The Word of Eternal Life
By Nancy Raabe
“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life!”
Spoken by Peter in John 6, this is refrain accompanies us through the twist and turns, the bumps and potholes of our lives. God’s word is our great heritage, and it is always there for us — especially in times of need.
Whenever I hit a pothole, there are three places I turn. First is to the psalms of lament, whose verses meet us in every conceivable calamity:
Save me, O God, for the waters have risen up to my neck. I am sinking in deep mire, and there is no foothold. (Psalm 69:1-2a)
But as for me, I am poor and needy; come to me quickly, O God. You are my helper and my deliverer; O Lord, do not tarry. (Psalm 70:5) Or the first verse of that same psalm: Be pleased, O God, to deliver me; O Lord, make haste to help me.
HELP!
Another place I go is to 1 Peter 5:8 for the reminder that these adversity is always going to be surprising us, especially when we least expect it.
“Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil is prowls around, looking for someone to devour.”
Don’t let that person be you!
Finally I find solace in the letter of James. Like 1 Peter, James is near the back of the New Testament; like the other letter, it was almost certainly not written by the disciple to whom it is attributed but instead penned later in honor of him).
Martin Luther had no patience for James, judging it to be “an epistle of straw,” but I find it extraordinarily useful in helping to understand the negative forces swirling around us that try to take us captive. On a recent Sunday we heard from James 3 about how the tongue can be “a restless evil, full of deadly poison,” and then the next week received from this same chapter a brilliant synopsis of how conflict among individuals arises:
“Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder [an assault on someone’s personhood]. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures….Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” (James 4:2-3, 7-8)
Draw near to God. This is all it takes. In his most famous hymn, Luther tells us crisply how to resist the devil: “One little word subdues him.” And as we would ask our young children whenever we sang that hymn in church: “What word is that?”
So take heart. Those so-called “acts of God” such as earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, floods we can do nothing about except cope together in the aftermath. But we do have the means to confront, tame, and subdue the dark forces which plunge us into potholes. All it takes is that one little word. Whenever you find yourself sinking into deep mire, cling to it with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
