Genesis 4:15
Abel's blood cried out from the ground. What must that cry sound like? What must the depth and horror of man's sins sound like to the ears of a holy God?
Nails on a chalkboard?
A loud ringing in His ear?
A mosquito in the middle of the night?
The type of screaming you hear only in nightmares. When someone you love deeply is hurting, bleeding, breaking, falling, dying...screaming out for you....and you can do nothing. The kind of gut-wrenching screams that break your heart, make you want to vomit, and echo in your mind when you wake.
Love consents to all and commands only those who consent. Love is abdication. God is abdication. -Simone Weil
God has stepped back. Abdicated His authority and power. Why? To give us free will. To let us choose. To choose Him. Or to not choose Him. And the devastation left in our wake cries out in anguish. If God hears the dying breath of sparrows, what must our atrocities sound like to him?
What did it sound like when millions of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals were herded into Nazi gas chambers?
When a man beat another man and ate his face while onlookers drove by on the Miami interstate?
What do the more than 54 million children killed in their mother's womb sound like?
What does it sound like in heaven when a child comes home from being bullied at school and hangs himself in the basement?
The genocides in Sudan, Pakistan, Burundi, North Korea, Lebanon, Rwanda....
How do these things sound to God?
Unbearable. The sacred beauty of life trampled and spat on. An incessant wailing.
"I seen the misery of my people...I have heard them crying out..."
Exodus 3:7
God heard his people's cry. We are familiar with the story that follows. God's vengeance on those who had persecuted his people. The great deliverance of His people from Egypt.
Over and over in the Bible, God hears his people's cries and acts.
How long will it be before God has had enough? How long until He will not tolerate the killing of another one of his children? How long will he show us mercy?
How long, oh Lord?
"Come, Lord Jesus."
So the question is, if God can't stand the sound of these things, then why does He allow them? He has the power to do something about it, but He must allow them because of the love He has for us. To eliminate these "sounds", eliminates our free will, and God loved us enough to give us free will.
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