Even as we read these words, a trial is going on in Texas, trying to determine the extent of guilt that the leaders of Enron, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, bear for the financial shenanigans that wound up leaving that company in the tank. If you’ve been hiding under a rock over the past few years, you might not know anything about the whole Enron debacle. As I understand it, these guys were basically successful businessmen who got greedy. Not content to see their company’s stock price—and therefore their wealth—increase at a healthy rate, they devised various schemes to inflate those prices. Their most notorious deed was concocting a whole series of subsidiary companies through which they could hide any losses or extraordinary expenses that the company incurred. In essence, they arranged matters so that all of the good things in the company got credited to the parent and therefore reflected in the stock price, while all of the bad things were buried in some subsidiary’s books, not exactly invisible but tough to recognize, and therefore not likely to affect the stock price negatively. The stock, as a result of these machinations, went up and up and up.
The problem with this sort of dealing is obvious to anybody who has a brain, which makes you wonder about the guys pulling the strings at Enron. Let’s say that the gas company asks you to read your own meter. You could easily cheat, reporting a number that is too low. The next month, you could do it again, resulting in a lower bill than you should receive. Eventually, though, the chickens will come home to roost. Eventually you’ll have to report the actual numbers and pay a huge bill. Apparently the geniuses at Enron believed that they could postpone that huge bill indefinitely. Reality proved them wrong.
If we’d just seen a bunch of scheming, disreputable cheats lose their paper fortunes at Enron, then the whole story wouldn’t be nearly as troubling, but we also saw thousands of Enron employees, employees who had sunk all of their retirement money into Enron stock, get wiped out. People who had been counting on retiring to Miami Beach find themselves just plain beached. These people were customer service reps, technicians, salespeople, and so forth, workers who had done nothing wrong at Enron, yet they still got nailed. That’s just not fair.
Life, of course, as anyone who has kids has said, is not fair. Life often punishes the innocent with the guilty. Sin, the gift that keeps on giving, has tentacles that spread far from the center of the wrong deed. That’s what we learn in today’s reading. The innocent would suffer along with the wicked in Isaiah’s view of the future. That’s not fair, we might say, but that is God’s way. In the end, none of us is innocent. None of us can complain about the effects of sin. The best we can do is ride out the storm of God’s wrath when it comes.
Tune My Heart is primarily an aid to the devotional life of its author, Mark Browning, who holds the copyright for this material. It is provided online in hopes that some will find it edifying. All contents, unless otherwise noted, may be redistributed freely provided that you give credit for its origin and do not charge anything.