Who or what will you trust if your life is seriously threatened or your way of life is endangered?

Photo by Yosh Ginsu on Unsplash — Photo by Yosh Ginsu on Unsplash

I don’t know if any of you saw this headline on Thursday from a USA Today article: “Yellowstone super volcano may blow sooner than thought—and could wipe out life on the planet.” If you read the article, nowhere does it say anything about wiping out life on the planet. And if you watch the accompanying video, it concludes by saying “don’t worry, the eruption isn’t happening anytime soon.”

Okay, not a real threat, but the world IS filled with real threats to our lives—we’re one cancer diagnosis way from that kind of threat, right? Deep despair and clinical depression can be life-threatening. And there are places where people are facing life-threatening situations through war or persecution or pervasive crime.

And sometimes it can just be our way of life that can be threatened with financial ruin or divorce or physical disability or mental illness. We survive, but the loss is devastating.

Who or what will you trust if your life is seriously threatened or your way of life is endangered?

This is exactly the kind of situation the king of Judah and the people of Judah face in the sermon passage this weekend. And the thing that’s so interesting and so helpful is that their story is so real and so untidy and so complex.

So we'll work our way through the narrative, facing some of the complexities, and drawing some lessons for our own lives when our very lives or our way of life is being threatened.