Fears and the Hope for Protection ...

Thursday, Nov 10, 2011. Life is always in danger! There are many things which can happen to us. We can have a car accident today. There are earthquakes here and there - as the one in Turkey last night. We are in danger, and this leads to fears and hopes …

What desaster can or will happen? …

Sometimes life feels like a game with hidden traps. Any time something bad can happen. There can be illness, terminal illness. There can be accidents. There can even be sudden death!

This situation generates fears and hopes. We fear something like that could happen to us as well. We fear that it happens to us personally or to someone in our immediate environment, so someone in our family, to our partner, our parents, our kids. And in fact, life is in danger.

How is it if you believe in God? Can you be save if you believe? Do catastrophies happen only to non-believers? Is there any religion which could save you from accidents or illness? Some people might even want to carry out a field experiment and work out the statistics: how many Christians had an accident last year compared to how many Non-Christians? But such statistics are usually not correct, since the groups they investigate are different for various reasons, and faith is just one factor influencing the outcome. And we also should ask: do we expect any signifikant differences? From theological arguments I do not see that we could expect different statistics!

Do not be afraid! …

One of the key sentences of the New Testament is “do not be afraid!” It is said to the people who witnessed the birth of Jesus. They are told that there is huge joy coming to them through this child. Also later, when they were in dangerous situations, Jesus told his disciples not to be afraid, but to have faith. Then, he changed the situation.

We need to look deeper into the stories and life of the apostles and of Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus was not afraid, but still he died at the cross. The apostles were not afraid, but they also did not die naturally, but they were all drawn into the conflicts which faith generated with the Roman empire. Even if we look back into the Old Testament and read about the trust which King David is expressing in the Psalms, he was in the middle of tough conflicts while he wrote these lines.

Both the Old and the New Testament clearly point to the effect of trust and faith. It changes our environment, it changes history. But that does not mean that Christians are free from conflict or from danger. We take part in the suffering of mankind. But we have a perspective beyond any danger, and we have God's power close to us. Both changes our situation completely. He can help us in any situation and change it - or he will give us the faith and trust in the middle of the danger and in the middle of catastrophic events, even if we faith our own death or those of someone we love, since we know that he is always in control.

“He is not strong who is not firm in times of trouble” (Proverbs 24, 10) (Roland Potthast) ... more texts