Sleep-walking Toward Gomorrah

The hearing ear and the seeing eye, the LORD has made them both.  Love not sleep, lest you come to poverty; open your eyes, and you will have plenty of bread. – Proverbs 20:12-13

The Bible tells us often to wake up: 

Wake up from your drunken stupor, as is right, and do not go on sinning. For some have no knowledge of God. I say this to your shame (1 Corinthians 15:34).

[F]or anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you (Ephesians 5:14).

On the other hand, sleep can be a good thing.

Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.  Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.  It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep (Psalm 127:1-2).

There is more than one kind of sleep and more than one kind of bread.  The sleep against which the proverb warns is the closing of our eyes and ears to the spiritual nature of our existence.  It is to dream that we are mere primates, clever apes and intelligent beasts.  That we can see we are more than animals is a gift of God.  Our spiritual senses testify to the Spirit just as our eyes are proof of the existence of light. 

If we close our eyes to the true nature of our existence, we will live impoverished lives, always hungering for some missing nutrient, no matter how much bread and beef and beer we consume. 

If we open our eyes, however, we will find, to our everlasting joy, that the Bread of Life is ours and in abundance.  All the true, honorable, righteous, and lovely desires of the spirit within us will find satisfaction and fulfillment. 

The world lives in a nightmare, somnolent and senseless.  Like all dreamers, their situations, motivations, and actions are often bizarre and irrational.  When we are surrounded by such, we may come to wonder if we are not the sleepers.  A few minutes of the evening news is usually sufficient to convince me otherwise.   

The Practice

Thus says the Lord: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast in his might, let not the rich man boast in his riches,  but let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord. – Jeremiah 9:23-24

This is a cross-reference from First Corinthians, but what struck me is where the Lord is said to practice His love, justice, and righteousness:   in the earth.   

It is notable that He practices, which to me means something like a doctor practicing medicine or a lawyer practicing law – jokes about those things aside.  Love and justice and righteousness are part of who God is as well as what He does.  We are here because of that.  Earth, all of material existence in the universe, is here that God might interact with us in expressing such.  All that exists in creation is exists because of God’s love and goodness.  

Heaven, in its full, everlasting conformity to all that God wills cannot be perfected; it is perfect.  Thy will be done, on earth as it is [always and everywhere and forever] done in heaven.  Earth is the borderland, the place where order and perfection are drawn out of chaos as the Spirit hovers over the roiling potentials of the deep.   

We come to understand that God did not only initiate creation out of His divine character and person, but He works in it now, first, because it is always now to the Eternal One.  He is creating, sustaining, and revealing.  Most often -- I tend to think, His practices are not so obviously and overtly miraculous.  The Lord works by His Spirit dwelling in believers; He works in and through us.  As my friend used to say, God doesn’t rain twenty dollar bills down from heaven because He is not a counterfeiter.  The coin Peter found in the mouth of a fish had been dropped or lost by someone.   Jesus could have turned stones into bread, but what He did was take a little bread offered and multiple it to meet the need.

Through prayer and faith in communion with our Father, we can experience His steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in our lives.  God is delighted when He sees us offering these blessings to others, multiplying the bread of life out here on the frontiers of the kingdom. 

Gathering Manna

The Lord GOD has given me 

the tongue of those who are taught,

that I may know how to sustain with a word 

him who is weary.

Morning by morning he awakens;

he awakens my ear

to hear as those who are taught.

The Lord GOD has opened my ear,

and I was not rebellious;

I turned not backward. 

— Isaiah 50:4-5

This is from Isaiah's revelation of Messiah as the Servant which crescendos in chapter 53.  It is easy to see how it applies to Jesus, and one might think that this particular passage was upon His mind often as He rose in the early hours of the day to pray alone with His Father.  Perhaps the last lines reverberated in His soul, too, during that last night in Gethsemane.  

For us, it is a call to hear.  Consider, though, that it says, "The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of those who are taught."  This is not a function of human knowledge, education, and intellectual capacity.  God simply pours His grace into His chosen vessels.  We can get in a position to receive, but we cannot claim an acquistion.  Knowing "how to sustain with a word him who is weary" does not come from obtaining a PhD in counseling or communications.  We often see family members, friends, and others close to us who are suffering, going astray, lost in mazes of their own making.  We want to help them, but we find much of the time that our best efforts fail.  Sometimes we even make matters worse.  There is only one Helper, one perfect Comforter.  It is His word the suffering and lost need to hear. 

My wife and I had gone over to the west side of the Metroplex one Sunday afternoon to visit our friends who pastored a church there.  Naturally we went to their service that evening and my friend preached.  At the end, he gave an invitation and a young couple came forward to the mourners' benches.  Pastor called for his wife and my wife to come down and pray with the young lady while I and one of his deacons went to pray with the man.  I had been taught the "Roman Road" from childhood as a standard, formulaic means of leading someone to "salvation". 

All have sinned and come short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23); the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ (Romans 6:23); God demonstrates His love for in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Romans 5:8);  whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved (Romans 10:13); and, finally, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved (Romans 10:9-10).  

 It was drilled in my head until I can do it in my sleep.  All that is true and good, but it should have been obvious to a blind hog that this couple, and especially the young man, was in serious and desperate pain.  It was one of those rare occasions where I was in the right place at the right time with a word for somebody, and I suddenly knew who it was.  Except that our beloved brother, the deacon, rushed in flapping his big Ryrie Study Bible, bound and determined to drag this poor boy down the Roman Road, regardless of what the Holy Spirit wanted.  After all, hadn't the same Spirit inspired Paul to write the book of Romans in the Original King James?

It is one of the beauties of the story of Christ as recorded in the Gospels that He always discerned the real need of the individual person to whom He ministered.  Now and then He would ask the person to state his or her need specifically, but I tend to think that was more to get the person focused than it was to inform Jesus.  The Lord does not need formulas.  He does not need education.  He needs emptiness, and through emptiness, He brings enlightenment. 

Sometimes I wake up with my head already buzzing with what needs to be done for the day, but most of the time, the morning can be a good time to be quiet.  If morning does not work then perhaps it is the late evening when all the day's work is done, and I can sleep on what I hear.  It is always, though, morning by morning, day by day. 

And when the dew had gone up, there was on the face of the wilderness a fine, flake-like thing, fine as frost on the ground.  When the people of Israel saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?”  For they did not know what it was. And Moses said to them, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.  This is what the Lord has commanded: ‘Gather of it, each one of you, as much as he can eat. You shall each take an omer, according to the number of the persons that each of you has in his tent.’”  And the people of Israel did so. They gathered, some more, some less.  But when they measured it with an omer, whoever gathered much had nothing left over, and whoever gathered little had no lack. ... Each of them gathered as much as he could eat. Morning by morning they gathered it, each as much as he could eat; but when the sun grew hot, it melted  (Exodus 16:14-21).

What sustained me yesterday may not be what I need for tomorrow.  Jesus told us to ask today for the bread we need this day.  We can trust that there will be a fresh inflow of exactly what we need for our challenges.  We may not know where it comes from or exactly what is it.  Its name is a question, yet we know it when we see it.  The Bible is a good place to start and even in the years when I don't plan to read through the Bible, I try to start the day with a verse or two or a chapter or two.  We may find je ne sais quoi in a painting, in a photograph, in music, in literature, or up a tree stand.  Up and down my sidebar and the sidebars of those in the sidebars, a person may find manna on any given day.  It is always somewhere.  If one will look.

Where there is inflow there must be outflow.  Acceptance implies surrender.  To do otherwise is to stagnate, to become a backwater of decay and corruption.   And Moses said to them, “Let no one leave any of it over till the morning.”  But they did not listen to Moses. Some left part of it till the morning, and it bred worms and stank. ... (Exodus 16:19-20).  Freely we have received, so freely we give.  As freely as we give, we will freely receive.  No matter what happens in the material world, no matter how chaotic or dire the circumstances, the same spiritual principles will always apply and succeed. 

But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge. (1 John 2:20)