Good After Beirut Blast?

By Kathie Lichtenwalter

I barely noticed the first thud and shudder.

Image © Pacific Press

We’d had breezes all afternoon that rattled our front door. But the second, unfamiliar thud-shudder was unmistakable. In a politically fragile world, I know the possibilities well: Fireworks? A machine-gun? A car bomb? A fighter jet flying over? While nothing had ever involved me personally, I had learned that every sound has a meaning, sometimes tragic.

I thought nothing of stepping out onto the front porch to investigate. From my hilly outpost above the campus of the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Middle East University, I looked across the sprawling city of Beirut below, past the port, and toward the Mediterranean Sea. I noticed clouds — a mushroom, it seemed — dispersing in high-speed flourishes across the sky overhead. Not normal. Not good.

I stepped further out onto the porch just as a massive explosion enveloped me. A wall of wind with dust and debris lifted me forcefully and threw me back into the house. I grabbed the door but couldn’t get a grip to close it. The force seemed to blow straight through the walls. The window curtains twisted crazily around me. I could hardly stand.

I wanted to look out the window, but I didn’t know if more was coming. I wanted to be safe, but where was safety? So I paced the hallway, my hands shaking. I started breathing again. Everything was eerily silent. Normal.

Minutes later, Osman called. I had taught him an online violin lesson just before the explosion. Now he was calling back, his eyes wild, his face sweaty, his phone jerking around to show me the destruction of his family’s tiny apartment. “It is all broken,” he said. “All broken, Miss.”

That wasn’t new to him. His family had been bombed out of Syria six years earlier. For him, the August 2020 warehouse explosion that killed at least 200 wasn’t his broken apartment. It was the familiar cycle of loss.

It’s a cycle I can’t break. I can’t numb the pain, reclaim the losses, rebuild a country. Nobody can. But we are not helpless; we are not victims. We stand in the presence of God, interceding for what is beyond our power to change and giving Him permission to defy the evil that is flexing and fuming. Good can come of this. Let God’s name be honored through my life, on our Middle East University campus, for dear Lebanon and into the uttermost parts of our reeling world.

Kathie Lichtenwalter works for the tentmaking initiative at the Middle East and North Africa Union. This mission story illustrates Mission Objective No. 2 of the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s “I Will Go” strategic plan: “To strengthen and diversify Adventist outreach in large cities, across the 10/40 Window, among unreached and under-reached people groups, and to non-Christian religions.” Learn more at IWillGo2020.org.

Produced by the General Conference Office of Adventist Mission. Find more mission stories at adventistmission[dot]org

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Further Thought:

“The spirit of bondage is engendered by seeking to live in accordance with legal religion, through striving to fulfill the claims of the law in our own strength. There is hope for us only as we come under the Abrahamic covenant, which is the covenant of grace by faith in Christ Jesus.

Image © Stan Myers from GoodSalt.com

The gospel preached to Abraham, through which he had hope, was the same gospel that is preached to us today, through which we have hope. Abraham looked unto Jesus, who is also the Author and the Finisher of our faith.” — Ellen G. White Comments, The SDA Bible Commentary, vol. 6, p. 1077.

“Before the foundations of the earth were laid, the Father and the Son had united in a covenant to redeem man if he should be overcome by Satan. They had clasped Their hands in a solemn pledge that Christ should become the surety for the human race. This pledge Christ has fulfilled. When upon the cross He cried out, ‘It is finished,’ He addressed the Father. The compact had been fully carried out. Now He declares: Father, it is finished. I have done Thy will, O My God. I have completed the work of redemption. If Thy justice is satisfied, ‘I will that they also, whom Thou hast given Me, be with Me where I am.’ John 19:30; John 17:24.” — Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages, p. 834.

Discussion Questions:

<–Thursday

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You can view an in-depth discussion of The Everlasting Covenant in the Hope Sabbath School class led by Pastor Derek Morris. Click on the image to view:

With thanks to Hope Channel – Television that will change your life.

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This video is produced by the South Pacific Division Discipleship team.

Week 3_The Everlasting Covenant_ study this lesson for Oct 16 from SPD Discipleship on Vimeo.

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Biblical scholarship has long recognized the similarities between Israel’s covenant with God and other covenantal agreements between kingdoms. This parallel shouldn’t be surprising. The Lord was simply working with His people in an environment that they could understand.

At the same time, the idea of a covenant, a legal agreement between two parties, with rules and stipulations and regulations, can seem so cold and so formal.

Image © Krieg Barrie from GoodSalt.com

Though that element must indeed exist (God is the law-Giver), it’s not broad enough to encompass the depth and breadth of the kind of relationship God wanted with His people. Hence, other images are used in Deuteronomy to help portray the same idea as the covenant between God and Israel, but just to give it added dimensions.

Read Deuteronomy 8:5; Deuteronomy 14:1; and Deuteronomy 32:6, Deuteronomy 32:18-20. What kind of imagery is used here, and how could this help reveal the relationship God wanted with His people?

Read Deuteronomy 4:20 and Deuteronomy 32:9. What imagery is used here, and how, too, does this help reveal the kind of relationship God wanted with His people?

In each case, there is the idea of family, which, ideally, should be the closest, tightest, and most loving of bonds. God has always wanted this kind of relationship with His people. Even after their shameful rejection of Jesus during the time of the cross, Jesus said to the two Marys after He had been resurrected, “Go and tell My brethren to go to Galilee, and there they will see Me” (Matthew 28:10). Even as the resurrected Christ, He referred to the disciples as “My brethren,” an example of love and the grace that flows from love for those who certainly didn’t deserve it. That’s essentially what the relationship between God and humanity has always been: grace and love given to the undeserving.

<–Wednesday Friday–>

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