Over the Line

Rejoice not over me, O my enemy; when I fall, I shall rise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD will be a light to me. -- Micah 7:8

It is never the end for the believer.  It may be the end as far as a career, a relationship, status in the community, a bank account, possessions, etc., but for us there is always a better day.  I have often thought I’d have to die to get there, and, some day, that will be true.  It’s true every day in that we have to die to self. 

We don’t like to be humbled or humiliated.  While we know that pride is a sin – and a deadly one, a lot of us – maybe especially Americans – tend to revel in our arrogance to a degree.  Most of us know we are going to pay for it at some point.  What we really need, rather than pride, is confidence.  We like to be confident, and we like confident people.  We have to draw the line between confidence and overconfidence, haughtiness, hubris or whatever you want to call it. 

The key, I suspect, is to give up any thought of confidence in ourselves or our situations.  Everything is going to change.  The unexpected is going to waylay us somewhere along our path.  We will stumble.  We will get knocked down.  We will be entangled in some snare, fall into some dark hole and feel trapped and hopeless.  Down in the pit, like good old Joseph -- one of our favorite biblical characters, there is not much we can do.  He was pulled out of the pit only to be sold into slavery then betrayed, slandered, falsely accused and thrown into a dungeon.  Joseph’s confidence, though, was never in his status, reputation, or ability.  It was always in the Lord and more particularly in God’s love for him. 

If we know that God loves us then we can always hang on to our trust in Him.  Whatever we have to go through, even if it is our own fault, our own stupidity, obstinacy, or even arrogance that got us there, we know He forgives.  What happens to us is simply the price of traveling through this life.  Let others think what they want, scorn and shun us, so long as we maintain our confidence in the never-failing love, boundless mercy and forgiveness of the Lord, we will have light even in the blackest of midnights.

Looking Out

Trust in him at all time, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us – Psalm 62:8

I am least likely to trust in God when things are going along splendidly.  It is easy to trust in God when all other hope is gone, when we have no other options.  

Trust in God first, second, and last.

Trust God when you are bitter, when you are snakebit, when you are well and able, when it all comes together, and when it all falls apart. 

Pour out your heart to God when it is filled with praise, when it is filled with joy or sorrow or hate or love, when it overflows with bitterness and cursing or gratitude and blessing. 

The world was different before the Cross, but I remember it.  I remember my life before the Cross.  God was a dread presence if I remembered Him at all for I was estranged and alienated, filled with animosity and rebellion.  But I saw Christ crucified, the wrath of God upon Him, in my place.  I saw, too, the risen Christ, and the ascended Christ, and I knew that I need no more suffer fear and foreboding in telling God my troubles, expressing my doubts, dismay, and anger, or confessing my faults, failures, and weaknesses.

And the LORD said, Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock, and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by (Exodus 33:21-22).

When you picture “cleft of the rock” it is a rather womb-like image.  God is our Father, but Wisdom is feminine, and the Way has that aspect of mystery as well.  Moses had asked to see God’s glory.  To see God full on destroys our existence as material creatures.  He always has to be behind us, as we are sheltered in Him.  Looking out, we may, however, see what lingers of His having come by in the great spiral path we are on.

Rebel Souls

Everyone who makes a practice of sinning also practices lawlessness; sin is lawlessness.  You know that he appeared in order to take away sins, and in him there is no sin.  No one who abides in him keeps on sinning; no one who keeps on sinning has either seen him or known him.-- 1 John 3:4-6  

John gives me trouble.  I have wrestled with him before, and I probably will again.  Obviously, sin is a rejection of and rebellion against the law of God.  Jesus was free of the sin principle, but He was also completely free of sin, living always, every moment, in harmonious accord with the Divine will. 

Lawlessness is an interesting word.  Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction ...
(2 Thessalonians 2:3).  The man of lawlessness is an antichrist, of whom John says in this First Epistle, there are many.  The lawless ones may, at times, associate themselves with the called-out ones who belong to Christ; however, they are never a part of the Body because rebellion and transgression of God's law are too much their identity.

Jesus is the opposite of lawless, yet He is the greatest revolutionary, leader of the greatest rebellion in all of history.  Whom did He rebel against?  The prince of this world.  Jesus overcame the devil, and in doing so, released us from bondage to that which had ruled over and enslaved us.  Now, the world and its dethroned, deceptive prince no longer have any authority over us.  Now we, too, are rebels, not against the Lord and His law, ... but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12).    

But the reason I have such a struggle with John in his letter is that he makes it sound as though those in Christ must be always free from any imperfections.  I've met some pretty saintly, holy people, but I've never met anyone I thought was perfectly sinless.  Being in Christ, we are delivered from the weaknesses of the mind and body.  That's why the New Testament speaks of having one's mind renewed.  The Christian has a new understanding, new insight, a new way of seeing, perceiving, and interpreting the world and life.  What the Lord does not remove is our "proneness to sin", as Matthew Henry puts it.

We have a new nature.  We can't operate the way we used to operate.  There is now light that shows us the repulsiveness and malignancy of sin.  Nevertheless, we must always be wary of deceit and deception.  Delusions are all the devil really has left.  And we have to be especially aware of our own potential for self-deceit.  But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves (James 1:22).  If we do fail, though, there is always room for reconciliation, for God ... is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.


 

Wounded for Life

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, … let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith … -- Hebrews 10:19-22

This isn’t what I really want to talk about.  I want to talk about joy and how we take the wrong things too seriously.  I wonder if there is such a thing as being seriously joyous or joyously serious.  But I’m not ready to do that, and this may be the way to it anyway because joy must have the right environment.  Just as a plant needs light to live, joy needs confidence and assurance.  We can only experience joy in anything when we lose ourselves in it.  I can’t lose myself if I’m worried about my performance and measuring up.  I can’t lose myself if I constantly checking to see if I am good enough, if I have to go back and see if I meticulously followed all the right steps and used the correct protocol. 

When Jesus died upon the Cross, we are told:  And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split (Matthew 27:51).  That same passage tells us that tombs were opened up by the quake and … many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many (vv. 52-53). 

The veil in the temple between the Holy Place and the Most Host Place was symbolic.  God could not dwell among men.  We usually think about this in terms of God’s holiness and our sinfulness as if God would be offended.  We would appear so filthy and horrible that He would just be sickened and disgusted, that He would have to kill us because He is just too pure to look upon us apart from the blood of Christ.  I think, though, that God’s locking Himself away, so to speak, under the Old Covenant, was a mercy to us.  Remember that Adam hid himself in the Garden.  The fallen are repulsed by the Divine.  We are the ones who cannot stand it, who cannot stand in or stand to be in His presence.  So God dials it back, veils it. 

Now we have Christ to mediate for us, to be the conduit, to make the fullness of God accessible to us because He is fully man as well.  When it talks about flesh here, as one commentary says, it’s not talking about the Lord’s body which is the temple, but about His frail human flesh, His human nature.  It is through the fully man part of Jesus that we are now able to enter into to the fully God part – God and man united, brought together in Jesus of Nazareth. 

Christians talk about grace, but we still have this bias toward performance.  It may no longer be about washings and kosher food and not doing work on Saturday, but we emphasize church attendance and service and giving.  People who do all that are better Christians -- people who go on the mission field, people who pray two hours every day, people who read their Bibles through every year, and so on.   These are a better class of Christians.  Sure, jokers like me will go to heaven but I’ll be in steerage.  We’re not first-class Christians.  It’s the first-class Christians that are advancing the kingdom and all.  I’m not much better than a stowaway or a hitchhiker, kind of a parasite. 

I’m not criticizing the first-class Christians because I don’t think they see themselves that way – the genuine ones.  It’s that I’m striving on my own to be a first-class Christian, and I know I’m not making it.   The reason is because I’m not seeing the way that has been opened by and in Jesus Christ.  I’m not in the Presence, and I’m not going to enter in by performance or by striving.  I will perform – or better – I will be fruitful once I’m in. 

You can a limb off a fruit tree and take it over to another fruit tree and graft it.  But in order to do that, you have to make a cut in the second tree -- the new, living tree -- so that limb can connect.  Once you do that, it is going to be a productive branch.  You can take the same limb and tie it on a fence post or even tie it onto a tree, and it’s not going to do anything except die.  I guess you could even tie fruit on the dead stick so it looks good, but all you are going to wind up with is decay and stench. 

A Roman soldier shoved a spear into the side of our Lord the same way a gardener would make a cut on a living tree for a graft.  Through that rent in His flesh, I may be grafted in as a son of God.  We are in.  Life, eternal life, the life of God is flowing into us.  How can we, then, not be fruitful?