Grundy's Blog

“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.” Joel 2:25 Very few films stay with me, but the 1975 film, Day of the Locusts , is one that I have never forgotten. The film is about three wannabes and desperadoes who are sucked into the Hollywood system of sycophants, diggers, and parasites. They listen and fall victim to Hollywood’s sirens: glamor, money, fame, sex, and adoration. I want to say that I have never succumbed to such voices, that I never “crossed to death's other Kingdom,” (T.S. Eliot) but truth be told, I have wasted many of my sixty-six years. Those years nearly cost me my children and my wife, who will tell you that I not only changed spiritually but physically—my eyes were vacuous gray, my skin jaundiced-like.   Satan had his way with me. Locusts ravaged my life and the lives of my family.   How does one get to a place where nothing matters but the satiation of selfish appetites? It begins with seemingly inconsequential sins. In Bruce L. Bake

“Rend your hearts, not your garments.”—Joel 2:13 An “army” of locusts has come into Judah, devastating the land.   The reason for such devastation is the sin of indifference, of being “neither cold or hot.”    John Piper writes: “ The ultimate aim of God in sending the locust horde against his people is to secure their undivided allegiance: ‘You shall know that I, Yahweh, am your God, and there is no one else.’ Evidently, the cause of the locust plague had been the people's half-hearted allegiance . Some of their affections had gone after things other than God. He was not their all-consuming love. So he fought against his own people. For few things are more dishonoring to God and dangerous for us than love to God which is only half-hearted.” Half-heartedness is a subtle sin that unlike overt sins —murder, adultery, gluttony, gossiping—it quietly creeps into our lives, appearing like a “false friend.” The sin of indifference veils spiritual emptiness.   We go to church, at

"But if not, be it know to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up." (Daniel 3:16-18) Most Sunday-schoolers know the story. Shadrach, Meschach, and Abnego are commanded by King Nebuchadnezzar to fall down and worship the golden image, and if they choose not fall down and worship, they will be cast into a burning furnace. The three men presumably had led normal lives, loyal to their livelihood. But now they are faced with a test of loyalty. "On one side of the equation was position family, wealth, security, life itself; and on the other side there was God."  This was the hardest test of loyalty to God that they had ever faced. The men must have gone through mental gymnastics in deciding which to choose. Do I choose to obey Yahweh, or do I choose security and family? What will it matter if I choose to bow to the golden image? Is loyalty to God more important than my own life? In John Lennox's commentary on

"Be still, and know I am God." —Psalm 46:10 We live anxiety-ridden lives. I look at the world and wonder,  how can I live a life of peace in a world permeated with fear, hate, arrogance, divisiveness, greed, racism, famine, and licentiousness? How can I be someone who exudes God's peace? How can I "calm and quiet my soul?" (Psalm 131). The answer begins with humility, "...the acceptance of our limited lives,. When we move low, back toward the soil from which we from which we can learn the lessons of our true humility, [then] we are able to enter a kind of peace." (Sutterfield, Wendell Berry and the Given Life ). There is as St. Augustine writes in The City of God , "the peace of all things is the tranquility of order" (Book XIX, Ch. 13). We are at peace when the "creature lives as a creature, the human as a human, God as God, and all are in proper relationship with one another" (Sutterfield 20-21).  In other words, peace is the r