While driving from Exeter to Bournemouth one summer morning, I decided to take the less direct coastal road, which would enable me to enjoy the towns and the sea views. Big mistake! I had not taken into account the endless line of caravanners who had taken the same road. It was the one time I made that mistake: thereafter I took less interesting but more direct routes — where possible, motorways.
“In the days of Jael, the highways were deserted and the travelers walked through byways.” (Judges 5:6) Not byways by choice but because fear stalked the highways. Fear of being robbed or even murdered by invaders.
Fear still stalks the highways: fear of catching some sort of post-Corona-19 virus, or being caught in a random attack by one group against another. Fear of such things is forcing us out of open societal ways once taken for granted and into lesser-known and out-of-sight byways of fearful and self-protective living.
In the days before kings ruled Israel, it was Deborah, a prophetess, who stood up and acted to deliver her people out from fear and back into faith. Out from the byways and back onto the highways. Out of hiding and back into the open.
Fear has driven us out of the open: out from openly expressing our political views and into hiding them, lest we suffer hatred or discrimination. It will take faith to get us back into the open. But don’t look for faith in those politicians who hide in the anonymity provided by entrenched bureaucracy.
Don’t look for it either, in megachurch pastors whose voices were silent during the onset of the introduced Covid-19 virus.
Unheard, as well, are the voices of those self-proclaimed prophets and prophetesses who are quick to direct people personally, but not address the nation publicly. Major prophets such as Jeremiah reprimanded the people, and the Minor Prophets spoke out against the evil doings of their day.
It takes a Deborah, one who will stand up and support a leader, and point him or her to God’s way through a problem and out of byways back into highways; back into living openly and freely again.
I’m not sick and tired of the virus or of anything else. I am well and am awake to those who would seek to use such things for their future plan and purpose for our nation.
The answer is found in turning our faces to God and asking Him for forgiveness, and then getting back to a lifestyle which is credible and workable, both spiritually and socially. Which, of course, involves real faith in Almighty God and submission to Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Out of that fearful, hidden byway and back onto the open, fearless Highway of Faith!