Escaping the Elements

But now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and worthless elementary principles of the world, whose slaves you want to be once more? -- Galatians 4:9

I am an advocate for common sense.  We can avoid a lot of trouble in life solely by paying attention to our sensory inputs, being courteous, and keeping our mouths shut.  When it comes to spiritual truth, however, we need revelation.  Our sense data and the common principles of horizontal relationships are inadequate. 

The Gentiles to whom Paul preached had little to go on other than elementary rules.  From those rudiments, they constructed, we might say, their gods who were fickle and petty, plagued with the same weaknesses as humans.   Occasionally there were flashes of inspiration and glimpses of the absolute as God laid the groundwork for the coming revelation in Christ.  The nations often had an archetype they could link to the gospel of Jesus Christ.  There was nothing as full and complete as the Law and the Prophets given to the Jews, but everybody had something. 

Nonetheless, Jew and Gentile alike were, for the most part, in bondage to rules, ceremonies, rituals, and rites meant to appease divine wrath and gain divine favor.  The Jews had the advantage because their God, though requiring careful approach and respect, was perfect.  He was, indeed, “jealous”, not willing to share worship with any idol, not subject to depiction in any form.  He was, in many ways, as Paul proclaimed to the Athenians, the Unknown God. 

Through Christ, though, we come to know God, even more we are known by Him.  He could not know us, be associated with us, befriend us, or call us His children when we were unrighteous and unholy.  We were strangers, alienated from our Father.  The only way for us to be accepted was through the perfect sacrifice, the Cross.  God has been satisfied in His justice, His righteousness, and His holiness.  We are now family.

I no longer have to offer a lamb or a calf on an altar to be in God’s favor, to receive His grace and forgiveness, or to have access to Him in prayer.  I don’t need to worry about being able to get to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover or the Feast of Tabernacles.  God blesses me because I am His child, adopted in Christ – not because I give my tithe.  To ask the one who has put his faith in Christ to go back to appeasing God through ceremony and animal sacrifice is an affront to the blood Jesus shed.  

Yet, I still give to those in need.  I help out ministries.  I don’t commit adultery thereby keeping my wife from committing murder.  I don’t steal, and I try not to lie or covet.  I did my best to honor my parents, and I have no other gods and no graven images.  I’m assuming it’s OK to have some depictions of Jesus and angels and saints.  I do wish I could convince the boss that the buck-naked waterboy statue is of the devil.  I’m still working on the cussing thing and the Sabbath.  I don’t do or not do those things because I’m trying to impress the Lord, but because I want to live and act in a way consistent with my new nature. 

I try to pay attention to the Spirit and follow His leading rather than going by what I see and hear in the natural realm.  I do not want to be in bondage again to the elements of sense.   I do not want to act out of fear but from faith, because … the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom (2 Corinthians 3:17).

The Law is good.  The disciplines, rites and ordinances of the Church are good – baptism, communion, prayer, fasting, etc., but they don’t make us right with God.  Only the Blood of the Cross makes us right.  We are set free as children of the King and citizens of the Kingdom, and we ought not be in bondage to anything -- good or bad. 

For Freedom

For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. --Galatians 5:1

Freedom:  without it, life itself is impossible.  To live is to be free.

 

Yet we see people everywhere deprived of freedom who live, or appear to live.  What if, tomorrow, I am thrown into a prison cell, chained and tortured?  It happened to Paul, and it did not seem to be much of a hindrance to his liberty.  He could pray and believe and love.  Nothing can separate us from the Spirit of God, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (2 Corinthians 3:17). 

Tomorrow will mark 238 years since a solemn assembly issued our Declaration of Independence.  As a nation we have wandered far from the path of freedom, the trail marked by the Founders, but hope that we will again find our way remains.  It depends on us.  No nation or people may long be free who submit to the slavery of sin and seek to live independent of truth and of God. 

Meanwhile, we as individuals have the choice to reject the world, the flesh and the devil and the shackles of delusion, regardless of what the majority choose, regardless of governments, of oppressive, ungodly laws and tyrannical regulations.  If we do not have freedom in our hearts, we will not see it on the earth.  If we do, there has not been and never will be forged the chain that can bind us. 

Tomorrow, I will thank God that I was born in the time and place I was, born an American with all the opportunities that I have enjoyed.  Especially I will give thanks for the privilege of knowing Christ, of being set free through the cross from the dark dungeon of falsehood.  Perhaps, too, I will offer a prayer of confession and repentance for too often turning from the light to chase after shadows, of sometimes preferring the darkness where I might seek to hide an evil deed.  I will remind myself that the decadence of a nation or of a class is no excuse for debauchery in myself, that I mock liberty and can never be free of oppression if I am willing to oppress and enslave others for my own benefit.

The Lord says that He desires truth in the inwards part, honesty in my heart.  Where there is no truth, there can be no freedom.  If we are willing to know the truth, the truth will indeed set us free (John 8:32).

Have a happy 4th of July.  May God's grace be shed upon us and deliver our nation from destruction.

God's Got It

Come now, let us reason together, says the LORD:  though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool. -- Isaiah 1:18

We are not pawns in game of life, as Mongo would say.  We should stop and think about the significance of this statement by Jehovah.  He is willing to reason with us, to communicate with and try to understand us.  He calls upon us to tell Him how our lives are advancing, where we are, what we need.  He offers us an opportunity to have the past redeemed -- not changed in the sense of undone, but changed in significance and made holy because of where it carries us.

Gagdad has been dealing with the idea of God operating in process as opposed to having everything determined beforehand, that God perhaps restricts His omniscience to past and present.  The future is determined not by God’s foreknowledge but by His intention which is determined by His Nature.  We know, to some extent, where we are headed when we know God.  The future is Christ. 

Let’s consider what Paul says:  Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. (2 Corinthians 3:17)  By this Paul means freedom from the bondage of the old fallen Adamic nature, but what good is liberty, what is liberty apart from the capacity to exercise and enjoy it?

To me, the centrality of prayer in Judeo-Christian practice indicates that all is not determined.  Saying that God is in control is not the same as saying, “Que sera sera”.  God is not the Man Who Knows Too Much, though that is exactly how He is pictured by many.  What we mean is that God may do as He pleases consistent with His character and the laws He has established in dealing with Creation.  He will accomplish that which He intends.  Neither man nor any other being or power is capable of thwarting the Divine purpose.  God is in control. 

He had to carry Jonah to the bottom of the sea in a whale’s gut, but He got that hard-headed soul to Nineveh.  He sent Philip to an unscheduled meeting with an Ethiopian eunuch.  He arranged for combatively kosher Cephas to have a BLT with a Gentile named Cornelius.  He got Paul to Rome on the Emperor’s denarius.  Right now, this day, God, in unknown ways, in the hearts of the most unlikely people, is working out and reconciling what happened yesterday with His goal – to bring us all into that one new race of men in the kingdom. 

The Wings of Gravity

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. -- 2 Corinthian 3:17

There is nothing more important than freedom.  Life itself is an expression of freedom, of God’s freedom in the universe.  It is a breaking away from the determinism of matter, acquiring and utilizing energy through choices and for choices that run counter to an elemental force like gravity.   When a man walks or a bird flies, the rules of gravitation are not broken but superseded.  There are laws of motion and aerodynamics and thermodynamics that allow a living creature to work with gravity, to use forces of friction and inertia which would seem to hold it in place in order to move and go where it chooses.  

If there were a creature that could survive in a weightless vacuum somewhere, perhaps in a potential space where there was no gravitation or anything to impede movement, that creature would be unable to move.  We need resistance.  We need something to drive against in order to propel ourselves toward our goals.  Our imaginary creature in our imaginary space would, in one sense, I suppose, be absolutely unhindered, but in reality it would be perfectly imprisoned. 

Evil may not be the right word here, but it is a convenient one.  We wonder why there is evil let loose upon the world.  Evil may be a function of spirit or morality as gravity is a function of matter.  Evil is not meant to conquer us any more than gravity is meant to chain us to one spot.  Evil enables moral freedom in the same way that gravity enables an eagle to soar or a plane to fly across the ocean.  It is in our resistance against evil that we learn the truth of the law of life and liberty in Christ. 

In my better moments I understand that not only is it pointless to ask for an easy life free from labor, suffering, sacrifice and pain, but the truth is that it would not be much fun.  Of what value is a life without challenges, a life without failure as well as success?  What would freedom mean in a world where a person never had to conquer, if nothing else, his own fears and faults?  I should say, especially my own faults and fears. 

Being in Christ gives us the power to overcome, but we must live for a while in a world where there are things to overcome in order to understand that.  Even the Lord Himself had to come to this earth, to be incarnated, to be limited and subject to the darkness that His light might be seen.