Dynamic Tension

Come, behold the works of the Lord, how he has brought desolations on the earth. -- Psalm 46:8

The Forty-sixth Psalm is one of my favorites, both reassuring and challenging, and this verse goes along with our theme of the last couple of days.  God really is in control.  He protects and shields His people.  The ever-flowing river of the Spirit brings joy to the City of God, which is the Body of Christ, and to us individually as sanctuaries in whom He abides.  We may be frightened by war and upheaval, disaster and desolation, but these things are in His hand as well.  He can make wars cease in a moment, break the bow and shatter the spear.

As Christians we have to live with a sort of dynamic tension, and, like the Charles Atlas-endorsed variety, it makes us stronger.  The trouble is that we are human and liable to move to an extreme.  We should live in a vigilant peace.  But peace can slough off into complacency and vigilance can metastasize into fear and panic. 

This may sound disturbing or controversial, but it seems reasonable to me.  If the Church fails and falls, if Christianity is driven out and defeated, it ought be forgotten and abandoned because that would mean it is wrong.  If the Cross and the Blood are not of God then as Paul said, we Christians are fools and of all men the most miserable.  We are not defeated when we are persecuted, martyred, or driven underground.  We must often, in the long spiraling course of history, be the oppressed and harassed minority, a bloodied and battered remnant that lies below the surface like the root of a fallen oak, from which will sprout a thicket to once again seed the earth with truth.   

God is running this show, or He is not.  The fate of humanity depended on Christ’s obedience to the Cross and the reality of His death, burial, and resurrection.  It is finished.  I don’t need to live in a Constitutional Republic with a free market economy or in a fag-free Falwellian theocracy for the Church to be triumphant.  I would prefer a libertarian central government and a Christian-based community morality at the local level.  I’ll work toward that where I can, but God is still in control if the three branches of the federal government collude to create Chicago-on-the-Potomac, declare all Christians enemies of the state, institute a fully fascist economy, and ban assault study Bibles -- especially the ones with high-capacity concordances.    

Taken as a whole, this is what Psalm 46 tells me, “Be still, and know that I am God.  I will be exalted among the nations; I will be exalted in the earth!” (v.10)  

God is not going to be defeated by a bunch of self-satisfied human slugs, con men, perverts, and petty crooks.  Nor will He be defeated by a bloody, backward, antichrist religion that can be sustained only through fear and oppression.  The mockers and the doubters, the scoffers and skeptics will pass like fog in heat.  Christ remains, and Christ will remain.   

The nations rage, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice, the earth melts.  The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah   (Psalm 46:6-7).

Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.  Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.  Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.  And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.  To him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen. (1 Peter 5:6-11)

The Rest

It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.  Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him – Lamentations 3:27-28

Be still, and know that I am God – Psalm 46:10

For fifteen days I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions. I was then very ignorant; every day I seated myself at my work table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results. One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak., making a stable combination. By the next morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those which came from the hypergeometric series; I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours. – Henri Poincaré

It doesn’t matter what we strive to do, striving is necessary – if only to prove that striving alone is insufficient.  Discipline, bearing the yoke, if we carry it through to the end, will lead us to a summit of silence.   

Paul calls the Law a guardian, a nanny, a pedagogue – something formal and pedantic to help us get started in the right way.  

So it is with all the burdens we carry in life – with life in this world itself.  Our journey here, all of it, long or short, is mostly boot camp.  Some of us will advance a little beyond and be more of a help than a hindrance to our fellow travelers, and we will all know our joys as well as our sorrows along the way.   

At times, really, the weariness seems too much. 

For those times, God has given us the gift of silence.  The space between, the stillness that holds the rhythm.   Rest.

Still

Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord GOD, when I will send a famine on the land— not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. -- Amos 8:11

It is not that the Lord ever ceases to speak but that people can no longer hear.  The world never listens, never hears God.  With directionless lives, they skitter about as if they were on a mission only to skitter back to where they started.  They hear nothing and assume that God is no longer speaking, or that He cannot speak, does not exist. 

Even when we want to hear, our ears may be dulled by the circus calliope, the cacophony of clowns clambering at the foot of the mountain.  Be still and know that I am God, we are told.  Those of us who seek this knowledge may withdraw to the mountaintop, to the deserts, to remote and lonely places seeking that stillness and silence.  This can be good – at least on occasion and for a time.  Some are called to it as a lifestyle, and any of us may  be called aside now and then.  God, though, does not require physical stillness or silence, but a stillness of heart, a space of spirit.  Your body is the temple and in that most holy place there is quiet.  In here, His voice may be heard over the rage and thunder of battle and storm, so long as the storms and battles remain outside.  Go in, as Jesus advised, to that “closet”, that secret, hidden place and close the door. 

For thus said the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel, In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.  It sounds so simple.  Go in and sit at the feet of Jesus.  Yet the verse ends with heart-breaking words:  But you were unwilling.  Let that not be true of us. 

Why would anyone refuse the rest and peace, strength and guidance the Lord offers?  We are willing enough to sprawl in front of a television, to rest physically.  What many of us seem reluctant to do is turn our minds and hearts to the reality of the indwelling Christ, to rest upon Him, His Person and the finished work of the Cross. 

The typical evangelical “worship” service is hardly a place for meditation, reflection, or rest.  There is noise and commotion and high tech displays designed to appeal to the audience’s increasing short attention span.  Many larger churches these days have separate services oriented to divergent demographics.  Older people like me go to one service while the younger crowd goes to a (typically) later service with more flashing lights and newer music played faster and louder, followed by sound-bite sermons from speakers in distressed denim. 

It’s appropriate.  I’m pretty distressed if I happen to walk into one of those by mistake.  My other personal gripe has to do with auditorium lights turned down so low that I can’t see my Bible, let alone read the words.  I’m always tempted to pull out one of my tactical flashlights to follow along – though, of course, the verse is up on the wall anyway.   Real worship is possible in such a place but only because of the inner stillness, the trappings are mostly distractions. 

We seem inclined, like the Romans to whom Paul wrote, to try to ascend up to heaven to bring Christ down or descend into the abyss to bring Him up from the dead with all of our rituals and noisy celebrations.  But what does it say? The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.  There is no need to suffer famine or drought.  The word is in our hearts.  Out of our innermost being will flow rivers of living water.

God still speaks to the still.