In Search of God amid the Chaos of War

You can find on your digital Bible or your physical Bible Psalm 10, psalm 10.

Everybody knows that.

What's happening in the world right now?

Once again, there is a lot of trouble in the Middle East, and there are not only the rumors of war, but there are actual wars happening.

The reality is that war has been the story of our lives, even if we've not been conscious of it.

Some here are old enough old enough to go all the way back to World War two and have experienced our country not only in World War two, but in the Korean war and the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and then Countless other wars have been happening all over the earth all the time, continually, every single day.

I'm in communication with Central African Republic because of Jonathan's house and the school and the orphanage in the clinic that we have there and are trying to help that place, which is war ravaged, and most of the children in the orphanage that my sister oversees are orphans of war.

That country experiences the turbulence of war every decade to the point that people despair of building huts or despair of Doing and making fine things, despair of doing any kind of art whatsoever, because they know that in ten years it'll be destroyed and probably wrecked for good.

If you go into that country and travel down the highway, you'll see burned out cars where they were attacked by rebels and you see the maimed bodies of victims of the war.

Countless, thousands and thousands of people die all the time on account of war.

It's easy for young men particularly, to romanticize war.

Some young men think, well, I'll go into war, and there's this DNA inside of a lot of young men that just wants to be a hero and they think of going into war.

But that Romanticism can be quickly dispelled of by the slaughter of people around them.

Some of our best works in the 20th century have come as a product of war.

Some of our best fiction that has influenced people in positive ways has come out of the crucible of war.

Tolkens, the Lord of the Ring, is a product of how God shaped him and molded him in the drama of World War one.

Cs Lewis, who was an atheist at the beginning of the war and yet even after World War one so, was so profoundly shaken by War that when World War two came up and he was close to being conscripted, he had said I would rather die than go into war again.

And Yet those Experiences shaped their writings and you could see a lot of their philosophy of life, their belief in God, their understanding of humanity, in their works like the Chronicles of Narnia and many more.

War is a terrible reality and now, especially because of social media and the power of media, we can bring images that are terrible and in disturbing right into our consciousness almost Relentlessly and without any way of escaping, unless we decide to bury our heads into the sand and and cope with it.

Some of us have experienced war.

We have one of our regular attenders that has fought in war in Lebanon and experienced the, the terror of war.

Even I, who have not experienced war as a soldier, experienced war when I was a young child.

I vividly remembered like it was yesterday a Hunkering down in our house while gunfire was going over our house in a rebellion that was taking place in the Central African Republic and Tracers were flying over our house and they say tracers go every 100 or a thousand I don't know Bullets.

The tracer goes and they were just flying over like fireworks over our house and a shell actually hit the house that we were in.

I Was scared then as a little boy, but looking back I realized that I was not near as terrified as I should have been, nor as terrified as my parents were, because I just Didn't understand the gravity and the life and death moments that were happening right in that time.

Why do people do these things to each other?

We've seen images this week of people running away from terror, hiding into bunkers.

In one episode that Cooper Anderson showed, 30 people got into a cement bunker and then somebody just callously threw in grenades and blew those people apart inside that cage.

How can a human being do something like that to another human being?

What happens in the brain of someone that can justify that?

What goes on in humanity that we have these kind of things?

And I think it would be pastorally responsible to try to help you think through this and process some of the news that you're encountering on a day-by-day basis right now.

Now there's three approaches that are common, and I'm going to take a less common approach to thinking about this and processing this.

One is the political process, the political way of thinking about it, to immediately decide who's right and what political side you're on in the issue, maybe a nationalistic or a patriotic way of jumping to the conclusion of where you're going to stand.

Your blood is here, your loyalties are here, you fly this flag, you understand the basic political agenda, government views and values of this particular party and you know where you land and that's how you process everything, even the atrocities that happen.

That's one way of processing it and if you are watching any of the news and the media and talking to people, you're certainly hearing that and you're seeing it take place.

Another way is the eschatological process.

Eschatology is the study of the end times, eschaton is the times, end times and ology Anytime you have a word with ology at the end, it's the study of and it's the talk about.

So the eschatological approach to this is very common among Christians where we'll say, especially if something is happening in the Middle East but it can happen, even if the war comes home to us in a certain way, such as the Ukraine war we don't tend to think of these eschatological reasons or down that pathway if you want, if it's war happening in Africa or somewhere else.

But nonetheless it's very common among Christians to recognize that Jesus has said there will be wars and rumors of war and suddenly there's all kinds of means and there's all kinds of statements and pontifications and speculations and all kinds of ideas about the eschaton, the end times.

That's one way to approach it.

That's not the way that I will approach that today.

A third way to approach the discussion of war is what I call the sentimental way, and by sentimental I'm talking more about the philosophy of sentimentalism.

The philosophy of sentimentalism is an idea that how things feel and how they affect us and how they feel should govern all of us.

It is the make love, not war, type of mentality and reaction that happens almost in a visceral way with many people, particularly Americans.

When these kinds of things happen, it involves moral equivalence.

They're reluctant to take sides or to say that one side is more misbehaving than another side, and they want to balance things out and we just want everybody to get along and it's all bad, everybody's bad.

Nothing justifies war.

It's a radical pacifism, if you will.

It's the idea that we humans can ultimately live without war.

Now you have to be smoking a lot of something to actually believe that, because there's never been a time in our history that there's never been war and sadly, we will be affected by it.

We pray that our sons won't be conscripted into war.

We pray that we won't lose some.

But if you're like me, you probably know someone who lost a relative or an intimate relation, literally killed in war.

Or maybe you're like me and you know people that are in Gaza today, palestinian Christians who bow their knee to Jesus Christ, the Lord of Lord and the King of Kings, and are being terrorized by bombs dropping upon them.

Or you're like me and you know Jews, who are lovely people, who are being terrorized by the other side.

I think that we, as Christians, need to make sure that we don't default right away to political or eschatological, or even sentimental type of thinking before we've engaged in this fourth way of approaching this discussion.

The fourth way of approaching this discussion that I want to bring to you today, by using an ancient poem, is what I call the anthropological approach, anthropology.

You already know what ology means.

Anthropos means man, humankind.

What is it that happens in humanity?

That we war?

What goes on?

That we cannot fight?

That we cannot live in existence with one another and have without having some kind of fight, without having some kind of argument, without sometimes it resulting in organized conflict, in which we are killing each other and massacring each other and engaging in just animal like destruction of one another's homes and places.

What is it about humanity that does this?

There ought to be deep in our hearts something that happens as we think about humanity and think about God, and we might say, like the psalmist says in the tenth psalm why, oh Lord, do you stand far away?

Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?

Psalm 10, verse 1.

Psalms 10:1

Where are you, god?

Where are you in all of this?

What are you doing, god?

Aren't you omnipotent, which means all powerful?

Aren't you omnipresent, which means everywhere present.

And yet to us and to others it would seem like you've lost control and this is happening in your place Now.

Psalm 10 is a poem and a couple of you have been here in the class and then somewhere in my sermon in San Jose when we were looking at Psalm 24.

And I told you that one of the ways to help you best understand and appreciate the Psalms is to realize that it's poetry, and poetry generally talks about three themes.

Poetry generally wants to give us a feeling, affections and ideas, not necessarily cognitive, intellectual thoughts, but a sense of conviction and feeling about generally three things place you have a lot of poems about home that's number one or presence, the experience of something, and there can be long poetry just about sipping wine, for example.

And music is written about experiences, the actual being present as a human being in this moment, whether of hate or of love.

It's presence.

And the third is people.

Who is the most important person in some poetry is a lover.

Some songs are about enemies.

The French national anthem calls for the bloodletting of all the enemies.

It's pretty bloodthirsty words if you actually understand French and sing them.

Many national anthems talk about the bloodletting of the enemies, or it's about who's in charge or who is supreme, and all of the Psalms address these three components and try to elevate our opinions and our feelings about these three categories.

Did you know that war is always about a place, about presence, who gets to do what with that place and how that place ought to be experienced?

And about people who gets to be the boss of the place, who gets to be the Lord of the place, who gets to own the place?

The wars that are at front and center of our American consciousness are about place, presence and people.

The Ukraine war goes back in the DNA of the people over 500 years, even a thousand years, and it's a battle over place.

It's a battle of who gets to be Lord of this place, who gets to govern this place and what kind of living, what kind of government, what kind of experience of this place should be?

How can we be present here?

And people are killing each other over those things.

Similarly, in Israel, it's a war about place, an argument about place that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years.

It's a war about people who gets to govern those people and what life should be like, and in particularly, there's a worship of Allah or of Yahweh component, because the life experience of people in that place is very, very important, and there are extremists on either side who don't want a pluralism, which means people from all different religions and different ideas and thoughts can all coexist together, because that's not how they want to experience presence in that place.

And so war is about place, presence and people.

Psalm 10, unlike a number of Psalms, does not have a signifying precipitous event to call for the writing of this song.

In other words, some Psalms have particular events that happen.

Psalm 51 is a Psalm of confession that David wrote after he sinned with Bathsheba, committing adultery with her and after having killed her husband, uriah.

That event prompted this poem, psalm 51, which is a wonderful poem of confession, but Psalm 10 doesn't have any precipitous event or some significant thing that happened that helps scholars and people understand what was the source of this writing.

It doesn't even say who wrote it, so some scholars are very most scholars are disagreed on who actually wrote it.

Was it David or was it some other Psalmist?

Therefore, even the timing of it is confusing to some.

Some think, of course, if David wrote it, there was during David's time, but others think that it was much later on, during the captivity, that Israelite Psalmists wrote this Psalm.

But what we do know is that it is included in the Holy Scripture, inspired by God, as one of the poems that we ought to read, and it has a universal tone to it, describing what anybody could feel or think during any crisis that involves human hostility toward others, any war that happens, and so what I want to do is give you a read through this Psalm, kind of talk through it like in commentary fashion, and then give you three ways to align or approach your God and to shape your mind in the context of the things that are happening in our world today.

Why, oh Lord, do you stand far away?

Why do you hide yourselves in time, yourself at time of trouble.

Clearly, the Psalmist believes in Yahweh, but this is what it feels like and he wants us to feel this.

And you're not an honest person or you've had no experience if there are not times in your life where you have felt like God is not there.

Right, you have felt like God is not there and you're wondering what's going on, why, oh Lord?

And then in the second part so that's the introduction to the poetry then in the second part he's gonna define the enemy the wicked man.

In arrogance, the wicked hotly pursue the poor.

Let them be caught in the schemes that they have devised, and some translations say the poor are caught in the schemes that they have devised.

But the wicked boast of the desires of his soul and the one greedy for gain curses and renounces the Lord In the pride of his face.

The wicked does not seek him.

All his thoughts are there is no God.

His ways prosper at all times.

Your judgments are on high, out of his sight.

As far as for all his foes, he puffs at them.

He says in his heart I shall not be moved.

Throughout all generations, I shall not meet adversity.

His mouth is filled with cursing and deceit and oppression.

Under his tongue are mischief and iniquity.

He sits in ambush in the villages, in hiding places.

He murders the innocent.

His eyes steadfastly watch for the helpless.

He lurks in ambush like a lion in his thicket.

He lurks that he may seize the poor.

He seizes the poor.

When he draws him into his net, the helpless are crushed, sink down and fall by his might.

He says in his heart.

God has forgotten, he has hidden his face.

He will never see it.

That concludes the first part.

A hyperbolic.

Hyperbolic means a deliberate exaggeration in order to make a point.

A hyperbolic description of the bad people.

And it's terrible.

They're greedy, they will terrorize people, they will hide in villages and wait for an opportunity to seize people.

There are in this poem two people groups.

There are the bad people and then there are the good people.

And the good people are defined with these words and there are actually more words in the Hebrew, but in these words in our English translation poor, innocent, helpless, fatherless, oppressed and afflicted.

So on the one hand you have the violent man who is greedy, who is mischievous, who's a mocker, who's atheistic, who's rebellious, who thinks he's gonna prosper forever and ever and it feels like he's going to flourish.

In fact, one way.

We cannot actually translate this well into English, but there's this tone of perpetuity in the verbs, so that the writer of the psalmist is saying this is the way it has been the way it is, and it seems like it's always gonna be this way that the wicked people will prosper, they'll get their way, bad governments will come into play and they will just dominate and there will always be oppression.

There will always be poor people, there will always be people crushed, there will always be innocent people, there will always be kidnapping and man stealing, there will be all these kinds of terrorist things that happen all the time and there will always be victims.

If our default view of any war is to immediately think of our political agenda and not have a tenderness and a brokenness in our heart for the innocent victims of villages on the other side of our political agenda, we do not know the heart of this psalmist, nor the heart of God.

There are always victims on all sides in the war, the wars of men.

The psalm is going to address that theme of people.

It will address who the bad players are, who the victims are and who the king is, the place over which the war is happening is the earth, the whole earth.

The earth is a place.

The earth is God's place.

Over and over again, the Psalms say the earth is the Lord and all that is in it and all the fullness therein is the Lord's.

All of this earth is God's place, all of it belongs to Him, and yet there are.

The human response is God has forgotten.

God doesn't know.

I will be the ruler of this place, I will dominate this place.

In other words, we are having here a description of mankind as a in general warring against God who is the ruler and Lord of this place.

You'll see it in verse 16, the Lord is king forever and the nations perish from His.

Some translations say land.

The actual, an actual translation could be earth, the earth.

And you'll see, at the very last verse it says God praying to God who will do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more.

God made this place to be a place of peace.

God made this place, all of this place, to be a temple of worship.

God made this place to be a place of joy and safety and harmony and love.

The sin has come into this place and men have said we will be the rulers of this place.

Thus you have the story of the Tower of Babel on the plains of Shinar, when the men said, hey, let us build a tower that goes all the way up to God, and we'll, and we'll be united, we'll rule this place.

And God said look at the technology, because the Tower of Babel is the first introduction of technology in the Bible.

Look at the technology of mankind and bringing this together.

If we don't disrupt this, they will become like us.

In other words, they'll have a premature rulership of the place.

And so God disrupted the place and confused it with language barrier, and he disrupted their technological advances.

As men become more and more technology advanced, we begin to think of ourselves more and more like God.

We're going to be able to have rulership of this place.

One of the humbling effects of this war that we're now observing in the Middle East is that technology was not used in order to plan it.

As far as anybody knows, it's a very humbling reality that, outside of the realm of what technology can do, an attack was planned.

But what we need to understand is man is at a war against God, and that's why Paul says in Ephesians, chapter six we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers in the heavenly places.

In the heavenly places you need to understand, and not talking about something ethereal and outer space beyond us that has no effect on earth.

Heavenly places is actually speaking to us of the invisible realm here on this earth, all that is invisible, where the demons and the angels interact.

Here on this earth, we are wrestling against principalities and powers.

In the heavenly places, there is a warfare going on, and all of the wars, whether it be World War II, whether it be the Gulf War, whether it be Ukraine and Russia, or whether it be this war, all of them are merely skirmishes in the gigantic war of rebellious man against God.

And so this evil is presented.

This evil is presented in the personification of an enemy that does all of these things, like verse eight.

He sits in ambush in the villages, in hiding places.

He murders the innocent.

His eyes stealthily watch and look for the helpless.

That word helpless used here in verse 10 and in verse 14 are the same Hebrew word that is used only here and nowhere else, and it's fun to read.

All the scholars try to translate it because it has all of the all the translations work afflicted the weak, the disabled, the vulnerable, and the translation I'm reading today says the helpless.

What is frightened situation?

To be among the helpless, where there is nowhere to look and nowhere to flee and nowhere to go.

We saw a father interviewed this week who literally sighed with relief when he heard that his kidnapped eight year old daughter had been killed instead of being left alive in the hands of enemies.

Imagine the sense of helplessness that some people in the Central Africa are feeling right now, where they don't know where their next meal is going to come and where they're afraid to go out of a village because they might get killed.

That's the helplessness that is happening on the earth all over the place because of man's conviction that they know how to live in this place.

They know what the experience of this place ought to be.

It certainly should not be through the obedience of the 10 commandments.

It certainly should not be through the worship of God.

We have our idea of how this world ought to be experienced, and so this is the place and this is how we're going to govern it, and other people disagree, and then we start fighting and then there are wars, it makes you want to do what one of my favorite authors said in a poem.

This is Wendell Berry, in a poem called the Peace of Wild Things.

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound, in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rest in his beauty, on the water and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water and I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.

For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free".

What is Wendell Berry romanticizing in this poem that we all can identify with?

He's saying I would really love the earth if there weren't people problems.

That's what he's saying.

I remember somebody saying to me when I got into Christian ministry the ministry is awesome if it weren't for people, but the ministry is people.

The ministry means that we will engage with hostility and problems and difficulty.

This whole earth is under the despair of human hostility.

James says in James chapter 4, where do fight wars and quarrels among you come from?

James 4 · chapter mention

Don't they come from your desires, that battle within you.

You desire but do not have.

So you kill, you covet but you cannot get what you want.

So you quarrel and war.

You do not have.

Because you do not ask God.

When you ask, you do not receive.

Because you ask, with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.

You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God.

Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.

Or do you think the scriptures say without reason that he jealously longs for the Spirit he has caused to dwell in us, but he gives us more grace?

That is why scripture says God opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.

James is saying and it's James is the most Old Testament T of the New Testament books, and that's a word I invented, I know, but you understand it it's the most Old Testament T of the New Testament books.

It's kind of like Proverbs.

And James is saying listen, wars come because you have an idea of experience and how life should be experience and you say I want it this way and somebody else says no, I want it another way and you could get little one year and a half year and a half year and a half old Leland and year and a half old Lainey together and they already have convictions about their way and they might start clawing at each other and going after each other and they have to be separated by someone that knows a better way.

James is saying you are arguing over presence, experience of life, and you have disagreements.

You have your inner lust that make you want things differently than what other people want and you're willing to till over it.

But not only that.

You don't agree with the people.

The person solution that God has established you ask you do not have because you do not ask God.

That is saying the person that you need to address and say is the king of all your desires and wishes is God and you need to pray to God.

But even when you pray to God, you have a disagreement with God because you're saying I want it to do my own thing with.

Give me this and give me that, give me this land, give me this people, give me all of this, and you're driven by your selfish ambition.

Therefore, you don't have it, you are adulterous and you're gonna war and self-destruct all the way.

God, and that is all pride.

And God resists the proud and he gives grace to the humble.

There is no war where there are not bad people on both sides.

This is not morally equivalence to say that one side is, that the both sides are equal and that we shouldn't take positions.

This is not a pacifist view.

Because I'm not a pacifist, because I believe war is gonna happen all the way.

I thank God.

I have some friends who are students of war, that are US Rangers, colonels and high-ranking officers, and I thank God for them.

So this is not a pacifist view.

We will have to be students of war until Jesus returns.

But this is to say that there is never a war without proud people on both sides who actually, at the root of everything, are hostile to God.

So we need to be humble because God gives grace to the humble.

And in the Psalms I don't have the time the poor are not just talking about the indigent or the food insecure or those who are not clothed, although that can include it, but the poor is talking about in some cases is talking about God's chosen people.

Psalm 14, for example, is an illustration of that God's chosen people and it seems like, hey, some of the Jews say, wow, it was a curse to be chosen by God, because life is terrible, there's no, there's no advantage to being the people chosen by God.

So the poor is not just the indigent, but the poor are people who believe something about a place and the place is being overrun by more powerful enemies.

That is why, listen closely, jesus said in the famous Beatitudes blessed are the what the meek or the poor in spirit.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall inherit the what Earth place.

Place, the poor will inherit the place.

The hope of the Gospel, brothers and sisters, is that all of God's people, whether they're Jew or Palestinian, from Gaza or Ukrainian or Russian, or from any of the tribes in Central Africa, the hope of the Gospel is that all of his people who have turned to Jesus, the King of Kings, will one day inherit the whole earth.

That is what this Psalm anticipates, because at the very end of the Psalm it says the Lord verse 16 is king forever and ever.

The nations perish from his earth.

Oh Lord, you hear the desire of the afflicted.

You will strengthen their heart.

You will incline your ear to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, so that the man who is of this earth, of the world like this earth, may strike terror no more.

So let me give you these three ways to approach war and rumors of war and the atrocities that humans do to one another.

First of all, assign all the evils of war and hate to humanity as a whole.

Assign all the evils of war and hate to humanity as a whole.

That's what the Psalmist is doing, is describing men, people who are hostile toward God.

There will never be a time when people have the opportunity to exercise their hostility toward God, that they will not hurt people who are innocent and helpless, and sometimes even Christians.

That's why the famous Messianic Psalm 2 says why do the nations rage and the people's plot in vain?

The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against his anointed Saying let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.

In California there will be a hostility toward biblical Christianity.

It may not show in bloodletting, but maybe it could someday.

There's a hostility and a mockery of morality that comes from the very heart of God.

There's an oppression that will happen as a result of bad, human, selfish, lust driven interest that's going to hurt people, and we have the helpless all around us.

So we need to remember Assign all the evils of war and hate to humanity.

We have a human problem in this place.

Secondly, align with the poor and helpless.

Align your heart, align your emotions, align your mind with the and the helpless.

Practically, this would mean that in real life, we ought to care for the poor and we ought to immediately want to help the helpless.

When I was in Belgium as a pastor there, one elderly Belgian woman told me that there were some soldiers from America that were just different, she said, and now, years later, she began to believe that they were Christian.

What made them different from all of the other expeditionary forces, all of the Allied forces, including other American soldiers?

What made them different was that this group of soldiers had compassion on the weak and the poor, including prisoners of war.

They would share their food with her.

She was a child and they shared her food with her because she was hungry and starving.

Every day would find ways to share.

I don't know if they were Christian or not, but here's one thing I know they had an ethos that comes from the heart of God.

These men would go on to the battlefield and kill as they needed to do to defend country and defend their cause and obey their government.

But when they had it in their power to be kind and gentle and align with sympathy with the poor, they did it.

We need to align with the poor spiritually.

That's why God says blessed are the meek in spirit or the poor in spirit.

We need to understand that we are no different than people trapped in a bunker hoping that some malicious person will not throw a grenade in there and destroy us.

We need to understand, if we're truly humble, that we are completely dependent upon God at all times, for our very next breath.

We need to understand that if there's going to be divine rulership and if there's going to be justice and peace and love, it's only going to become through another man who is not affected with the sin of humanity as we are.

It'll be the second Adam Jesus, coming again as king, who will establish his government and make this place, which is his place, finally a place of justice and joy and fulfillment for the helpless and the fatherless.

So we choose to align ourselves to the poor.

That's why one of the Psalms starts with blessed is the one who cares for the poor.

And thirdly, not only do we sign all the evils of war and hate to all humanity across the board and align with the poor and helpless, but thirdly, we need to subscribe or attribute whatever word works best for you justice and honor and control to God, who will most definitely prevail.

We ascribe to him.

Psalm 24 says who is the king of glory?

The Lord of Hosts is the king of glory.

Here it says in verse 16 the Lord is king forever and ever.

The nations perish from his land.

It's as good as done.

He will hear that.

He hears the desires that the afflicted earlier says.

He sees what is going on and he will rule.

And this hope, this conviction, prevails in us.

So it still brings us back to the opening question oh Lord, where are you in times of trouble?

Where are you right now in times of trouble?

And the answer, which we will remind ourselves of as we do the Lord's table, is that God is present on the earth through his people.

God is present on the earth through his church.

We, no matter how, attempted to respond in other ways, with visceral hate or with spontaneous, combustible political activity, we who are God's people all over the world who truly have the spirit of him, who loves the fatherless and cares for the helpless and maintains the poor and is instant, in season and out of season to help the weak.

We who have that spirit will show the presence and the love of Jesus to those who are suffering all around us and point them to the hope that we have that King Jesus is winning the war of which all these other wars are merely skirmishes, and justice will come and we consciously and with conviction ascribe to our Lord glory to exercise his authority as he will and when he will, because it most certainly will happen.

Let's pray.

I pray as we try to think of this conflict, the wars we're in as humans on the earth who cannot escape it.

It's going to happen everywhere.

It's all over.

We're grieved by it.

We pray that you'd help us to know and to make sure that we are safe in Jesus Christ, that we have called upon the King of Kings to be our ruler and our protector and our helper, and that we have received the comforter, which is also called helper, to help us in this time.

And we know that one day all things will be brought in submission to you and the earth.

This place will be restored to a place of peace and joy in the glory of God, in Jesus' name amen.