The Expendables

And Elijah said to them, Seize the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape. And they seized them. And Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon and slaughtered them there.  – 1 Kings 18:40

Dealing with our delusions requires a radical approach.  The idols that we create in our minds and the thoughts that support, protect, and empower them cannot be dealt with in whack-a-mole fashion.  There are too many of them.  Elijah was up against 450 prophets of Baal and another 400 prophets of Asherah.  Thinning the wolf pack is not going to solve the problem.  Sure, they will drop back and hang out in the brush for a while, but they’ll recruit and breed more and probably come back stronger than ever.

All-or-nothing is the way to go.  I have a feeling this is how God works a lot of the time.  He lets us suffer the consequences of our vain pursuits, allows us to hit rock bottom, as the AA’ers say.  This drought was extreme, three years with no rain.  Israel is forced to face a grim reality.  The same thing happens to us as individuals.  Reality intrudes on our comfortable illusions.  Our faith in the “priests of Baal” and our Baal itself begins to show signs of wear and tear.  Fissures appear.   Meanwhile, the truth hammer continues to fall. 

God confronts us and challenges us.  This is the key to breaking free of our illusions.  There has to be something real to replace the false.  We are going to believe in something because that is the way we are made.  Faith is always reaching out, always feeling for that connection.  If the false prophets are eradicated and the false god exposed as a lie, it has as an opportunity to connect to the Truth. 

Just as He did undeniably before all Israel on Mount Carmel, the Lord can pull back the curtain, let the light in, and reveal the dead, hollow uselessness of what we have been serving.  Nevertheless, those people would never have responded to Elijah’s call to seize and slaughter the false prophets merely because Baal had been exposed as a lie.  They had to see not just that Baal could not answer by fire but that the Lord could and did. 

I often meditate on the scene in Exodus 20:18-19 where the children of Israel were witnesses to the presence of God:   Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off, and said to Moses, You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.

Sometimes we want a level of plausible deniability in our relationship to God.  We want a buffer, a middle man who can be questioned and with whom fault may be found (as Israel often did with Moses).  The raw feed, so to speak, of a direct encounter with the Holy One blows away our defenses, the wall of little dishonesties that we hide behind.  Those who demand a “Damascus Road” experience before they believe are, perhaps, the most deceived of all.  If we refuse to see the Lord with our eyes open, we will have to find Him blind.  

Perhaps this is why prayer is such a struggle for people like me.  It's not that God isn't hearing me so much as, if I stay at this too long, He might start talking.  That really is my problem.  I get some great idea and when the end of the day comes, Jesus is there waiting for me.  Sometimes He doesn't even have to say anything.  He just looks at me, and I know I have been entertaining one of Baal's prophets.  The Sword of the Spirit comes out and another head rolls.  Ah, well ...

The Mediator is the Message

Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled, and they stood far off and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die.” – Exodus 20:18-19

This is the “Jesus willies” on steroids. Not only is the presence and reality of God undeniable in this situation, it is frightening. I am sympathetic to these people because they were seeing their reality invaded; their very conception of what was real was called into question. It is hard to imagine that such an experience would not leave a person shaken, even terrified.

We are going to talk about responses to hearing the word of God – in a series, if I don’t get distracted by something shiny, and Exodus seems a good place to start. When I was younger and talked about it, I almost mocked these Israelites. How could they not want to experience God in such a powerful way? I have learned better. To request a mediator is actually a good and reasonable response. God “raw” and direct is too much. It shatters the necessary separation with such psychic and spiritual violence that the container of material existence is ripped apart. We might liken it to trying to catch Niagara Falls in a paper bag. We need a go-between, someone or something that can mitigate the violence of the ultimately Real, that will allow us to draw the truth through a straw rather than the proverbial fire hose.

Moses was transformed by his nearness to God such that, “… the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him” (Exodus 34:30). But even Moses, in his communion with God could not endure the direct light of Divine glory but only what we might call the after-glow (Exodus 33:17-23). We may not be certain what that means, exactly, but we know how it is described by Paul when he speaks of the Old Covenant being “put in place through angels by an intermediary” (Galatians 3:19). In other words Moses dealt primarily with the Angel of the Lord, a Theophany, or some kind of angelic manifestation which modulated the Divine Presence enough for a man to survive the encounter.

This brings us to Christ who is the one Mediator between God and man -- the Logos. What is unique about Jesus is not only is He the Mediator, He is the Message. According to Hebrews, the Father has “spoken to us by His Son” in a new kind of apocalypse, where the veil is removed and we can see what Moses longed to look upon, “the radiance of the glory of God” and, in the Man, “the exact imprint of His nature”.

It is not surprising then that as the Holy Spirit begins to reveal Christ to us, we get a little shaken up. We can understand Isaiah when he says: Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at your presence— as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil— to make your name known to your adversaries, and that the nations might tremble at your presence! When you did awesome things that we did not look for, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence. (Emphasis mine)

Whoa!

Perhaps it is just me, but I find in myself a sort of ambivalence. I am all ready for God to “rend the heavens and come down” as long as He doesn’t actually, you know, come down. I will light the fire, but I don’t really expect the pot to boil. Yet that is what is going to happen at some point. If we continue to allow His Spirit to work on us and draw us, a time will come when Christ will become real to us and the solid earth will be bubbling beneath our feet. After that, I do not believe there is any turning back. We cannot return to Egypt, though it is possible to die in the wilderness, and it is just that irrevocability, I think, that causes us to be hesitant, to draw back from full contact, to cry out, “Come, Lord Jesus”, and to mumble “just not today.”

The answer is not to back away but to seek the human face of Jesus, the Son of Man -- His own preferred title. Not that the Son of Man will not still shake up our worldview, but we know that He is one of us despite being fully God, that He understands us, is touched with the feeling of our infirmities. Jesus knows what it means to live in a body formed from clay and filled with the animal cravings and weaknesses inherent in the meat nature. We need a mediator, and He is the best.

Free Willies

O LORD, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps. — Jeremiah 10:23

Did Jeremiah believe that man's destiny is predetermined, that freedom is a mental illusion, that we are built by DNA and the impinging vectors of our environment to be forced into a path that we must walk?

I think it is true that each of us has a destination, if not a destiny. I like the word "doom" as it is so often illustrated in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. There are obstacles we must encounter, quests we must follow, pressures we must endure as we are strengthened and empowered for the vast freedoms of eternity. We may attempt to reject our doom, but it is laid upon us; we will face it despite our choices. Yet we are meant to be free. Jesus said, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." This implies that man, apart from the truth, is in bondage but also that liberty is attainable.

Though I am unable to offer comprehensive answer to the question of predestination, it is true that we are creatures of two realms. The material world does seem to function in a deterministic fashion at the macro level, and to the extent that we inhabit that world, we are subject to its laws. We are also, however, spirit — whatever that means — and subject to the laws of that realm. This is what Jesus was trying to explain to those with whom He contended in the 8th chapter of John. They claimed freedom based on their descent from Abraham. Jesus countered that it wasn't a matter of natural lineage but of their "obedience" to sin which made them slaves of sin. They were destined to obey sin because the will of man is enslaved.

The will seems to be an interface between the spirit and the body. Man is born with his will imprisoned by the life of the flesh. He may have a good, kind temperament. He may be the beneficiary of a positive environment and good parenting. Nevertheless, he is chained to the natural life and unable to make truly free choices. It is only when we learn who we are in and through the Logos that we can be free — as Jesus said, "If you continue in My Word, then are you My disciples."

As creatures of the material world, we find ourselves doing that which we would rather not do, and we fail to do what we would prefer to do. For I know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do, I approve not. For what I would do, that do I not; but what I hate, that I do (Romans 7:14-15). There may be a fleshly adherence to the law but it does not bring righteousness. It can only assuage our guilt. The natural man can get along fine with religious observance until and unless he comes to the raw Reality as the children of Israel did at the foot of Sinai. Isaiah had a similar experience and a similar reaction: Woe is me! For I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips (Isaiah 6:5).

For many of us the inevitable response to a close encounter with the Spirit is a sense of fear and unworthiness. Our guilt and shame are magnified. Our failures loom large and seem to multiply until we feel there is no way possible to endure His presence. This is not a bad thing. It is the infinite holiness within us that was made in His image and likeness in harmonic vibration with the Infinite Holiness of the LORD of Hosts. Naturally, the natural man gets a little shaken by that experience. It is death to the natural when we live in the spirit. As noted above, Paul had this experience: O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? ... So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death (Romans 7:24-8:2).

When the Son has set us free, we are free indeed.