12/9/2023 0 Comments Undying loyalty![]() ![]() Nothing that a believer in Christ does, nor anything that is done to us, can cause God to stop loving us (Romans 8:35–39). God is loyal to us even when we are not loyal to Him, and His loyalty is so much a part of His character that He wouldn't be God without it (2 Timothy 2:13). God is "the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations" (Deuteronomy 7:9). Anyone who puts his or her faith in Jesus Christ will be saved (John 3:16–18 Ephesians 2:8–9). ![]() We see this primarily in the fact that He made the way of salvation available and extends the offer to all (2 Peter 3:9 Acts 4:12 Galatians 3:24–29). God pledges His love to all people, even those living in rebellion to Him (Romans 5:8). Without His initial, unfailing commitment to love us we wouldn't understand how to be loyal to other people. God is the basis for our understanding of loyalty. Our desire for undying loyalty stems from our need to be in a relationship with the God who would die out of loyalty and love for us. As people we long to have friends and family who are on our side no matter what we do because we were created to be in relationship with a God who does just that. While the Bible doesn't talk about loyalty very much by name, the concept of loyalty is demonstrated throughout the Bible. And it leaves out perhaps the most painful truth: that the perpetrators of this atrocity have yet to answer for it.Loyalty is giving consistent allegiance or support to a person or institution. There’s also the severe psychological injury we’ve incurred, traceable through the staggering rise of psychiatric disorders over the past few years. ![]() It leaves out how, last summer, the rotting grain left in the destroyed silos was left to burn for a month, so that again the city had to witness the sight of smoke pouring from the port. Yet this litany sanitizes the extended horror, leaving out: the rescue and cleanup efforts left to ordinary citizens, the people with destroyed homes who couldn’t access their own money for repairs, the homeless who couldn’t afford to feed themselves, the hospitals that had too little medicine or electricity to treat the wounded, the people viciously beaten and detained during protests demanding justice. Now, three years since the port explosion, the losses are well known: some 220 dead more than 7,000 injured, many with long-term disabilities about 70,000 homes destroyed and 300,000 people left homeless. This was the country whose capital city exploded. Pharmacy shelves were bereft of goods, gas station queues were kilometers long, and, at night, streets and houses were pitch-black without electricity. Many Lebanese could no longer afford fuel, food or medicine, but all those things were in scarce supply anyway. This was an entirely illegal maneuver - a theft, in fact - but undertaken in collusion with the dons in government. To offset their losses, banks had frozen the money in depositors’ accounts and restricted withdrawals to an amount barely enough for daily necessities. Lebanon’s economy, designed to function as a giant Ponzi scheme among the banks, the central bank and the government, had finally failed - as many economists had warned it would. It was several months into the pandemic and about a year into a financial collapse that had already plunged most of the country into poverty and sent the currency into free fall. ![]()
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