Looking through the Psalms we see that Israel and David are often ensnared in struggles against their enemies and against themselves. Sometimes we become our own worst enemy. I know I took the picture below before a game I attended during warmups, but when a team’s season begins to unravel the team often fights against itself. This causes the team to lose more games than they should. We also tend to underperform when we start unraveling. One bad decision leads to another, and this builds upon itself.
We are creatures that desire structure and consistency. We don’t trust ourselves to operate according to God’s purpose without structure. We have organized ourselves into organizations and churches that we hope will provide us the structure/ theology/ preaching/ group dynamic that we need to keep us within God’s desire for our lives.
The structures we put in place to define our situation, and to make sense of the world we live in often betray us, and take away the freedom that we have been given. Sometimes these structures do not allow us to worship God in a variety of forms, they do not give us the freedom to seek God, to question the things that will help us grow in our faith. In some of these circumstances, we abandon and strike out against what we see as oppression, only to exchange it for another form of oppression. In these cases we either vilify or deify the structure.
All this being said, structure is not bad, but we must be free to challenge the structure at times, when we have come across a situation where structure becomes oppressive, but we also need to be willing to be wrong, and allow the structure to show us where we may be wrong. Understandably, this takes maturity that not all of us may have, but should develop in our relationship with God. This is part of the struggle that we cannot escape or hide from within our structures.
Our God needs to be God, for only God can pull us out from our struggles, and the closer we grow to God the more mature we become in our faith, and the better we are within the structures within which we are organized. Struggle happens, and when it does, let God be our God.
Elpis and Shalom 