Micah 6:8

So I am on a big NT Wright kick lately.  For my devotional I am reading his "Mark for Everyone," a verse by verse commentary on the book of Mark that is, well, for anyone.  It is very accessible but several times I have had my mind blown. Today I was reading about the raising of Jairus' daughter and NT Wright said something that I thought was important for all of us to hear: "Why doesn't (Jesus) prevent awful things like the Holocaust from happening in our own day?" This is the type of question that causes many to stumble on Christianity.  How can God be a good God and yet let bad things happen? I come across this question all the time in my ministry.  Wright has a great answer: "Just as Jesus wasn't coming to be a one-man liberation movement in the traditional revolutionary sense, so he wasn't coming to be a one-man emergency medical centre.  He was indeed bringing starting a revolution, and he was indeed bringing God's healing power, but

I am continuing my reading of Surprised by Hope, by NT Wright and I just wanted to reflect on two big distractions of Christianity. These are two worldviews that can somewhat be developed from scripture, however, they are not what the Bible actually teaches about the end of all things. The first is the myth of progress.  This enlightenment way of thinking essentially says that know that we have reached a point of our existence that humanity can see what needs to be done, God decided to step out of the picture and allow humanity to do the work.  This way of viewing the world was especially prevalent in the late 1800s and early 1900s but was deeply wounded by the two great wars of the 20th century (and all of the things that happened in them like the Holocaust and Hiroshima). NT Wright says, "the myth of progress fails because it doesn't in fact work; because it would never solve evil retrospectively; and because it underestimates the power of evil itself and thus fails to se