, is that a tiny action can start a snowballing effect which leads to massive changes. A good example would be the Arab revolutions. The small group of protesters meeting in Tunisia would never had imagined such a big consequence from their actions!

History can also be very sad too. The wars with horrific stories of merciless killings, the news of devastating earthquakes and other natural disasters, the terror of continued oppression by the government. When we learn about such things we can often question God. "How can God let such things happen?" I think part of the answer is repeated throughout my favourite Psalm. As I mentioned before, every second line of the Psalm is "His [God's] love endures forever".

The title of this post is History through glasses because I often think we can look at every event in all sorts of different ways. We put on our critical glasses and start seeing all the flaws in people's plans, or wear our ethical glasses and get angry at all the wrongs being committed. Well, I think we should try and see History through the glasses of God's eternal love.

So, if we look at the events of World War 2 understanding God's eternal love, we see that, yes our world is broken. Yes, people do die unnecessary deaths. But we know that God's love never dies, so we know he will come to make a new heaven and earth with no more pain, no more wars, no more suffering. It gives us the strength to cope all the bad things in this life, knowing that we have something to look forward to.

History is the story of this world. But this world is not the end. So by God's love being eternal, we know that it will last forever, even when this world does fade away, he will still be there.