Standing In

Now Joshua was standing before the angel, clothed with filthy garments.  And the angel said to those who were standing before him, Remove the filthy garments from him. And to him he said, Behold, I have taken your iniquity away from you, and I will clothe you with pure vestments.  -- Zechariah 3:3-4

This Joshua is the high priest in the time of Zerubbabel.  The prophet sees this scene in a vision that foreshadows the work of our Joshua which, as you know, is simply another form of the name “Jesus”.  Jesus as our great high priest was clothed in the filth of humanity’s iniquity and rebellion.  Because of His willingness to come down to us, to be shamed, humiliated, and put to death on our behalf, He was raised up, clothed in purity and perfection.    

Unlike the high priests of Aaron’s line, the Lord had no iniquity of His own to be taken away.  The sin that was removed was mine and yours. 

There are days that I wake up and think that I am broken beyond all hope.  I wonder if I can ever be anything except a miserable, pathetic excuse of a person who sometimes actually rejoices in evil.  My self is a corrupt, grubby beggar.  But between that soiled and sinful dead man stands the living Christ, clothed in spotless robes of righteousness, making intercession for me.  He is the one who is seen and accepted in my place. 

Numbers chapter 16 tells the story of a rebellion among God’s people led by Dathan, Abiram and Korah.  Those who thought they were righteous enough to stand before God challenged Moses and Aaron and brought their own censers to offer incense (prayers) before the Lord.  Korah was a Levite but not of Aaron’s line.  He was a son of Kohath and had duties relating to the tabernacle.  But he was not a priest.  The principals in the rebellion were swallowed up by the earth, and two hundred and fifty of their followers where struck down by the fire of God. 

The next day – and who thought this was a good idea? – the congregation was grumbling against Moses and Aaron.  They said to them, “You have killed the people of the Lord” (v.41).  Brilliant.  The cloud of the Presence descends and the Lord tells Moses and Aaron to step back because He has had just about enough for this week.  A plague falls upon the Israelites and people start dropping dead.  At the urging of Moses, Aaron took a censer and ran into the crowd.  And he stood between the dead and the living, and the plague was stopped (Numbers 16:48).

So today, the High Priest stands between the Living God who is a consuming fire and the dead man. 

Wardrobe Malfunctions

[A]nd to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness -- Ephesians 4:23-24

This has been a busy week, not a particularly bad one, but it seems as though it went by too fast.  I did not get everything done that I would like.  We have had non-stop rain here for the last six days.  Now we have the remnants of tropical storm (or depression or whatever) Bill pouring torrential amounts of water out of the sky.  Therefore my grass is going to be a foot high before I get a chance to cut it.  (Saturday is no good for other reasons.)  So I got some things done that are not part of my usual weekly routine.  For example, I got a haircut.  I guess it had been a while.  My wife got me started going to this shop at the mall, and this was probably my third haircut since February.  I went in and asked if they would have time to work me in that evening (Tuesday, I think).  The girl – not the usual 40ish woman – said to give her twenty minutes. 

While I was waiting -- it's the mall, right? -- I went looking for a summer sport coat to wear to church.  I found one in my size in a lightweight, kind of tan material that should work with brown, black, gray and probably navy pants.  I tried it on, paid for it, took it out and hung it up in my car, and came back in to finish waiting for my haircut.  I got my money’s worth on the haircut.  I said, “Just make it high and tight.”  She did.  There is nothing left to mat down under my helmet.  I’m probably good for the rest of the summer.  I gave her a generous gratuity despite the fact that she was talkative. 

Then tonight I took some stuff to Goodwill.  I’m going to take more -- none of Vickie’s stuff.  I can’t do that.  Her shoes are still where she left them on the steps up out of the garage.  Another pair of her shoes, her coat, and some other clothes are still in the laundry room.  I don’t know when I’ll even be able to move them back to her closet.  Anyway, I’m cleaning out some of my things that are just taking up space.  I’ll get rid of some old suits and other clothes that I don’t wear any more this fall probably.  I bought that new sport coat because the ones I’m going to take to Goodwill are out of style and have funky colors.  Some of them I think I got from Goodwill, and they were cheap but they never fit me well. 

I suppose I could take one of those old jackets to a tailor and have it let out in the chest and taken in the waist, have some of that padding pulled out of the shoulders, etc.  One time I was talking to a contractor about how he got started.  He said he learned a little about a lot of trades as a kid because his dad was always working on their old house.  He said it seemed like they were always adding and remodeling and refinishing one room or another.  He chuckled a little and asked, “You know what we had when we were done?”  I shook my head.  He said, “An old house.” 

Some of us try to fix up the old self.  We try to reform it and clean it up.  We work and work to make the old self more presentable and attractive and acceptable, to get it to conform to God’s law and His standards.  When we are done we have the old self.  The leopard has not changed his spots. 

God doesn’t call us to reform.  He has a better way.  He says all a person has to do is take the old self off and toss it, pitch it, throw it away.  We don’t need it.  He offers us this glorious new self that does not need reform.  It is already in the likeness of God in righteousness and holiness.  We don’t need to work and worry to get righteous because we have put on Christ, and we are clothed in His righteousness.   

It’s amazing.  Look at it again:  put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.  That’s it.

I really wish I could be a good person.  I’d like to live in a way that’s pleasing to God.  I’m all messed, though.  I have all these stains, cigarette burns, and tears and holes in awkward places.  I can’t go before God like this.  But I can … put on the Lord Jesus Christ…  (Romans 13:14). 

Legend of the Fallen

And he said to all, If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. -- Luke 9:23

Jesus bore our burden of sin upon the cross.  The good news of His death, burial, and resurrection is the revelation of His love for us, our salvation, justification, reconciliation, and peace with the Father.  He offers to take the burdens that weigh us down and wear us out, and in exchange, He offers us a sack of slack to carry, a yoke that is easy and light.  How does this square with the daily cross Jesus says each of us must take up?

I have been talking around this, I think, all week.  I’ll probably talk around it today, too.  The Cross frees us from the captivity and delusions of the world, the flesh, and the devil, but I’ve still got this natural human life to live out.  We do not suddenly get translated to heaven when we rise from the waters of baptism.  It would be a lot easier to be a Christian if that were the case. 

Instead, we spend the rest of our lives dealing with, resisting, renouncing, and, ultimately, overcoming the sin nature.  As I may have noted in the post about 1 John 3, Matthew Henry argues that Jesus did not carry away “ our moral infirmities, our proneness to sin”.   I don’t know about anybody else, but I know for certain that my own “proneness to sin”, if it has been taken away, still calls home a lot. 

My problem in this world is me.  That’s the daily cross.  It’s my tendency to blame other people, my feelings of selfishness and self-righteousness, my inclination to believe that I am better, somehow, than the people who get in my way.  It’s easy for me to think that life should please me and go my way, that others exist for my benefit, that things should be fair and that, at the same time, I ought to be able to do pretty much as I please.  So, constantly, daily, I get up and I pick that cross up, and I do a hundred things that go against the grain.  I give in.  I give others the benefit of the doubt.  I help somebody else.  I sacrifice, and, if I’m not careful, at the end of the day, I get to thinking I’m a really good guy.  As Rick and Father Stephen point out, self-improvement is a loser’s game.  The reason I carry this cross isn’t to make me better but to put my old, fallen self on fully display for what it is. 

I watched I Am Legend, which might not have been the best choice under the current conditions, but I got through it.  I watched the alternate version which makes more sense.  One thing that really hit me is when Neville is offered the chance to leave and join other survivors, he resists, insisting that New York City is his site.  “I can still fix this,” he shouts. 

That’s one of my favorite phrases.  I can fix this – except, I can’t.  I can’t fix my self.  But I can take up my cross and bear it.

Armed to the Teeth

Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh,  arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human passions but for the will of God. – 1 Peter 4:1-2

This is similar to Paul’s instruction in verse 5 of Philippians chapter 2: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus….”  How we think is our protection against being entrapped and controlled by the world and its illusions.  If you tell someone these days that listening to certain kinds of music, reading some books, watching some shows on television, or looking at certain kinds of pictures on the internet is a bad idea, you are liable to get accused of legalism.  What you are really guilty of is common sense. 

If you have a well-developed sense of right and wrong and have come to comprehend what it means to reject self and take up the cross, a great deal of popular culture is going to make you uncomfortable -- at best.  When I started getting my life straightened out thirty-plus years ago -- I'm still working on it, you'll know I'm finished, mostly, when you hear I'm dead -- I was kind of an audiophile.  I had a big component system with a receiver, cassette deck, turntable, high-quality cartridge, and huge speakers, and I had dozens of albums.  I decided it was all too much of a distraction, and I needed some Christmas money, so I sold everything.  I remember, though I hated to see a lot of it go, feeling a sense of relief that it would no longer be there to draw me away.  

I didn't do it because somebody told me that I would go to hell if I didn't.  I didn't do it so I could tell people how holy I was.  I didn't even do it because I thought God would love me more.  I no longer wanted to live for my own passions and my own ends.  I didn't set foot in a movie theater for nearly twenty years.  The only show we would watch on television for a while was Dr. Quinn.  Having to listen to country music in some place like a restaurant made me almost ill -- some country music still has that effect.  

Some stuff I can genuinely enjoy, like Firefly, but I still have to be careful because it is so easy to pick up on the characters' way of thinking.  It's not that we don't understand these things are fictional and fantastic.  We do, but we also identify with them.  We admire courage and boldness, skill and ingenuity.  We want those things in our lives, and, similar to what Father Stephen is saying in the linked post, we end up feeding, strengthening and encouraging a self that really just needs to die.  We tend to pick up on whatever truth is contained in what is being said or sung or depicted and when we bring it in, some other not so elegant stuff tends to come along for the ride.

To stand strong against the world, the flesh, and the devil, to be identified with Christ, there are some things we may find it necessary to let go, for a time, or forever.  If it is pulling us down, we ought to turn it loose.  Think like Jesus.

A Hitch in Time

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 2:24-25

I love most of the Hitchcock movies like The Birds, Vertigo and Rear Window.  I think it was Frenzy that I saw in a movie theater with a friend of mine.  We were thoroughly unsophisticated hillbilly kids, and it was about too much for us.  We agreed to not tell anybody we had seen it.  It was guilt by association.

A similar film from the ‘80s is The Hitcher with Rutger Hauer and C. Thomas Howell.  I noticed I mentioned this movie in a post a couple of years ago, but we're expanding it a little here.  It’s like watching a copperhead in the weeds, repulsively fascinating.  If you are familiar with the plot, you know that Howell plays a youthful character named Jim Halsey who is delivering a “drive-away” Cadillac from Chicago to San Diego.  He makes the mistake of picking up Hauer’s ominous hitchhiker, John Ryder. 

First of all, there really aren’t any homosexual, homo-erotic undertones in the movies.  I’m not saying that couldn’t be read into it, as some have done, but I think it misses the much bigger point.  Ryder and Halsey -- one hauls and is the vehicle while the other rides and controls.  I can see how someone obsessed with sex or told, at some point, by a sex-obsessed person that it’s like catcher and pitcher might start thinking that.  Halsey and Ryder do get accused of being homosexual by a flagman on the road construction crew, but that is deliberate misdirection on Ryder’s part to defuse suspicion. 

Ryder is a psychotic but a very capable and, we might even say, supernaturally intelligent murderer.  He’s demonic.  He is able to follow Halsey undetected, appearing and disappearing at will.  The reason, so it seems, that he picks Halsey and puts him through so much torment is that he wants to be stopped.

It is almost as though Halsey and Ryder were the same person, a kind of Dr Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, Gollum/Smeagol, split personality.  Halsey wants to do the right thing, tries over and over to turn himself in, to escape from the avalanche of evil that he has innocently been caught up in.  Every time, Ryder comes from out of nowhere to intervene and keep Halsey trapped in the ever-tightening spiral.  The movie is on Youtube if you don’t remember it or have never seen it and want to watch it.  Most of the gore is off-screen.  There are dead, bloodied bodies around and a lot of implied horror, but we don’t witness so much of it as we would in the more current slasher movies.

Halsey might understand what Paul was talking about:  … For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out …  I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil is right there with me … ( a little loosely from Romans 7:15-25).  

Every time we want to set things right, to rectify and put everything back the way it should be, something will come out of “nowhere” to upset and thwart our best-laid plans and good intentions.

Now my very exclusive coterie of readers, all four of you, I’m sure don’t have this problem.  For me, though, it’s not really out of “nowhere”.  I suspect that I know exactly where my hitcher is riding as well as his real identity.  I’d like to deny culpability for these sins, point the finger, and blame Ryder, and there’s no question that he needs to be stopped – to die.  But I’m the one who is responsible for stopping him. 

Near the end of The Hitcher, Ryder has been taken into custody by the Texas DPS and is being transported in chains to prison.  Halsey is riding with a DPS captain – who represents the Law.  Halsey says something like, “You’re not going to be able to hold him.”  The Law is good, but it is inadequate to deal with Ryder.  He can’t simply be imprisoned and confined.  We can’t pass off our obligation to the authority of the Law.  We brought him here.  We have to stop him.  In his better moments, in his brief moments of clarity before his nature reasserts itself, Ryder wants us to stop him.  He gives us opportunity after opportunity. 

So, Halsey, after setting the Law out by the side of the road (a mirror image of how the whole thing started) and taking the vehicle of the Law, turns around and goes after Ryder, catching up with the bus just as Ryder makes his escape.  With this last one-on-one confrontation, it is Halsey who goes free.