Precious Mettle

The blessing of the LORD makes rich, and he adds no sorrow with it. -- Proverbs 10:22

We have talked about the fact that a person getting what he or she wants does not necessarily mean happiness.  I tend to believe that most of us do get what we want – that is, as wise men have said, we get what we are.  A lot of us find we are not at all happy with that.   Change who you are and you can change your circumstances.  You need not go far to find that is rarely works the other way.  A well-washed pig still returns to its wallow. 

Back when I worked for a financial services company, I was looking over the results of a report I had created for the accountants.  I noticed that we had a person on the charge-off list as a result of bankruptcy whose occupation was something like “lottery winner”.  I forget now exactly how it was worded, but that’s what it amounted to.  People who routinely play the lottery are more likely to win, I suppose, but those same people are generally individuals with poor financial management skills and an inadequate understanding of even basic household economics.  It’s kind of a shame “Home Ec” has been disparaged, mocked, and vilified over the years.  A lot of young women, and young men, for that matter, would benefit from grasping even the rudiments of managing home, family, and income.  Budgets, eating good food at home, self-discipline, a little of that and people would not need the feral government to pay their rent or hand them EBT cards – which is probably why it’s no longer a requirement in the government indoctrination center curriculum. 

This verse always reminds me of another, Ecclesiastes 1:18 -- For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.  I have probably said before, I copied this verse out of my King James Version Bible and pinned it to the wall of my bedroom when I was thirteen or fourteen.  I don’t know what I could have known back then that vexed me, but I understood somehow it was true.  Ignorance may not be bliss but it is something of an anesthetic.  I started to say that the exception is the knowledge of God, but that is the most painful of all, for it shows us our own sad condition.  The house doesn’t look too dirty until you turn on the light.  Though, as Jesus says, the sorrow caused by the knowledge of God is like the agony of child-birth that ends in joy. 

As we seek God, He reveals Himself to us and in us.  Here is genuine and eternal wealth, riches that are not deceptive or temporal, that will not perish in the using no matter how prodigal we may be in sharing them.  If your riches are gold and silver, you may find yourself thinking about thieves, seeing thieves and burglars everywhere, investing in vaults and strongboxes.  If your wealth is in houses, you might worry about fire and flood and earthquakes.  If it is land, you may fear drought and pestilence.  Even if you succeed in thwarting the thieves and threats, in the end you must pass from this world and leave it all behind.  But if God is your Source, not even death can separate you from your Treasure.

No sorrow.  Nothing to fear or dread, no matter what may come.  

And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the LORD your God. (Deuteronomy 28:2)

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. (Psalms 23:1)

Oh, fear the Lord, you his saints, for those who fear him have no lack!  The young lions suffer want and hunger; but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing. (Psalms 34:9-10)

I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or his children begging for bread. (Psalms 37:25) 

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.  (Matthew 6:33)

I Can See Eternity from My House

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing.  In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God – 2 Corinthians 4:3-4

The Greek word transliterated “aion” appears frequently in the New Testament, something like 128 times in 102 verses, according to Strong’s Concordance.  For those playing along at home, aion has the Strong’s number of 165 or G165, G for Greek.  It is derived from another word that means perpetually, incessantly or always.  In the good old KJV, aion was most frequently translated as “ever” – as in the Lord’s Prayer:  And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.  Amen  (Matthew 6:13 KJV).  The second most popular translation in the Authorized Version is “world”:    And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come  (Matthew 12:32 KJV).  In my ESV and other modern versions, the phrase reads:  either in this age or in the age to come, but the ESV uses "world" other places as in the verse at the top.

The basic definition is given as a) perpetuity of time, an eternity, or forever; b) the cosmos or “worlds”; c) an age or an indefinite period of time.  For those who are geeks rather than Greeks, one might think in terms of Tolkien’s ages of Middle Earth which vary in length of years but have marked beginning and endings usually involving cataclysmic events such as the destruction of the One Ring.   Beyond that, the idea of an age is somewhat similar to the useful German word zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.  An age denotes the way of thinking, perceiving, and understanding reality that dominates during a period of time.  On www.bibletools.org, I find a quote from Richard C. Trench that sums it nicely:    . . . all that floating mass of thought, opinions, maxims, speculations, hopes, impulses, aims and aspirations at any time current in the world, which is impossible to seize and accurately define, but which constitutes a most real and effective power, being our moral or immoral atmosphere which at every moment of our lives we inhale, again inevitably exhale.

Our “world” is in large part the way in which we interact with it.  It is a little like an operating system on a computer.  One OS may be more powerful in certain areas, another may be easier to use while another may make some otherwise difficult tasks trivial.  Each OS interacts and controls the same physical machine, yet the user of a given system is more or less oblivious to the underlying structure and functionality. 

Apart from the horror that was Vista, most of us as computer users are content with what our operating system gives us.  The same seems to be true of most people in the world.  We are either happy with our world, or we think we have no other option.  Would it not be sad to have Vista as our only choice?  Many have thought for a long time that Bill Gates was the devil.  He’s not, or he would have stopped after foisting such a demonic system on the masses. 

But there is a devil, and he is the god of this aion, that is, of the system of perceiving and interacting with the cosmos that blinds unbelievers and deceives them into thinking that the gospel of Christ is a delusion, that nothing exists except the seen.  As long as we use the devil’s OS, we are going to have a hard time getting to the truth.  The very first step is to understand that … we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen.  For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal (2 Corinthians 4:18).  

My wife has a desktop that came with Vista installed on it.  She has been using it for several years while I told her repeatedly to spend a buck and get Windows 7 (which she runs on her laptop) or something else.  Finally, after the box had simply refused to boot for weeks, she let me install Ubuntu as a demo.  After she played with it a little, she allowed me to install it on a partition alongside Vista.  I am pretty sure, once she gets used to it, she will become an open-source Linux fan-girl.    

The old pagan world had us view ourselves as transient creatures created for and driven by the whims of a myriad of capricious, petty gods we might placate or enlist on our behalf with the appropriate sacrifice or service.  The modern, materialistic world has us viewing ourselves as slightly enlightened animals driven by instincts, trapped in a deterministic universe where we have no choice except to pretend we have a choice and no escape except death.  Our purpose is merely to survive and propagate our genetic material.  (I’m sure a materialist would object to “merely”, but there it is.)  

The gospel teaches us something very different -- that our purpose transcends the boundaries of our material existence on this planet, that we are the children of God, adopted in Christ Jesus, our lives filled with meaning and significance.  We learn that we are free to make good choices (and, by extension, bad ones), to live lives of holiness and righteousness filled with peace and joy.  We are more than our possessions and our achievements.  The marks that we make do not depend on length of life, the number of patents we hold, or the number of children we have.  We will be rewarded in eternity – a new age – based on our faithfulness and obedience. 

A couple of years ago, I wrote about a child who was born and lived for only a few hours.  In the view of this aion, his life was a waste and should have been terminated in the womb, for the parents knew his condition some weeks before his birth.  Nevertheless, I know his brief existence here was but a steppingstone, a poignant prelude to his real life.  During those few hours he did his job of wounding hearts – and do not ever doubt that there is such a needful calling, and a very high calling it is.  Those who can fulfill it are rare and wonderful.    

The zeitgeist is everywhere.  The pressure to conform, to fit into this world system, this aion, is very powerful at times.  Our jobs, our friends, our families, the aches and pains in our physical bodies, the television, the internet, shoot, sometimes even our churches all tell us:  this is it.  Get it while you can. 

But if I can just stop running, I might find out what is behind me.  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life … And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the Lord your God. *

* Some assembly language (also known as “revelation”) required.  Thank God for His grace.