smoldering stubs

There's something I need to remember, andI was reminded of it again this morning. God actually said it to King Ahaz, through his prophet, at a time when Ahaz faced overwhelmingly strong enemies:

Isaiah 7:3-8: "Then the Lord said to Isaiah, 'Go out, you and your son Shear-Jashub, to meet Ahaz at the end of the aqueduct of the Upper Pool, on the road to the Launderer’s Field. Say to him, "Be careful, keep calm and don’t be afraid. Do not lose heart because of these two smoldering stubs of firewood—because of the fierce anger of Rezin and Aram and of the son of Remaliah. Aram, Ephraim and Remaliah’s son have plotted your ruin, saying, 'Let us invade Judah; let us tear it apart and divide it among ourselves, and make the son of Tabeel king over it.' 

"Yet this is what the Sovereign Lord says: 

'It will not take place,

it will not happen,

for the head of Aram is Damascus,

and the head of Damascus is only Rezin.'"

The reason I need this is that I can be too aware of worldly power. In fact, I was trained as a military officer in a strange skill called relative combat power analysis. That's a process of comparing not just numbers of soldiers and kinds of vehicles and weapons, but also training, morale, affects of weather and terrain, and other things we called multipliers. As a result, I tend to approach business and politics the same way.

Sometimes, the results are scary. It seems like the power is with factions I think are bad. So it's good this morning to remember that to God, they are just smoldering stubs. As he said so dismissively about Aram and Damascus, the head of North Korea is only Kim, and the head of our dysfunctional government is only Donald Trump. David Duke and Mitch McConnel and Nancy Pelosi and whoever the head of ISIS - these are only men and women.

Left unsaid, of course, is that God is God. All of us will go no farther than the boundaries he sets.

I need to remember that.