Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. -- 1 Peter 5:8

Whatever the devil may be, he is no idiot.  Just as people can be talented, clever, knowledgeable, and even intellectually superior without being good or wise, our enemy is a genius of tactics and strategy.  He has been working the underground angle for a long time.  The forces of evil are like a guerrilla band that thinks they have won the hearts and minds of the general populace and are ready to come out and go conventional.    

It has happened a lot over the centuries in and among various nations.  Now it’s about to come to the whole world.  The devil can take the platform of international news, the internet, and social media and make his proclamation of victory to nearly everyone on the planet simultaneously.  The enemy thinks he has won. 

This is where mere intellectual power fails.  The devil lacks wisdom, as do his ministers and his minions, regardless of the world’s high opinion of them.   Together they have laid a trap for the faithful.  They have dug a pit to capture us, but they will fall into it. 

That doesn’t mean there won’t be suffering among us.  There always is.  Peter acknowledges that in this same fifth chapter, but he also reminds us that we are on the right side – not of history but of truth and righteousness. 

It is time, once again, to remind ourselves that our struggle is not against creatures of the flesh but against the spiritual powers that dominate and control the thinking of those trapped in a carnal mind. 

The enemy can be defeated.  The mouth of the lion can be shut.  Resist him, firm in the faith …

God of Thunder

Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of him!  But the thunder of his power who can understand? — Job 26:14

We are sometimes amused by the diatribes of unbelievers as they rail against the god of their imagination, but you can always tell when even those who claim to be believers turn out to be idol-worshippers.  The idol is a puny thing.  It is carried around by the ones who believe in it like the dead man in “Weekend at Bernie’s”.  It is animated by and has power over only the one who has been deceived by it, or who deceives himself with it. 

A god that can be fully explained and fully understood is not God.  Most often we hear only the faintest whispers and glimpse the Lord in shadows moving at the edge of vision.

When God speaks in full voice, we are overwhelmed.  In John 12, the Father speaks audibly to the Son.  Though the voice is overheard by those around Jesus, it is incomprehensible to them. The crowd that stood there and heard it said that it had thundered. Others said, An angel has spoken to him (John 12:29).

We may all hear the thundering voice of God in the storms of life, in our tragedies and catastrophes, but, too often, it is sealed to us.  And when the seven thunders had sounded, I was about to write, but I heard a voice from heaven saying, Seal up what the seven thunders have said, and do not write it down (Revelation of John 10:4).

The truth can create fear in us.  We cower and stop our ears, passing it off as a “natural” phenomenon.  We have decided beforehand that God does not speak; therefore, this terrifying thing cannot be His voice.  He can’t be telling us that we are reaping what we have sown.  He can’t be calling us to repentance.  God only speaks through the soft, soothing, comforting voices of His priests and His ministers. 

Beware of those who explain away the thunder.

Perfect Faithfulness

Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered.  And being made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him … -- Hebrews 5:8-9

These verses, speaking of Jesus, trouble some people.  Wasn’t Jesus perfect in every possible way, sinless and holy and always loved and accepted by God the Father?  Yes, He was.  How could He be perfected or “made perfect”?  In His Person, as the Second Person of the Trinity, He was, without any question, flawless, ideal, and complete.  However, He took on flesh, and, though He remained God Incarnate, He had a mission to fulfill. 

Personally, I would not have blamed Jesus if He had, after walking among us for a while, said, “They really are not worth saving.”  If He had turned away from the Cross, said He wanted to give it up, skip the suffering, and let us all go, I do not believe I could call that choice a sin on the Lord’s part.  He would have left us – to quote Oh, Brother Where Art Thou, in a tight spot, but we would not have much room to complain.  It’s our own fault. 

Still, Jesus would have failed in His mission.  He would not have been made perfect in that regard.  He could not have been condemned, but He would have, as far as we are concerned, failed.  Is the same true for us?  Can we be good and righteous failures?  Can we be “acceptable” Christians yet miss the mark because we fear and recoil from our own cross? 

What I do, in one sense, doesn’t matter much.  I am about as unimportant and insignificant as a human can be.  I am not called to bear a very large or difficult cross; nevertheless, I do have a cross.  There is a reason I am still in this world.  I can hold back, look out for myself, not hurt or take advantage of others, avoid scandal, stay out of obvious trouble, maybe even do the occasional good deed, and be thought of as a “good enough” person.  When my time comes to die and I stand before the Judgment Seat of Christ, I might say that I believed in Him, that I was not much of an adventurer, that I was perhaps a bit fearful and overly cautious and did not much that was very bad and perhaps a little more that was good. 

Jesus will say to people with that attitude, No!  Be hot or be cold.  Do not be lukewarm.  Whether our lives are noticed or not does not matter.  It does not matter if we are not powerful and influential.  It matters only that we are faithful and fully committed.  We are called to be like the woman’s alabaster jar of ointment (Matthew 26:7-9) – broken and poured for Christ even if the world’s looks on and calls what we have done foolish and pointless. 

Anxiety holds us back from so much.  There is a line, sometimes difficult to define, between being wise and being overwhelmed by dread of what might happen.  Prudence is a virtue.  Cowardice is a sin.  What we have to do, no matter how small it seems, may be what no other can do.

Trigger Warning

Do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain. – Philippians 2:14-16

The advice in these verses is good.  Questioning can also be translated as disputing or doubting.  Jesus uses the same word in Luke 24:38 when He asks the disciples why “doubts arise” in their hearts.  I have a family member who has been going through some difficulties for an extended period of time.  Someone encourages her and says that she should turn her stress and worries over to God.  She responds, “I wish it were that easy.” 

I can understand that, but it does seem strange that grumbling, complaining, and doubting come easier to me than handing the burden off to another.  I know when I am working and someone on the team says that he or she will take care of something I thought I had to do, I feel relief, usually.  The times when I don’t are those occasions when I harbor trepidations about the trustworthiness and competence of the volunteer. 

I suppose that means, if I worry about something God has offered to do, I doubt that He is really up to the job.  That’s Paul’s point in the last part of the passage.  If those he has taught and guided and admonished cannot live without fear and doubt, without whining and moaning and cowering, without worrying and fretting about every trouble that comes along, he has failed in his ministry, and he will be called to account for it. 

I have been binge-watching Band of Brothers which I have enjoyed much more than Private Ryan.  In one scene the recklessly courageous Ronald Speirs explains the “trick” to a fearful soldier.  It amounts to assuming that the worst will indeed happen and that one has no hope of coming out alive.  The way it is framed in the dramatized dialogue, Speirs’ advice doesn’t sound appealing to a Christian.  However, it struck me as very similar to something a Christian has said.  In his parody of self-help books, Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy suggested a cure for depression:  suicide.  If that seems rather extreme, Percy explains that once suicide is actually an option, one is free to live as an ex-suicide, concluding: 

The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o’clock on an ordinary morning:

The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future.  His breath is high in his chest.

The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs.  Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive.  It is good to be alive.  He goes to work because he doesn’t have to.

Note again, I call this book a parody.  Don’t take it too seriously, and keep in mind that to be an ex-suicide, one can’t actually pull the trigger.  As Percy says, You can elect suicide, but you decide not to.  It is a very important distinction.

Or, as Paul told the church at Philippi as few verses earlier:  For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain (Philippians 1:21).  That sounds a bit more acceptable to most of us, but we should remember that to be in Christ means that we have died to self and identified with Him in His death on the Cross. 

My life is in God’s hands.  I trust my very soul and my destiny for all of eternity to Him.  What are all the troubles of this world to that?

Taking Care of Business

Calling ten of his servants, he gave them ten minas, and said to them, Engage in business until I come.  -- Luke 19:13

The traditional KJV says, Occupy till I come.  Word Pictures in the New Testament indicates to us that a better sense might be “trade here while I’m coming”.  Maybe it’s just me, but “engaging in business” carries a connotation of high finance and equity markets.  I don’t think that’s what these servants were being called to do.  They were not sitting in an office.  The successful and commended servants were going on and plying the trade routes.  I would imagine they had to make trips out to other places, buying and bringing back goods desired in the local marketplace.  There was risk involved and potential loss.  They probably suffered some losses and setbacks and had to work harder to make up for it. 

They tell us, from this parable, that we ought to use our gifts as God intended, and I agree with that.  Notice that in this version of the story, there are ten minas or talents, each given out to ten different servants.  We do not have the inequitable distribution seen elsewhere.   Every human being is given something precious and treasured by God.  I am not very talented.  About the only thing I ever excelled at in my youth was bucking hay bales.  But I have this life, this soul -- the divine spark that Bob was talking about a couple of days ago. 

When I pass from this life and stand before the judgment seat of Christ, I do not think He will ask me much about my hay hauling or my singing, whether I coded for the kingdom or how much money I spent on Girl Scout cookies or gave to missions.  I think He will look at the life He gave me and see if I multiplied and enriched it.  He will want to know if I risked myself by loving other people, including those on whom I had a chance to lose it all.  He will want to know if I hid out in the basement, or if I went out through the war zones and the no-man’s lands.  Did I ever defy the devil to add to gain more for the Lord?  Or did I prefer to keep a low spiritual profile, to bury that spark and keep it out of sight to avoid being attacked?

It may be tough for me to answer.  I do tend to avoid the critics, the skeptics, and some of the heretics.  I am more comfortable being some distance from the edge of the precipice.  I don’t know that I want to see how close I can get or if there is some narrow, knife-edged way to bridge the gap and get over where there are treasures I might bring back.  Yet, isn't this, in a much greater way than I can imagine, what the Lord Himself did in the Incarnation? 

Obviously we don’t want to gamble with our souls, but I do think we are called to invest and “trade” some in this world.  I think missionaries and visionaries, spiritual and intellectual pioneers, artists and poets and prophets and creators of all kinds bring back treasures that enrich the lives of others and bring growth to their own souls.  I am not going to be one of the heroes of the faith or a notable saint of any kind, but I am going to do what I can with the spark that I have.   

I’m going love people who may reject me.  I’m going to study and read and pray.  I’m going to challenge the assumptions that the world system offers to me and expects me to accept.  While I am at it, I may challenge some of the traditional interpretations of the Bible that my religion holds.  Maybe I’ll look at the questions and objections of the skeptics to see if I can venture out to bring back answers for that market. 

Now, there will be those who are concerned, frightened, perhaps even offended by us as spiritual traders.  I understand.  There is the potential to go off the tracks, to get lost or waylaid out there in the bush.  I think, though, if we will listen carefully to our Guide, who will never leave nor forsake us, regardless of the dangers and tribulations of the trail, we’ll find our way safely back home.