And God Heard…
A few days ago, I posted a Substack entitled, “A Yom Kippur Plea to an Audience of One.” A reader wrote back, “I wish there was a God to hear you.”
As it turns out, there was. The very next day following my post, Hamas agreed to free all its hostages, and Israel agreed tostop bombing Gaza. My reader might still not be convinced, however, because it’s only a partial agreement. “Were it actually a divine intervention,” my reader might object, “everything in the peace plan would have been accepted and Israelis and Palestinians would have immediately begun striving toward amity and concord.”
There’s only one problem with that kind of objection: in the Bible, that’s not how things work when God hears us cry out. The book of Exodus, for instance, speaking of the Israelites’ enslavement in Egypt, recounts that “The Israelites were groaning under the bondage and cried out; and their cry for help…. rose up to God. God heard their moaning…, and God took notice of them.” Those few verses are the turning point of the Exodus story. Instructively, though, they appear early on, that is, in Exodus’s second chapter. God’s ultimate rescue of the Israelites doesn’t come until fifteen chapters later with the drowning of the Egyptians at the Sea. Even then, the Israelites’ final deliverance to the Promised Land comes in fits and starts. Having agreed to a covenant with God at Mt. Sinai (‘God’s Peace Plan’?) they nevertheless repeatedly break it — as I imagine both Hamas and Israel will do with any ceasefire agreement between them.
The God who hears us can only do so much. So much depends on us, too.