An Echo in the Darkness (Mark of the Lion, #2)

by Francine Rivers

“God created mankind to live in a love relationship with him and to reflect his character. People weren’t created to live independent from God.”

People see the mark of the lion on her. They fail to see what it means.”

The answer isn’t in removing things from your life or adding more rules to follow. The answer is giving your life back to the God who created you. And he’s every bit as real as flesh and blood, the earth, reason.

Make me comfortable so I can go on doing whatever I want to do. They wanted sin without consequences. How do you bear us, Lord, when we are so stubborn and foolish? How do you bear us at all?

God was inconceivable, intangible, incomprehensible, unexploitable. They didn’t want a life of self-sacrifice, purity, commitment, a life of Thy will be done, not mine. They wanted to be master of their own life, to have their own way, and be answerable to no one.

!!!!!

And so Marcus did as he was asked. He gave in to his deep need to speak of Hadassah. And all the while he talked of her, he failed to see the irony in what he was doing. For as he told the story of a simple Judean slave girl, Marcus Lucianus Valerian, a Roman who didn’t believe in anything, proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In the midst of his suffering, Job said, ‘Surely even now my witness is in heaven, and my evidence is on high.’ Man needs someone to speak for him before the Lord.

Job said also, ‘I know that my Redeemer lives, and He shall stand at last on the earth.’ A redeemer who sacrificed himself for our sake. Only God himself is pure and without sin, Marcus. I believe Jesus is the Redeemer I’ve been waiting for all my life.”

“We were all created incomplete and will find no rest until we satisfy the deepest hunger and thirst within us.

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You” - St. Augustine

And yet, though you deny it with your last breath, your soul yearns for God, Marcus Lucianus Valerian.”

Search all you will for retribution or meaning to your life, but until you find God, you live in vain.”

He had tried everything to fill the emptiness within himself: women, wine, games, money. Nothing was sufficient. Nothing answered the need. The void remained, an affliction of his spirit.

He wasn’t to be found on a mountaintop or in a holy city. God wasn’t at the altar stone in the heart of the temple. God wasn’t in a deserted house in a Galilean village or even along a lonely path to the sea. How do I find you?

all Marcus could do was stand and stare out over the Sea of Galilee, surprised by the joy he felt. Sudden. Inexplicable. Complete joy.

“Then know this, Mother. Your prayers have been answered. I found Christ. A man named Cornelius baptized me in the Sea of Galilee.”

“I have come home, Mother. To you. And to God.”

don’t know if I drowned, Mother. I know I felt resurrected.” He held her hand, which was still delicate and graceful. “And I know now that Jesus is alive. I see his presence in the world around us.”

“God chooses his children from before the foundation of the earth. You were filled with thirst for the living water from birth, Marcus. Until you sought Christ, you failed to find a way to fill the emptiness within you. Only Jesus suffices.

blessed your name because it was through you, through being sent to the arena, that God freed me from my fear.”

“I knew the moment she accepted Christ,” she said, looking at her daughter’s face—a sweet, beautiful child, sleeping. “Feeling and strength returned to my body.”

God is merciful. Julia’s redemption was proof of that, and Hadassah felt that her purpose here was now fulfilled, her work finished.

he touched her face tenderly, tracing the mark of the lion. “You are beautiful.”

“You are more beautiful to me than any woman in the world,” he said huskily, “and more precious than all the gold of a thousand ships.”

And he knew it was a gift—a gift from a loving Father who had been waiting for him to come home.

The echo in the darkness had not been Hadassah’s voice at all but God’s, calling out to him, never letting him go.