Game 7 Cubs & Indians

This week, the Chicago Cubs broke a 108 year-long championship drought in perhaps one of the most exhilarating World Series games ever. In the seventh game, during extra innings, and after a rain delay,  the Cubs beat the Cleveland Indians 8 to 7, releasing an eruption of joy throughout the city of Chicago.

We wrote last week about how natural events can speak to spiritual realities. We mentioned the significance of this particular series as well as the idea of national “curses” being broken. As facetious as a baseball curse may sound, there is a greater picture here of hope breaking through clouds of doubt and resistance. For Chicago, this type of breakthrough is needed in more ways than one. The last time the city of Chicago was so prominently in the news was earlier this year when it was announced that over 1000 shootings have happened there since January. (And this was reported in April!)

8, the final score of the game’s victors, is the number of new beginnings. And 7 speaks to fullness and completion. It is the fullness of time for the city of Chicago to head into a true new beginning of victory of redemption.

(As a fun side-note to all this, news surfaced over the last few weeks about a high school yearbook from 1993 where a young man randomly wrote that the Cubs would win the World Series in 2016. Other people have highlighted that the movie Back to the Future 2 also came eerily close to a correct prediction by saying the Cubs would win in 2015.)

It seems the spirit of prophecy is not contained to pulpits, but to random yearbooks and movies as well.  And as coincidental or unspiritual as baseball and yearbooks may sound to some people, the Spirit of God fills all things and is speaking all the time. There was indeed significance to this Game 7 victory and we will see it unfold in the years ahead.

Congratulations to Chicago.

Gigafactories and Sustainable Energy

The energy and car company Tesla has been in the spotlight again this past week after the release of a National Geographic documentary that has an interview with Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk regarding his new “gigafactory” in Nevada. This is essentially a self-sustaining factory (it produces its own energy) that creates li-ion batteries, which bring clean and sustainable power to the world, starting with Tesla vehicles. The amount of sustainable batteries that will come from this one factory will be greater than all the same types of batteries being made throughout the entire world put together.

In the interview, Musk explains how just 100 of these battery factories could transfer the whole world onto sustainable and climate-friendly energy. Developing nations would be able to skip the entire process of building big and complicated power grids and go straight to using these sustainable batteries. It’s an amazing claim, but the math and science is there to back it up.

 The Election

This coming Tuesday is the crescendo of the most tense and explosive presidential race in recent history. Over the past few weeks, we’ve addressed some of the underlying political issues surrounding the nation in our Cold Civil War series (see here). We won’t go into that further here, but we encourage you to read through that again. This is only an encouragement to pray for the country and to really ask God for His heart and mind on this matter in terms of voting (while also remembering that His ways are not always our ways and His thoughts aren’t always our thoughts). But above all of this, we want to encourage our readers to call something else to mind in the next couple days: Whatever the outcome is, there is One who was already elected to save the world.

And He was successful.

Jesus is the true “Elect One” of Isaiah 42, who has brought and will continue to bring justice and righteousness to the earth. No matter who wins out on Tuesday, the ultimate Elected Official already sits at the highest branch of Government and there is no lying, corruption, or perversion going on with this Person. In fact, if Wikileaks could access the hidden cameras and emails of heaven, they would only expose leak after leak of this Elected Person secretly planning our redemption and conspiring for our prosperity and salvation. He is working behind the scenes to pour out love and grace upon us all. His plans for us (and our nation) are filled with hope and He has the ultimate say on the destiny of the world. Yes, we get to participate and we encourage that participation, including in the political sphere. But don’t take yourself too seriously next week. The most important vote happened 2000 years ago, when Jesus Christ voted YES to righteousness, forgiveness, and redemption for the whole human race.

Amen!