Jars

Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at your presence— as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil— to make your name known to your adversaries, and that the nations might tremble at your presence! – Isaiah 64:1-2

I am not happy with the path taken by America in the last hundred years, especially, perhaps the last thirty or so.  My opinion is that our political choices are a function of the state of our hearts, that the decline in our culture, our decadence, our degeneracy arise from a lack of personal righteousness, not only in the hearts of corrupt politicians and corporate CEOs but in the hearts of Americans as a whole. 

God is good, and He will give us what we want.  Unfortunately we have chosen to follow after wickedness and sow the seeds of destruction.  We will reap the same.  One might start to think that the fields are, indeed, these days, white unto harvest.  I tell you, though, even now, God will hear us if we cry out to Him.    

Isaiah cried out to the Lord, asking Him to … rend the heavens and come down.  I pray today that the Lord would come down.  I will not presume to tell Him how to do that, but my study of the Bible makes me think that it is unlikely (though not impossible) that He would rip a hole in the blue sky above me.    

And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.  And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. (Matthew 27:50-51)

The veil in the temple separated God from man.  Man’s sinful nature, what we call “the flesh” kept him isolated and unable to approach God.  When Christ, having taken on the nature of man in the Incarnation, suffered in our place and died a sacrificial, atoning death, that separation was ended.  Isaiah’s prayer found its ultimate fulfillment, its antitype.  God did come down, rending not the blue sky but the First Adam’s nature and bursting forth in the Last Adam. 

Why is there not revival in the Church today?  Why does it seem that evil triumphs at every turn, that we are ruled by the depraved and the godless?  For one, perhaps, we have not because we ask not.  Instead of praying for God to come down, we ask that we might go up.  Sometimes we pray for our leaders – as we should.  We pray that godly men and women will be elected to public office where they often become as corrupt as those around them, if they were not already.  We hope to escape in the Rapture because we believe in that things are just going to get worse and worse.  Maybe they are.  But that is not our call.  We are here.  And, from the Parable of the Talents, the Lord tells us, “Occupy till I come.”  (Luke 19:13)  Take care of business. 

We need to pray that God will come down.  So, you ask, O, wise guy, if the Lord isn’t going to rip the sky open, how is He going to come down?  I’m glad you asked.  He is going to rend something all right.  Consider this verse: But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. (2 Corinthians 4:7)

The power and presence of God resides in His people, in you and, ostensibly, in me.  He is right here, yet something is hindering Him, holding Him back.  That something must be broken.

Remember Gideon and his Three Hundred:

And he divided the 300 men into three companies and put trumpets into the hands of all of them and empty jars, with torches inside the jars. … So Gideon and the hundred men who were with him came to the outskirts of the camp at the beginning of the middle watch, when they had just set the watch. And they blew the trumpets and smashed the jars that were in their hands. (Judges 7:16-19)

What did Jesus tell us?  We are the salt He uses to preserve the earth.  We are the light of the world (Matthew 5:13-16).  He says you don’t light a candle or a lamp and keep it hidden under a basket or in a jar because you can’t see it.

This is what prayer will do.  It will break the jar.  The reason we do not have earth-shaking, nation-transforming revival is because the torch is still in the jar.  If we are concerned about the world, if we are earnest in desiring liberty and freedom for ourselves and our children and grandchildren, if our hearts have been touched and burdened by the unrighteousness we see around us, pray that God will break this jar of clay, these jars of clay and let there be light. 

    

Offensive Christianity

Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.  There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.  But before all this they will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors for my name's sake.  This will be your opportunity to bear witness. — Luke 21:10-13

As in the parallel passage in Matthew 24, the Disciples have asked Jesus about His statement concerning the destruction of Herod's Temple.  The Lord predicts the siege of Jerusalem in 66 to 70 AD and speaks of the calamities surrounding it.  Those who hear the word, though, have always understood that Jesus was seeing beyond the single event and prophesying both of a greater eschatological truth and of a reality that believers in all times and places can comprehend. 

Wars and rumors of wars, natural disasters, and epidemics are the things that keep the evening news on the air selling soap.  Somewhere on this slightly egg-shaped planet today somebody is going to die in a conflict.  Accidents and disasters will take place, but life will go on.  People have not changed all that much due to civilization and Western culture.  We have not really gotten used to it.  We are still playing with the same basic equipment that ushered in the Old Stone Age.  Fears still motivate us.  We are still looking over our shoulders for Smilodon, and we get frightened by Smiling Shem or Fundy Frank or some other bogey of the modern age.  The manipulators like that; it makes us easier to drive into the corral.

Jesus says that, in the times before Jerusalem was surrounded and thrown down, His followers would be rounded up, imprisoned, and persecuted.  "But before all this they will lay hands on you."  This has been the pattern ever since.  Christianity must be silenced, driven underground, diluted or tainted in some way before evil can run its course.  At the very least, the salt must lose its savor and become good for nothing except to be discarded.  As long as Christians are pure salt and light in a society, tyranny and violence, dishonesty and vice are held in check.  The professors can re-write history all they want, but they cannot change the truth.  No nation with a strong Christian base is going to fall victim to internal corruption.  At worst it will do as America did in 1860 and cleanse itself of a corrosive evil, bathed in its own blood. 

They don't lock us up in America these days.  They don't have to.  They corrupt us with fame and money.  They encourage our greed with tax-exempt status — as long as we are willing to play their game.  They segregate us and tell us to keep our religion in our churches, that we can do whatever we want behind closed doors.   You can let your little light shine, so long as you keep it covered with this government-approved bucket.   Preachers don't go to jail in America for preaching the gospel; they are imprisoned for tax evasion.  Gangsters can beat a murder rap, but nobody beats the IRS. 

There does need to be a separation of church and state.   The state needs to get out of the church, which is exactly what the sometimes-agnostic, sometimes-deist, sometimes-unitarian Jefferson meant when he coined the phrase in his letter to the Danbury Baptists.  Churches need to take to heart the admonition of Solzhenitsyn with regard to government:  "Don't believe them, don't fear them, don't ask anything of them."  Christians should not be beholden to the state nor obedient to the state.  Rejecting the state is harder to do when you have been living at least partially off taxpayer beneficence for a hundred years. 

Wait, did he say that Christians should not obey the state?  Yes, I did.  Does anybody think that the Body of Christ is not more righteous — at least in theory — than any government anywhere, any time in history?   Are our standards not higher and purer and truer than anything a bunch of bought-off legislators, bureaucrats, corrupt lawyers, and political hacks would impose?  Grow up!  Do I or does any other Christian need a state law to tell us that certain things are wrong — that it is wrong to hurt or to deceive others, to satisfy our own greed and lust at the expense of another, to enrich ourselves by impoverishing someone else?  Hell, no.  We are guilty of turning our consciences over to the government, of substituting legality for morality.  I don't need a government to outlaw what the Bible tells me is wrong or to force me to do what the Bible says is right.   

As it stands, the church has marginalized itself, becoming enamored of worldly success and acceptance.  We trade in the same corrupting values as the non-believer.  We have watered down the wine to make it acceptable to children, which would not be quite so bad if we hadn't gone and developed such a taste for it as adults.  We can't handle anything stronger any more.  We might get out of hand, upset the status quo.  As Hank lamented about a different kind of wine, nobody wants to get drunk and get loud.  We don't want a Holy Ghost that really emboldens us, that makes others uncomfortable.  He's the Comforter all right, but He only comforts us after we have been shaken by the relentless terror of the truth.  Our God is a consuming fire.  If He ain't freaked you out, you ain't seen Him.

The Church's ineffectiveness against spiritual death and corruption is evident all around us.  Secular American society is rapidly decaying.  Every one of the Seven Deadly Sins has so permeated the thinking of the nation that it is easily deceived and led astray.  When people turn from the truth, the links of the chain are forged, grace is set aside, and the key passes to fate: 

The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.  Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false,  in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.  (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12)

We will not like how this ends, though it is not the End of All Things.  Any little, old antichrist — and there are many, will do to bring about the fall of a city, a state, a culture, or a civilization.  All that has to happen is for Christ and His people to be pushed aside, for His truth to be rejected and ignored — before all this.