Not What I Had in Mind

Be strong and courageous, for you shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to their fathers to give them.  Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded you.  Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good success wherever you go. – Joshua 1:6-7

I could use this same title for every post.  As I often say, I am a much nicer person on the internet than I am in real life.

Faith, hope, love – I was thinking about that, rather bitterly, last night as I was filled with anger and frustration.  My first waking thought was one of hopelessness.  Then I decided to get up and have a cup of coffee and see if I couldn’t make it until sundown.  There is no way I can get everything done today that needed to be done yesterday.  I’m like the guy in “Sixteen Tons” – “another day older and deeper in debt”, except mine is “further behind”.  I don’t think I have accomplished anything tangible in the last year.  In other words, the call to “good success” is not really ringing true this morning.

I do not like to fail.  I do not like to be exposed as anything less than perfect – or at least competent and strong.  I am not inclined to yield the field.  I suppose there is such a thing as a tactical retreat.  It could be, I suppose, that the courage I need is not the courage to press on, but the fortitude to admit my vulnerability, the strength to acknowledge that my strength and ability have limits. 

The meek, Jesus said, shall inherit the earth, but flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom.  We are heirs of God, joint heirs with Christ Jesus (Joshua), heirs not of a bit of soil but of the spiritual reality of which Canaan speaks.  This inheritance is sealed and guaranteed by the presence of the Holy Spirit.  Those who followed Joshua typified the death of self by crossing the Jordan River at flood stage.  The Lord held up the waters of Jordan, as He had done on the Red Sea, so that the people crossed, in effect, under the water.  

Every day – especially lately, it seems that the world is poking and prodding me, wounding my pride and then pouring salt in the wounds.  Overmatched, hounded, hurting and hopeless, I fight on – not out of courage but out of fear.  It seems as if I have been here before, and maybe I have.  Israel passed through the Red Sea to find the Law before passing through Jordan to find grace. 

I hope no one else is as hard-headed as I am, as arrogant and defiant, yet cowardly when it comes to living a surrendered life.  It comes down, perhaps, to an idea that if God gives it, it is His; if I earned it, created it, built it, it is mine.  There’s nothing wrong with owning something in the material world – so long as we recall that even our natural strength and ability is from our Father and that even what we can hold in our hands, we hold only as stewards for Him.  

 But on the other side of Jordan – that place we are promised, that Life that is waiting for us to step into, there is no room at all for my inflated estimation of myself.  Pride has to die right here, and if I try to hang on to even a shred of it, it will pull me down to hell.  Under water.  I have to go under, but I can’t stay.  I can let my old nature pull me to the bottom, but it has to stay there, and I (not I but Christ) have to rise.  I can’t hold my breath much longer. 

Stop Putting Me On

But that is not the way you learned Christ! — assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and 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 4:20-24

What does it mean to "put off your old self"?  We may call it the old man, the carnal nature, the adamic nature, the flesh, but the simplest description is just self — me.  We are born into the world with a self.  We are not blank slates.  Anyone who has a child, or more than one, will tell you they are born being different.  Self is not personality though the two are related.  The persona is our mask, our inter-face as opposed to our intra-face.  It is the template or the jig on which we build our relationships with others.  Self will be seen — or at least glimpsed from time to time through that template.  Some of us are simple and our interface reflects largely and accurately the underlying self.  Others of us, either because we are fearful of exposing our nature or perhaps because of the circumstances of our upbringing, have a mask that exposes much less of that nature. 

Religions and philosophies have long recognized that self is somehow at the root of many of our problems.  Though a Christian, I am rather sympathetic toward Zen, and I think zazen meditation can be practiced  by Christians without conflict.  I am not sure where this quote came from, but I like it:  To study the Buddha Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.  I suspect generally that what most Zen practitioners are forgetting is a version of the persona rather than the actual self, but the point is still to perceive and experience as directly as possible the pure reality around us.  What the truly enlightened will realize is that self cannot be overcome by self. 

The key to understanding and ultimately freeing ourselves from self's bondage is to realize it is "corrupt through deceitful desires".  We are unable to see things clearly.  Our perception is clouded and corroded to the point that we misunderstand, misjudge, and miss the mark.  So much that we see in the world is deception.  People are drawn into all kinds of suffering because they are deceived.  The old nature has no resistance to corruption.  Let's go back to the Old Testament for an illustration: 

King Solomon made 200 large shields of beaten gold; 600 shekels of gold went into each shield. And he made 300 shields of beaten gold; three minas of gold went into each shield. And the king put them in the House of the Forest of Lebanon. ... In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem.  He took away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king's house. He took away everything. He also took away all the shields of gold that Solomon had made, and King Rehoboam made in their place shields of bronze, and committed them to the hands of the officers of the guard, who kept the door of the king's house.  (1 Kings 10:16-17, 14:25-27)

Gold is, of course, incorruptible.  Bronze, while quite strong and initially as shining and bright as gold, develops, over time, a patina of corrosion.  To keep the shields of Rehoboam looking like gold required a great deal of work, a lot of burnishing and polishing.   In the same way, the flesh is resilient and tough.  It, too, can be shined up to look pretty good, but it lacks the value, quality, and incorruptible nature of gold.  The bronze shields were a counterfeit of the gold shields.  Rehoboam, through disobedience, lost a great treasure to Shishak — as king of Egypt, a type of Satan.  To avoid being embarrassed by such a loss, he took what he had and made something that served the purpose and "looked just as good" as the shields he had lost. 

In Adam, humanity lost the intimate connection with the Father also through disobedience.  Like Rehoboam, we were plundered by Satan.  From the Fall until the Cross, most of us had little choice except to rely on the self, to do the best we could with what we had, to brush and polish the tarnished face of our old nature and make it as acceptable as we could.  The Law gave us the means to keep our shields bright and strong, but what God wanted was for us to have a new and incorruptible nature.  The death of Christ and the shedding of His blood provided us with a new covenant.  The Cross offered us a way to set aside self and take up a new nature, that of Christ Himself. 

The beauty of this new self is that the world is unable to tarnish it.  Those "deceitful desires" that assail us can longer cause corruption.  Instead of being confused, accused, and harassed, our minds are renewed and refreshed, able to perceive clearly.  Now, like those golden shields of Solomon, we reflect back to God His glory, undiminished and unclouded by the corrosion and dust of the world. 

In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one — Ephesian 6:16

Dead Reckoning

So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. – Romans 6:11

The ESV is a little weak, though correct.  I just like the old KJV word “reckon” better than the more generic “consider”.  It sounds like something Josey Wales might say.  

“They say you’re dead to sin, Wales.”

Spit.  “I reckon so.”

Considering oneself dead to sin makes sense only in light of the preceding statement in verse 2: How can we who died to sin still live in it?  The truth is that reckoning has more in common with accounting than with gunslinging.  When we write down the balance in our account book, it had best be the amount that is actually in the account.  Otherwise we can find ourselves guilty of writing bad checks or perpetrating fraud – unless, of course, we are the federal government.  Come to think of it, “account” would be a better modern word than consider.

We can account ourselves dead to sin because we identify with Christ, or rather He identified with us.  He immersed Himself in human flesh.  He made His obedience and death ours.  We are drawn into and immersed in His death, or, as it is more traditionally put, we are baptized into His death.  This accounting, then, is a matter of recognizing, acknowledging, and operating in accordance with the revealed truth. 

By accounting ourselves dead to sin, we are not like the Little Christian Who Could, huffing, “I think I’m dead.  I think I’m dead.”  We are not by our heroic efforts making a hope or even an uncertainty into a reality.  The illusion is not that we are dead to sin but that we feel the need to sin. 

I suppose I should stop and make the point that when I say “sin” I am just using a shorthand for anything that is perpetrated by the old Adamic nature, anything that is done out of material or animal impulses.  A lot of us have never committed adultery because, frankly, it is a lot of trouble, and we are just too lazy to do it.   Some of us have never committed murder or stolen diamonds only because we are scared of getting caught and winding up in prison; or, we don’t know a trustworthy fence, or because cleaning up the gore after a homicide might cause us to miss “Dancing With The Stars”.  And, really, there is a reason they call it “dead weight”. 

Instead we steal time from our family and friends by shifting our work onto them.  We cut people up with cruel words.  We fill our minds with vicarious adulteries and “romances” and violence via television and the internet.  We manipulate and deceive in order to get our way or not suffer the consequences of our actions.  I could go on, but, as Leonard Cohen says, everybody knows.

If we are indeed dead to the old nature, why do we feel such an obligation to it?  Why does it seem to trap and hold us so much of the time?  Everything is answered in Genesis.  And God blessed them. And God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth (Genesis 1:28 – emphasis added).  We are meant to rule.  But equally and reasonably we are meant to be ruled over.  We feel an obligation, a sense of loyalty, and we do not know to what or to Whom we rightfully owe it.  

Did you ever wonder how Lucifer could rule a bunch of fallen angels that were already rebels?  I have.  It looks to me like the devil would be so busy putting down uprising that he would hardly have time to annoy me.  But all of God’s creatures, fallen or not, are built with a sense of loyalty.  This is why we find the traitors punished in the very lowest circle of hell.  No one respects a traitor, not even those who benefit from the betrayal.  Many should be fearful. 

Though Adam has long repented his failure and the transference of his allegiance to the enemy, we followed our father in his disloyalty and rebellion under a new master.  We could not help ourselves.  We were bound to the flesh.  We could not break the curse without becoming accursed.  So it was that God divinely provided an alternative.  I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel (Genesis 3:15).  One would come born of woman but owing fealty to another Father.  He took the curse upon Himself and broke its power.

Now, if we obey only our heavenly Father, no one can account us as traitors.  While many may not desire to have the Lord be their Lord, they do not become rulers themselves but remain subject to the flesh, for all of creation will give allegiance to that which it believes is master -- no matter how base or destructive.  In the midst of a world system that operates on the power of the flesh, we must remind ourselves of the truth regularly.  It is like the illusion of a rising and setting sun.  It is easy to forget that it is a function of the spinning earth.  

… be transformed by the renewal of your mind … (Romans 12:2).