“In the paths of your judgements, O LORD, we wait for you…For when your judgements are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness.”  (Isa 26:8, 10)

As I was walking along a local street praying about the tsunami disaster, I saw in an instant, as it were, the street in front of me piled up with the debris of bodies scattered everywhere.  There was something in what I saw however that told me the Spirit of God was no showing me a picture of Asia but of Australia.

The chaos I beheld was not physical but psychological and relational.  It represented the relational death of divorce, abortion, dislocation, homelessness, fractured families, substance abuse, sexual immorality and all the other mayhem of Australian social life.  It was as if a “soul tsunami” had hit our nation and left in its wake tremendous emotional and interpersonal chaos.  Holding everything was not love but a physical net of material prosperity, government welfare and a privileged standard of living made possible by technological advancement.

Later God began to speak to me about a “natural spiritual principle” that is the solution to this problem: when a nation is willing to risk the loss of that in which it is rich, it will gain that in which it is poor.  For Australia this means that if we won’t risk losing our standard of living, we will never gain spiritual life.

“He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to practice justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8).   As a nation, and a church, we do not love mercy.  It is not part of our staple diet and passion –like the beach, football, sex, entertainment, family and so on.

John Howard is on understandable but dangerous ground when he says, in relation to Australia’s generous aid to Indonesia, “Australians are basically ‘good people’.”  Jesus said, “no one is good but God” (Mark 10:18).  To claim ‘goodness’ for oneself is to claim God- likeness without understanding what “loving mercy” meant for God.

As I was praying about “loving mercy” I had a penetrating inner sensation, as if my heart was being torn out of my body.  I sensed that this is how Jesus felt as he walked the land long ago and saw the demonized, dying, and despairing.  Because his heart, as it were, left his body and moved towards those in pain, “power went out from him” (Luke 6:19) and multitudes were miraculously healed.  God so loved the world that his heart – his Son – was torn out of heaven when the Word became flesh and took up an earthly life in the midst of a world in crisis (John 1:14, 18).

“Where was God when the tidal waves struck?” many cry.  The answer is always in the cross.  In his deepest despair the godly man cries, “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck.  I have come into deep waters and the flood sweeps over me.” (Ps 69:1), “all your waves and breakers have gone over my head” (Ps 42:7).  On the cross, Jesus experiences in full what the psalmists felt in part: the torrent of evil, moral filth, anguish, pain and spiritual despair of all the ages inundates the soul of the Son of God – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” (Mark 15:34). This is God’s own “soul tsunami” of identification with the suffering of the whole world.

“Go and learn what this means”, says Jesus, “‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice’, for I came not to call good people but sinners.” (Matt 9:13).  The people of Australia will never be delivered from their own soul tsunami until the church lives out this radical truth before there very eyes – until the church is so full of the love of mercy that it shames the nation into repentance.  This is what God says to us Christians first:

“Is this not the fast I choose … to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them… Then your light shall break forth like the dawn and your healing will quickly appear…” (Isa 58:6a, 8a).

“Judgement will be without mercy to those who show no mercy.” (James 2:13).  Look around with spiritual eyes to the state of the church and the nation – would anyone dare to say that it is not as if we have been hit by a moral tsunami?  Where is the broad evidence of the mercy of God – in healing, repentance, mass conversions, and holiness?  It can only be that we are “good” nation that knows something of tolerable sacrifice but does not “love mercy.”

Until the church of God opens its heart and gives of itself to the poor so radically that  we risk our privileged standard of living, then nothing much will change in Australia.  This is the spiritual test that the natural disaster to our north thrusts upon us.

Yet, if we have a mind for it, when our hearts are being torn out of body for the sake of those who are perishing – in body as well as spirit, truly we will “touch heaven and change earth”