Saints and Cynics

All your allies have driven you to your border; those at peace with you have deceived you; they have prevailed against you; those who eat your bread have set a trap beneath you— you have no understanding. -- Obadiah 1:7

We want to trust the people, believing that our friends and family have our best interests at heart, as they sometimes do.  The only Person we can trust fully and completely without exception, without reservation is God.  He is enough.  If I trust God then the weaknesses and betrayals of allies and companions can be handed over to Him.  It is a great comfort and takes the pressure off us, as well as off our friends.

Relationships suffer when one or more of the parties ask others in the relationship to be as strong, dependable, steadfast, and giving as God is.  This is especially true if the person so depended upon doesn’t have the right connection to the Lord.  We can be a channel of God’s love, mercy, power, and faithfulness, but we can never be a source.

By submitting ourselves to God we can transcend the limitations of our self-life.  The self-life of even the best of us will fall short in satisfying the yearnings of another’s heart.  In ourselves, we will disappoint, stumble, fail, and sometimes fall.  But in Christ, my heart becomes a funnel for the love of God, and the more I let out the more He will pour in. 

If we are living life according to the flesh, more often than not, we are going to be caught up in dramas, schemes, deception, and treachery.  People we thought we knew, thought we could rely on, will let us down, turn on us, stab us in the back.  As a natural cynic, I am never terribly surprised by this, but I would rather be a born-from-above “cynic” like Jesus: 

Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing.  But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man (John 2:23-25).

Jesus knew that we can’t be trusted, that we have our own agendas and ulterior motives, yet He never let that stop Him from doing good and doing what was best for each of us.  It never made Him stop loving us.  Maybe it made Him love us more for He saw how alone and helpless we are apart from Him.  He knew His Father would take care of Him.  He wants us to know it, too, and to follow in His path of pouring our lives out for love.

Hard Head, Soft Heart

Behold, I have made your face as hard as their faces, and your forehead as hard as their foreheads.  Like emery harder than flint have I made your forehead.  Fear them not, nor be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house. – Ezekiel 3:8-9     

I know this person – actually, there are several people I know that are like this – this one who thinks I am easily deceived.  Ben was talking the other about giving and when it is appropriate to give money to someone who might misuse it.  This person comes and gives me a story, usually pretty elaborate, fairly desperate.  It always starts out, “I hate to even ask you.”  One of these days I may reply, “Not as much as I hate to hear you say that.” 

The thing is, I know I am being lied to.  One of the things I prayed for when I first became a Christian was the gift of discernment.  I don’t know if I got that, but I certainly have the gifts of suspicion, skepticism, and cynicism.  None of us probably tell the whole truth all the time.  I don’t, but it’s not with the intent to deceive.  It’s more like changing the names to protect the innocent – and sometimes to protect the guilty.  There are details that people really don’t need to know.  It’s good to be laconic. 

Anyway, Ezekiel in general, and these early chapters in particular have always meant a lot me.  Ezekiel and Thomas, and, to a lesser extent Gideon, are the men in the Bible that I identify with most closely.  Not that I was ever called like them, but they did their jobs.  They did what they had to do.  If I had a motto it would probably be something like “Stick to it.”  To do that, you have to be a little hard-headed.  There is a form of stubbornness that is positive, a refusal to quit even when it’s hard and when it hurts and it’s not going your way.    

There is another side to all this, though, for the same God who made Ezekiel’s head harder than flint said, Be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding, which must be curbed with bit and bridle, or it will not stay near you (Psalms 32:9).  Later on, in Ezekiel 11:19-20, the Lord spoke of a change He wanted to make in His people:  And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God.

There is nothing wrong with being analytical and skeptical in terms of the intellect, but, in the end, the intellect must be informed and guided by the heart.  And the heart must be open and sensitive to the Spirit, to hear God and respond.  This has become something of an expansion of the comment I made on OC yesterday about love and logos.  We can be intellectually rigorous with regard to doctrine so long as it serves love and is motivated by love. 

What my deceptive friend does not understand is that I do not help a person because they can come up with a good story.  Usually the better the story, the less apt I am to buy it.  My head is too hard.  It’s my heart that responds to the plea the Spirit makes between the lies.

Question of the Day

‘Anyway,’ said the Ghost, ‘who wants to be rescued?  What the hell would there be to do here?’

‘Or there?’ said I.

‘Quite,’ said the Ghost, ‘They’ve got you either way.’

‘What would you like to do if you had your choice?’  I asked.

‘There you go!’ said the Ghost with a certain triumph.  ‘Asking me to make a plan.  It’s up to the Management to find something that doesn’t bore us, isn’t it?  It’s their job.  Why should we do it for them?  That’s just where all the parsons and moralists have got the thing upside down.  They keep on asking us to alter ourselves.  But if the people who run the show are so clever and powerful, why don’t they find something to suit the public?  …’

-- C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 7

This is one of my favorite books.  There is a certain dreadful whimsy to it.  After thirty years, I’ve finally gotten around to starting Gene Wolfe’s  Book of the New Sun series, which has, to me at least, that same sort of a feel. 

The excerpt above is from a conversation with a character referred to as the Hard-Bitten Ghost.  He was unimpressed with Pekin, the Taj Mahal, hell, and heaven.  He was not one to be taken in.  We are amateur cynics.  The Hard-Bitten Ghost was a professional.   In a way, the Hard-Bitten Ghost is very much the spirit of our age.  I strongly suspect that we can attribute many of our woes, socially, politically and economically, to exactly that sort of thinking.  There is a conspiracy behind everything.  Everybody is in cahoots.  The political parties are all the same.  Everything is run by the bankers … yada, yada, yada, as someone once said. 

And the funny thing is, there is a level at which that is true. 

If we surrender our destiny to the secular and the temporal, or, as John put it, to the world, the flesh, and the devil -- the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, we will become hard-bitten and jaded.  Inevitably.  We will see the world with cold and weary eyes.  Our laughter will be joyless, our humor nothing but base and cruel snark.  Nobody gets a belly-laugh out of it.  Our lips might curl in a “collie” smile, our amusement seated in our sense of superiority.  But it is no fun. 

What would you like to do if you had your choice?

It is a dangerous question.