The election is in one week and I think it would be accurate to say there is a lot of prayer being sent up like bowls of incense right now. I think it’s also accurate to say that there are mixed messages in those bowls. We often don’t know just how to pray for our nation.
As for me, I’ll admit I’ve vacillated. I’ve cried out for mercy, beseeching God to give us a second chance to get it right. When it felt like I was asking for thirtieth, fortieth and fiftieth chances ad nauseum, I’ve tried to come into agreement with whatever means God saw fit to bring us back to our right minds. I’ve always stopped short of praying outright for His judgment to fall – which probably makes me weak, I know. I’ve heard other people describe the Capitol as a cesspool and other names not fit to print and they seem to have no trouble decreeing calamity over the city, but I immediately get flashes of actual people suffering under those calamities and so, no matter how frustrated I get with this place, I can’t seem to quite give up on it.
Lately I’ve taken to praying like Abraham: peradventure there lack five of the fifty righteous, wilt thou destroy the place for the forty and five that art therein? Sometimes I even roll my Rs like Alexander Scourby. Actually I don’t. But I do ask Him to save the city for the sake of the righteous remnant, whoever and wherever they are.
But today as I was driving home praying the Abrahamic prayer, I realized that I don’t even know what a “righteous remnant” is.
I thought this because I’ve been studying different uses of the words “righteous” and “righteousness” in the Old Testament lately and I’m having a hard time really understanding what they mean. I’ve even looked up the definitions in Strong’s Exhausting Exhaustive Concordance to see if I can glean some insight from the original Hebrew. Which of course is completely ridiculous since I don’t have the faintest idea how to read Hebrew. Nevertheless, I’m in the process of doing a thorough – and completely amateur – word study because the Father apparently has good things in store for the righteous and I wanted to know what that means…and how to be one.
Have you noticed that when people talk about the “remnant” they usually lower their voices as if they’re referring to an elite cadre of secret-ops-super-saints? While that sounds really cool, I don’t actually know that any of those kind of saints reside in my city – well maybe one, but one person does not a remnant make. Not even Abraham himself dared to negotiate for fewer than ten.
And counted among that righteous remnant was Abraham’s nephew Lot. You know, the one who was given his pick of all the land…and chose Sodom. Which just goes to show there’s hope yet.
