This Land Is His Land

The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me. -- Leviticus 25:23

The natural life of a person passes away.  We work and accumulate, maintain, save, store, perhaps even hoard.  Sometimes we forget that we must, at some point, leave everything behind.  We have to take a balanced approach.  I could die and leave it all behind tomorrow.  Or, I might live another 30 years.  Meanwhile, I am a manager of God’s property – what I own, even my own physical existence. 

Life makes more sense, is easier, and less stressful when we follow God’s will, trusting and resting in His goodness and grace.  As far as our lives and possessions go, the first rule is simply to be faithful to do what we can do.  There is no place in a Christian’s life for sloth, neglect, and ingratitude.  Yet the battle is not ours.  We do our part and give the Lord room to do His part.  We trust that when we have sought His will in prayer, He will meet us in our circumstances.  He wants partners not puppets, sons not slaves.  But partners trust one another, and a son believes in his Father, just as Jesus did, right to the cross, through the tomb and out the other side. 

It is our Father’s world.  We move through it and move on.  Someone comes behind us and inhabits what we have left, the echoes of our lives, the alterations we have made, the ruts of our failures, the pinnacles of our successes.  It becomes their responsibility to deal with what they have been given, while we give an account for what we left. 

Is our legacy the briars and barrenness of self-righteousness, envy, strife, and hatred?  Or are we leaving behind well-cultivated fields sown with “… love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, [and] self-control …” (Galatians 5:22-23), the fruit of the Spirit to sustain our successors in difficult times. 

I am afraid the last few generations have squandered a great and glorious inheritance.  We have a few fields that have not been paved over, a few that have not been exhausted and depleted and abandoned to the sprouts, weeds, and brambles.  Will the next few generations struggle in a new dark age where truth becomes a scarce resource, or will we begin to break up our own fallow ground and reclaim some plot, however small and humble, for the Lord?

The Wait

Therefore the LORD waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you.  For the LORD is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him. -- Isaiah 30:18

I am waiting this morning, and I expect that, soon, I will be somewhat busy.  Meanwhile, I continue on with what has become my theme for the week.  I am sure I have read this verse dozens of times -- as many times as I have read through Isaiah 30 and pulled verses from it.  Stopping to look at it and consider it, it is, as my old friend Herb might say, a powerful verse. 

God waits.  For what?  To be gracious to us.  In an overarching sense, in light of God’s work in human history, we can understand that the prophet is looking forward to the Cross where grace it brought to all in Christ.  While God’s goodness, love, and mercy fall like rain upon all of humanity, everywhere and at all times, He waits, as well, to be gracious to each of us individually.

Why does He wait?  There is seed time, and there is harvest time.  There are seasons in our lives that are appropriate for divine intervention.  There are other times, winter seasons, when God draws away, goes out of sight and underground.  As a tree is not dead because it has lost its leaves and stands waiting for spring, so, even in our seasons of dormancy, the Lord, though silent and unseen, sustains us. 

At other times, however, the Lord waits for us.  Yesterday’s post referenced Isaiah 30:15 calling us to rest and to quietness.  So long as we are trying by our own human, fleshly efforts to achieve success, to create our own security, and initialize our own versions of happiness, God waits.  He waits for us to see the futility and the vanity in our fruitless exertions and to turn to Him in hope and faith. 

I want to say that it should always be us waiting patiently, being long-suffering as we remain in a state of serene anticipation looking for the justice and judgment, the mercy and favor and blessings of the Lord.  He should not have to wait on us to wear the old self out in toil and turmoil.  But maybe that’s one way we put the old man down – work him to death.  After all, the Lord told Adam how it was going to be:  By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground (Genesis 3:19).  It could be that the old man isn’t a bad field hand, so long as you beat him like a rented mule, keep him in his place, and don’t let him think he can run anything.

Keep Calm and Flail On

Now Ornan turned and saw the angel, and his four sons who were with him hid themselves, but Ornan continued threshing wheat. – 1 Chronicles 21:20 (NKJV)

That’s a questionable translation of the verse, but it makes me wonder if, when the Jebusites left Jerusalem, the descendants of Ornan might have ended up in Scotland with their blood still flowing in the veins of some of my kinfolk.  It wasn’t like it was a less than awe-inspiring sight:   And David lifted his eyes and saw the angel of the LORD standing between earth and heaven, and in his hand a drawn sword stretched out over Jerusalem. Then David and the elders, clothed in sackcloth, fell upon their faces. (v.16)

I think it is more likely that the “continued” doesn’t belong, and the chronicler was simply explaining what Ornan (not to be confused with Onan and his flailing) was doing on his threshing floor, as the old KJV implies.  In any case, Ornan did not run and hide.  Instead he went to David and offered him the ground, the threshing sledges for fuel, the oxen for a burnt offering, and the wheat for a grain offering.  He recognized that this was holy ground.   

Traditionally, we are told that this is the same spot where Abraham built an altar on which to sacrifice his son, Isaac.  It is featured prominently in any modern picture of Jerusalem as it is near the Dome of the Rock mosque on the temple mount.  The parallel passage is in 2 Samuel 24 where Ornan is called Araunah whose name means “Yahweh is firm.”  God is our Rock.  The temple would be built on something that would not sink or shift. 

I may be sometimes as Ornan is depicted here:  in the presence of the miraculous but so caught up in the mundane that it does not fully register.  I admit that I am torn between admiring a man who would just keep on threshing wheat and thinking that he ought to have been more shaken up.  I mean, there was a plague.  Seventy thousand people had died already.  Yes, that’s bad.  I have wheat to thresh.  Some kind of frighteningly glorious being shows up in mid-air with a sword stretched out over your head.  That’s impressive.  This wheat is not going to thresh itself. 

In a way, I think we ought to be like that.  Keep calm and flail on, because it isn’t about our emotions but our obedience.  After all, it’s all around us.  Everything they tell us in songs and sermons, it’s all true, and it’s all right here, right now.  Christ is in us.  We are transformed.  Heaven is everywhere present.  We are immersed in it.  The whole world is on fire with presence of God.  And it is good to let that presence overwhelm us on a regular basis.  No one, though, can live like that every minute of every day. 

More and more, I realize that the secret of Christianity is in plain sight.  We hear it and read it all the time.  Yet we continue to struggle, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff in our hearts and lives.  There is no shortcut to finally hearing – if it is final.  Our ultimately useless efforts are, paradoxically, essential to our enlightenment.  Flail on.

The Rest of the Story

Thus says the LORD: Take care for the sake of your lives, and do not bear a burden on the Sabbath day or bring it in by the gates of Jerusalem. -- Jeremiah 17:21

This is not about whether you and I keep a Jewish Sabbath from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday nor if we have to work on Sunday.  I do think it is good to consider Sunday the first day of the week and, when possible, to take time that day to dedicate the week to the Lord.  But I used to have a job that had a Thursday-Friday weekend.  There are people who keep things going for the rest of us.  We don’t always get to set our schedule the way a more agricultural, less electrified society did. 

It’s good to have a day of rest.  I appreciate this more now that I am older, and remembering the Sabbath to keep it holy is one of the Ten.  In the gospel narratives, though, one of the things that drove the conflict between Jesus and the religious leadership was the Lord’s apparent liberality in interpreting Sabbath rules.  The Pharisees were very strict, but [Jesus ] said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.  So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27-28)

The Sabbath is not a rule to bind us, but a rule to release us.  And, being set free, we ought not allow ourselves to go back into bondage.  The people of Jeremiah’s day were working and ordering their lives by the rules of the unbelieving world.  Keeping the Sabbath by shutting down business as usual, letting their servants and their animals rest, stopping for twenty-four hours to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Lord over their lives would have broken the chains of fear, greed, envy, and covetousness. 

In the same way, for us, the Sabbath is the symbol of the reality that our salvation and our relationship to God are not dependent upon our works.  Gentile Christians were never bound to keep the Sabbath as evidenced by the Jerusalem Council’s letter in Acts 15:28-29:  For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well.

That’s because Christ is our Sabbath rest.  We can read Jeremiah’s warning this way:  Stop carrying your sins around.  Stop trying to come into the City of Peace a burden of guilt and shame that has been dealt with and taken away by the Cross.  Trust the Lord and lay down your burdens before you try to come through the gates into the City of God, into the presence of the King.  But Jesus said it better than anyone else can:

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

A Way in the Wilderness

Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old.  Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?  I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.  The wild beasts will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches, for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself that they might declare my praise.  Yet you did not call upon me, O Jacob; but you have been weary of me, O Israel! – Isaiah 43:18-22

I used to read that with just a twinge of something between self-righteousness and terror.  Now when I read it, I feel more like David probably felt when Nathan pulled back the curtain and said, “Thou art the man.”  (2 Samuel 12:7) 

How does a person become weary of the benevolent, loving and gracious God?  I don’t know about anyone else, but, for one thing, I lose track of my priorities.  I get focused on what I think God ought to be doing – you know, in my humble opinion.  If God isn’t doing what I think is important, I may decide He is doing anything at all.  A meteor smacked some stuff in Russia early this morning.   I had a better target for it a couple of nights ago.   The story says over 500 people were injured, and the other night, a little over 500 people – let’s see, 435 plus 100 plus 9 plus 2 … it would have been perfect. 

There could be a number of reasons God and I might not be on the same page.  Maybe what I think is a disease, God sees as a symptom.  He is working on the cause; I’m fuming about the consequences.  I’m all caught up in what I’m losing, like Tevye’s “Tradition”, while God is doing a “new thing”.  I miss the ultimate for the sake of the immediate. 

As always, the cure for weariness is rest, that is, trust in and reliance upon God alone.  The experts stew and spew like ants on acid.  We want action, or, at the very least, a lot of talk.  While God abhors sloth, He wants us to work out of the space of peace and slack.  There is a beauty and sense in the concept of Lent, of putting aside something that takes too much of our time and effort, that tends to hold us captive, that we think we cannot do without. 

No, I’m not giving up coffee.

But time in the desert, a setting aside of the comfortable and comforting, letting the past pass, resting from the reins of control, there are not things to dread.  The way of which we are weary is not the Way.