Strange Mercies

When he summoned a famine on the land and broke all supply of bread, he had sent a man ahead of them, Joseph, who was sold as a slave.  His feet were hurt with fetters; his neck was put in a collar of iron; until what he had said came to pass, the word of the Lord tested him. – Psalm 105:16-19

Matthew Henry comments on verses 8 through 23:  

Let us remember the Redeemer's marvellous works, his wonders, and the judgments of his mouth.  Though true Christians are few number, strangers and pilgrims upon earth, yet a far better inheritance than Canaan is made sure to them by the covenant of God; and if we have the anointing of the Holy Spirit, none can do us any harm.  Afflictions are among our mercies.  They prove our faith and love, they humble our pride, they wean us from the world, and quicken our prayers.  Bread is the staff which supports life; when that staff is broken, the body fails and sinks to the earth.  The word of God is the staff of spiritual life, the food and support of the soul: the sorest judgment is a famine of hearing the word of the Lord.  Such a famine was sore in all lands when Christ appeared in the flesh; whose coming, and the blessed effect of it, are shadowed forth in the history of Joseph.  At the appointed time Christ was exalted as Mediator; all the treasures of grace and salvation are at his disposal, perishing sinners come to him, and are relieved by him.

Afflictions are among our mercies … because, among other benefits, affliction helps to … wean us from the world.  The people for whom I feel the most pity are those souls whose only hope is the hype offered by the world.  They buy into the beguiling frauds of the mass media, pursuing and consuming all that the priests of Mammon hold up as desirable, mortgaging their lives and the lives of their children, enslaving themselves to deceitful, dancing images that shift and snare. 

Joseph’s story has come up several times over the last few days, and I am reminded of the Pharaoh’s dream of seven fat cows and seven full heads of grain devoured by seven skeletal cows and seven blighted heads of grain which yet gained nothing from their consumption.  So, too, many fail to realize that in consuming they are consumed by those who claim to be their benefactors yet, in effect, devour their lives.  Sadly, even those ravening predators gain nothing from their deception.  All is vanity, emptiness, as the Preacher says. 

We need to fill our lives with the Word and truth.  I enjoy buying trucks and bikes and tools and gadgets of various kinds, but I understand what I am doing when I do it.  Those things don’t make me into someone different.  They are going to provide me with convenience and pleasure, not transform my life.  I have to give up something to get them.  They provide me with no security or actual worth.  A wealthy friend of mine, whenever I or any of his friends would get something nice and new, would inevitably say, “Praise the Lord!  You deserve that.”  I don’t know if I “deserve” it, but it is always nice to have good stuff and to recognize the real Source of it. 

Every so often, in reading the Bible, I will come across something that, unlike the promises and promotions of the world, does change me.  This is God in His love and grace revealing Himself to me and in me.  A genuine revelation can be known by the fact that it will almost inevitably try us.  Truth tests the one who believes it because much of the time it looks like it is not true.  That’s what the psalmist said of Joseph.  He had a revelation that he was going to be elevated to a position where his family would bow down before him.  In the pit, in slavery, and down in prison, that was probably kind of hard to still believe.     

God says we are to reckon ourselves dead to sin.  When I get angry and spit and swear, I don’t really feel dead to sin.  It doesn’t look like that is going to happen.  Still, it is the truth that we have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer “I” that lives but Christ that lives in me.  Thus, despite the occasional evidence to the contrary, I will reckon myself dead and keep on believing. 

(QUESTION – for the few and the brave who read this stuff:  Does anybody know the origin of this:   If you know what you are doing you are blessed; if you do not know, you are cursed?  I seem to associate it with something like the Gospel of Thomas as some apocryphal saying of Jesus, but I have been unable to find it.  And, maybe, too, I have twisted it to make it into something different from the original.  In my version, it means recognizing and accurately assessing – as far as possible – why I am doing what I am doing.  I should understand my own motives and not be driven by things subconscious and unseen.) 

A Different Way

Do not be amazed that I told you that you must be born again – John 3:7

In Walker Percy’s novel Second Coming the protagonist goes into a cave intending to make it his tomb. He is, however, driven to seek a way of escape from the cave because of a painful toothache. In his search in the dark, he enters a passage that is very confined. He keeps crawling until he falls out into the open world. It’s been a while since I read the book, but, as best I recall, I didn’t catch on right away, whether through Percy’s skill or my own denseness. I have a feeling Nicodemus had a similar experience in his encounter with Jesus. Sometime later he was probably thinking about the whole conversation along with all he knew about the Lord and had a slap-your-head moment. Or, as Rip Taylor used to say, “You’ll think about this later, and you’ll laauugh!”

Evangelicals talk a lot about how easy it is to be born again. And it is. All one has to do is die first. We baptize people in water because it is so much easier than burying them and digging them back up. Life, death, and rebirth are akin to the dialectic thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. To experience any kind of true growth, we have to be hidden away, enter the crypt, and re-emerge.

Because Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross is a once-for-all carrying away of sin, I want to think that my own long, dark night of the soul is a once-for-all experience from which I should emerge into eternal sunlight and joy. In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis mentions the nature of man as being subject to a sort of sine wave shaped “law of undulation”. We gain ground; we lose a little; we gain a little more. It is enough to cause me to think that perhaps it’s all right if I have to keep entering the dark and coming out the other side.

In fact I think we may precipitate a cycle by our decisions to seek God. I believe beyond any question that God hears and answers our prayers. He gives us that which we seek, though it is common – in my case anyway – not to recognize the answer when it arrives. (See JWM’s WFB putting together old bikes) In many cases, an answer to prayer involves a trial or a crisis of opposition that seems to be not only blocking our deliverance but pushing us further away. I am taken aback and discouraged, but I should not be. The way up is down. The road to the light leads through darkness.

Our prayers try us, and the word of the Lord that comes to us as a result will test us, just as the word of his vision tried Joseph (Psalm 105:16-22) before leading to his deliverance and that of his people. Joseph went into the pit, from the pit to the chains of slavery, from slavery to the dungeon, from the dungeon to the throne. The thing I need to learn is, first, not to allow trials to convince me that God does not know what He is doing. Second, the valley of the shadow of death is a very real, very dark place through which my path to enlightenment leads, and I may be there more than once. Third, when in the valley of the shadow of death or the tomb or the pit or the cave, I will not get out if I sit down. I must keep going. Finally, it will not do me any good to take the back track. I cannot find my way out by going back the way I came. I must leave a “different way”.

Anonymous

God is not named in the Book of Esther. Esther is a young Jewish girl who winds up in the harem of the Persian king and wins a, uh, “beauty” contest to become the queen. Some have suggested that both “Esther” and “The Song of Solomon” should be removed from the Canon of Scripture. I will admit that I did, at one point, wonder how “The Song of Solomon” got by the censors. But Esther is different. In fact, until someone pointed it out, I did not realize that God’s name does not appear in any form. The assumption of His presence is so obvious that the absence of a direct mention never occurred to me.

God is seen in Esther’s story, but He is anonymous. It’s rather like in the story of Joseph where the brothers throw him into a dry well, and, as they are trying to figure out what to do with him, a caravan of traders “just happen” to come by and Joseph ends up in Egypt. So, too, Mordecai, Esther’s cousin and adoptive father, “just happens” to learn of a plot to assassinate the king. Later, the king can’t sleep and “just happens” to have his scribes read from the chronicles where he is reminded of the plot and of the fact that he owes his life to Mordecai the Jew. He also learns that Mordecai received nothing for his loyal service. It “just happens” that Mordecai’s mortal enemy, Haman, is entering the court at that very moment. The king asks Haman, who knows nothing of what is being discussed, “What should be done for the man whom the king wishes to honor?”

In his pride, Haman thinks the king is referring to him, so he launches on an elaborate, over-the-top scenario. When Haman finishes, the king says, “That’s a great idea. Now, you go do exactly that for Mordecai the Jew.”

JWM, on his World-Famous Blog, was talking about coincidences and started me on this thought. Just as with Esther and Joseph, most of us, if we stop to consider it, recognize that something seems to be going on. The events in our lives appear to be guided rather than random. Now the materialist will argue against this pointing out that such superstition arises because people tend to notice when something hits but not when it misses. My mother used to say, upon hearing thunder at this time of the year, “Thunder in February, frost in May.” Actually, around here, February thunder is not that uncommon while May frosts are – but if it happened once, no doubt Mom’s belief would be confirmed, similar to her belief in following the “signs” in the Almanac for planting. My father was a skeptic. The theory goes, for example, that you are supposed to plant root crops – potatoes, carrots, turnips, etc. – in the dark of the moon. Dad’s inevitable response was, “I think they do better if you plant them in the ground.”

But we are not talking about old wives’ tales. Many of us have seen God work in our lives through extraordinary circumstances. Excuse me if I have related this story before. I couldn’t find it in the archives. Years ago, I quit my job and moved to a small town in Texas to help rebuild a church. I think I was doing God’s will. After a couple of months in a less than booming economy, I found what I considered to be a temporary position, making very little money, well below what I was qualified to do. We wanted to buy a house in the community. We had some money to put down but as I was in a different line of work, we had to do a lease option. The lease was only good for a couple of months, at which time we would have to get a loan or move on.

Jobs in my field were hard to come by at that time. One day I drove over to a neighboring town to the library and read through the paper. An ad jumped out at me. It was calling for my specific skills. It was almost as if it had been written for me. This was on Tuesday. I hurried home, and we put together a resume and cover letter which I sent the next day – Wednesday. The month ended on Sunday and with it the window to exercise our lease option. I needed to be on the job for at least a month. This was a last chance to get back to my regular line of work, qualify for a loan, and close in time to avoid another expensive, undesirable move. On Thursday night a man called and asked if I could come up Friday afternoon and interview.

My wife rode up with me and waited in the car, praying, while I went up to the eleventh floor. They gave me a little test, and I talked to three or four people. Finally I came back into the room with the first man who interviewed me. I really expected that he would tell me they would think it over and let me know. Instead he said, “How much did you make at your old job.” I told him. “Things are more expensive here,” he observed and then asked if I thought a twenty-five percent increase would be about right. I said, yes, as calmly as possible. “One more question,” he said. “Is there any way you could start Monday?”

“I can do that.”

We got the loan and went on from there. I got my next job in a similar, equally timely fashion. Later, we sold a house in one day. We wanted to move across country again. I turned in my resignation, and I didn’t have a job in the new location until three days before we loaded the truck. I got it sight unseen because a guy I had worked with five years before “just happened” to be the hiring authority at a business in a town near the one to which we were moving.

Coincidence? Sure. If it makes you more comfortable to think that I’m unbelievably lucky or gifted I probably can’t convince you otherwise – no matter how many synchronicities I can relate. I know better. I know my life has been guided. Jesus said the Way is strait and narrow – not straight. It’s sometimes like walking a razor’s edge but it is not without its bends, blind corners, hills and valleys. Even when I am blind to my destiny, even when I am stupid, the Lord continues to move me along the road and have me in the right place at the right time.

When Paul went to Athens, he saw the many altars to many gods, and one, even, inscribed "TO THE UNKNOWN GOD". The Athenians were superstitious and fearful of offending a god they knew nothing about. They thought that, possibly, an Unknown God might be more powerful than the gods they named. And Paul thought, "Cool."

A Garment of Light Woven in Darkness

He had sent a man ahead of them -- Joseph, who was sold as a slave. They hurt his feet with shackles; his neck was put in an iron collar. Until the time his prediction came true, the word of the Lord tested him. -- Psalm 105:17-19

Joseph was the favorite son of Jacob. He was also the chosen of God -- in many ways a type of Christ -- who was to provide the means for establishing Israel as a nation under the protection of the world power, Egypt. Joseph was his father's favorite by birth -- the eldest son of his beloved wife Rachel. Beyond that, Joseph was gifted with prophetic understanding and wisdom, a genius of sorts. Having to deal with him as the father's favored would have been bad enough for his brothers, but his gifts made him even more insufferable. The air of confidence, the sense of knowing, it would have come across as arrogance even if it wasn't -- and Joseph was only human. After all Joseph had a vision of God's plan: his brothers would bow down to him. He would rule over them.

Then the word of the Lord began to test him. Joseph had to learn that the ways of God sometimes pass through darkness and through pathways hidden to the sight of man.

Abused by his brothers, sold into slavery in Egypt, Joseph did not lose faith. He made the best of it and did well. But the path led further down, as he was falsely accused and wrongly imprisoned. The word still tested him. What was in him? Even in the dungeons, his wisdom and integrity puts him in a place of trust and leadership. It doesn't seem like exactly what he had in mind, to be number one -- at the prison. Yet Joseph still shows no sign of bitterness, resentment, or any lack of forgiveness. He clings to God as that exalted vision tries him to the utmost.

When, at last, his gifts seem to give him an opportunity for a glimmer of hope, nothing comes of it. He continues to languish for two full years.

Then "the time" came. His prediction came true. God lifts Joseph. The path emerges into bright light and full view. Joseph is "suddenly" prime minister of the richest, most powerful nation on earth. His wisdom delivers not only the Egyptians, but his own family. Through Joseph, Israel and his descendents find favor in the court of Pharaoh. To his fearful brothers Joseph says, "You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good."

I see that I do not measure up to this attitude. Too often I hold onto things that should be released. I doubt God in the midst of trials and become depressed and hopeless, yes, even bitter. A brief trial is one thing, but something that drags on and on for years, how can that be God?

I need to remember that darkness is the time of rest. Rather than fretting and worrying in a trial, that is the time to take it as it comes and trust in God. If the path leads down – well, going downhill has advantages. As Jake Hess used to say, “Things will get better, get worse, or stay about the same.” When the night comes and no man can work, I will rest in the Lord. God means it for good.

Suffering, loss, and pain are not good things. Betrayal is not a good thing, yet the betrayal of a Judas brings salvation. God means it for good.

The shadowed path down, the road of testing and trial leads to the light. The word of the Lord will try me as He weaves my way in the dark, as He leads me to the light. God means it for good.