God so used a stick of wood

The world, have you noticed, takes stock of the value of life toward its end, counting accomplishments or fidelity to a creed. Only the God of the Bible gives value to a person’s life from the beginning.

It’s astonishing, really, yet shapes not only our pro-life politics or our efforts to save unborn lives. It shapes those things, yes, because it shapes everything. I could spend a year—I might—writing columns about the implications for life when it has value starting at zero.

Let’s start with a view of ourselves as global citizens. What role do I—one of 6 billion—have in the world? Infinitely the same value as all others, and theirs infinitely of more value to me when I know they matter infinitely to God.

The fact that life is valued before it has done anything of value is groundbreaking enough to remake whole political systems—if it means the life of plumber, poet, or president can be conducted for God’s glory. All men everywhere, leveled. Your one blank slate, while it is yet blank, created equal—preeminently so—to all others. It is earthshaking enough to unravel the world’s looming human catastrophes—if a life has infinite value to God.

‘Though we are limited and weak in talent, physical energy and psychological strength, we are not less than a stick of wood.’ —Schaeffer

This led Francis Schaeffer to his famous consideration of Moses’ rod and one of the theologian’s best-remembered declarations: “There are no little people, no little places.”

Consider “the mighty ways in which God used a dead stick of wood,” said Schaeffer, recounting how the rod became a serpent before Pharaoh, summoned plagues, protected God’s people, and supplied them with water in the desert.

“‘God so used a stick of wood’ can be a banner cry for each of us,” wrote Schaeffer. “Though we are limited and weak in talent, physical energy and psychological strength, we are not less than a stick of wood. But as the rod of Moses had to become the rod of God, so that which is me must become the me of God. Then I can become useful in God’s hands.”

If we aren’t careful, infinite value becomes another way of boasting about our own self-worth. In the time of the book of Judges in Israel, there was no king and “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Failed states may follow social and political breakdown, and soon, we learn from the book of Ruth, a famine forces families to leave Bethlehem.

We live in a time when populist rebellion seems to be the spirit of the age near and far. The “little people” clamor over injustices, real and imagined. And beware that mob: Forming a cause and making a clamor do not esteem a neighbor made in God’s image, don’t alone build a country or better a world.

I say all this because for a long time at WORLD we’ve made “no little people” part of our work ethic. Yes, we care about the presidential candidates debating onstage, but we value more what their tax plan means for the young mother in Minnesota. When Baltimore rioted over the death of Freddie Gray, we wanted to report what the mayor had to say, but what we most wanted to know was what a pastor would say to his congregation across the street from Gray’s housing project.

In 2016 my work will turn fully once again to focus on the world overseas. I plan next in this page to summarize more why the leading overseas threat from Islamic State is one we cannot turn from, how even in recent weeks new evidence should alert us more to the structure of the foe we face (or won’t face). But whether we face populist anger or existential threats, finding and valuing “little people” may be crucial to helping our understanding. I will be searching also for the people in trenches, where the work gets done. I saw one of them in a photo on New Year’s Day—his feet a blur of movement as he slogged through mud and his head obscured as he carried four mattresses in one of the Middle East’s many displaced camps, to a family now entering their second winter there and needing resupply.

Email mbelz@wng.org