23. Hebrew Worship: Poetic Justice • by Arthur Burk • Sapphire Leadership Group, LLC • www.TheSLG.com • 1

23. Hebrew Worship: Poetic JusticeThe plague of locust was the death knell of the economy of Egypt. The cattle had been destroyed. People spent their hard earned money on more cattle and it got destroyed a second time. Some of their crops had been destroyed by the hail. Now every small scrap of plant would be devoured by the locust.

Egypt may have had some small level of liquidity left, but what good is money when there is no food in the store?

Of all the plagues, this one landed with me in the deepest place. God brought the first of the Hebrews, Joseph, to Egypt to save them from starvation through a crop based mandatory savings project. The rest of the Hebrews came to buy grain from the Egyptians.

Now, at the end of the story, the Egyptians are destitute except for some cash, and are buying grain from the Hebrews because they were blessed by their God and their crops were protected.

What poetic justice.

This moved me deeply because it is my life. I struggled badly in school. My worst grades were consis-tently in writing and speaking. When I was a senior in high school, we had to write two term papers. I got an F on the first one and a D- on the second. The D- was not because of vast improvement but out of self-preservation on the part of the teacher. She did not want me back in class next year.

I remember the day she took pages from my term paper and projected them onto the screen at the front of the class to show the class all the errors. Every imaginable error was on a single page of my term paper, so it was easier for her than showing a dozen different students’ papers.

Some years later, I went to Mt. Hermon to the granddaddy of the Christian writer’s conferences. Each registrant was allowed to present a book proposal to the publishers and some would be selected in the breakout sessions to be critiques for style.

You got it. Mine was selected in the break out session I attended, and it was shredded as “the worst book proposal” he had ever seen.

23. Hebrew Worship: Poetic Justice • by Arthur Burk • Sapphire Leadership Group, LLC • www.TheSLG.com • 2

So here I sit, cranking out blog after blog, speaking hither and yon, and some people actually want to listen to what I have to say. That is God’s poetic justice – rubbing it into the devil for what he did to me as a kid.

This is one of the reasons I worship so deeply when walking with my survivor friends. I see such im-mense things that He does for them as poetic justice.

I just received a lengthy email from a survivor I connect with once or twice a year. She wrote about what God had done with a particular part of her journey and asked if I had ever seen anything like that before or not.

I will write back something to the effect of “Of course not, Silly. You had some of the worst SRA I have seen. Do you think God is going to heal you in any ordinary way? Never. You are going to be one long series of over the top, amazingly different miracle encounters with God as He brings poetic justice to His ancient enemy, not just healing to you.”

Join me in a short, pointed worship celebration of the God of Poetic Justice.

23. Hebrew Worship: Poetic Justice

Copyright November 2015 by Arthur Burk