King of the Wild Frontier

Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; steadfast love and faithfulness go before you. -- Psalm 89:14

I confess that I sometimes want to accuse God of being unfair, perhaps even fickle.  We who do what we are supposed to do – more or less, don’t always seem to get what we think we deserve.  It’s a recurring theme with me.  Sometimes, though, the light is on, and I understand that I would not know what fairness, justice, goodness, or even love is if He had not shown it to me.  John, writing in the letter we call his first, says, “We love because he first loved us.” 

We can love because He loves us.

I don’t know that I will stop complaining entirely about evil and stupidity and injustice that happens.  I won’t stop crying over tragedies.  Losses will still cause me some anguish, but it is because I know it doesn’t have to be so bad.  I know I don’t have to be so bad.  The Lord established Himself as the Creator, Sustainer and Ruler of all that exists by laying a foundation of righteousness and justice.  Everything is built on what is good and true. 

It gets pretty weird out here in the fringes where I have to operate.  Maybe that’s why I have the soul of a pilgrim.  Or a frontiersman.  That might be more like it.  We are pioneers, always pushing the frontier of the kingdom out just a little further. 

So there is the Light.  The power of the Light is infinite and all-pervasive, but there are always shadows and corners and cul-de-sacs where the Light needs to bend.  Instead, the Lord sends in receivers.  They get charged up full, and He throws them down some dark shaft, some long, dark corridor.  The Bible says that Moses did not know that his face shone with the glory of God’s presence.  All he knew was that everybody was freaking out, afraid to look at him, and he didn’t need a lantern in the outhouse. 

Our mission is to bear the Light, our little portion of it, into all the places where we might have to go.  I’ve been on a cave tour when they turn out all the lights.  Turn on single keychain light in that situation, and it seems like a flood light.  The darker and deeper the hole you are in, the brighter your light will appear to those around you. 

Be a Happy Valentine

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. – 1 Corinthians 13:4-6

There is such a thing as spiritual envy.  There is even what St. John of the Cross calls in Dark Night of the Soul “holy envy”, a “… grief over the realization that one does not have the same virtues another has”.  Yet holy envy also rejoices in that realization as well, rejoices that those virtues are practiced by someone, that God’s truth is being upheld and lived out.  I understand why he used the term holy envy, still there ought to be a better way to put it.  Envy itself is far too corrosive and deadly to be tamed in the service of the truth.  We can find in the spiritual success and virtue of another encouragement and hope, but envy is as happy, if not happier when the envied one is pulled down as when the envious is elevated.  God called Himself “a jealous God”, never an envious one, and certainly God is incapable of envy since no one could possibly be better than He is in any way. 

Beside that, love is simply incompatible with envy.  Where love genuinely exists, the success and happiness, spiritual and otherwise, of the one we love is synonymous with our own highest desire.  This is why Psalm 37:4 says that if we delight ourselves in the Lord, He will give us the desires of our heart.  If we love God, we want Him to be happy.  Wait, can God ever be unhappy?  There is a part of me (the thick-headed, dogmatic Scots part, probably) that wants to say, No, absolutely not.  Yet Jesus wept, not just at the tomb of His friend Lazarus, but over the city of Jerusalem.  The prophets speak often enough of God’s longing for His people, not because He needed anything from them, but because He loved them and wanted what was best for them.  That is, God finds His own delight in delighting us, or He is delighted by our delight in Him. 

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.  In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.  In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.  – 1 John 4:8-10

If we didn’t get it, John says it again in verse 19, “We love because He first loved us.”  

Happy Valentine's Day.  Somebody loves you.