Nowhere To Go But Up

There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest. -- Job 3:17

This is a verse I quote quite often, especially when the issues of life become a more of a load than we think we can bear, and there seems to be no hint of a better day dawning.  We are going to have days like that.  It may take less to depress me than it does for those with a sunnier disposition, but most of us have wished, in one form or another, that we could just get it over with.

Job, of course, is speaking at the culmination of a series of events that robbed him of all his material wealth, his family, and his health.  Everything that we normally think is essential to happiness and hope had been taken from him.  It is hard to imagine how a person in that situation could keep from lamenting the apparent travesty of existence.  In verse 23, he asks, Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in?

The light Job speaks of is, first and plainly, the light of our initial existence, coming out of the darkness of the womb in birth.  He wishes that he could have been stillborn that he might have moved from the darkness of the womb to the darkness of the tomb, with no intervening trouble, weariness, loss, or grief.  

Second, it is the light of human consciousness.  While animals, we know, may feel some form of grief and sadness, they do not experience it in the same way as a human.  Our suffering extends beyond the present, into both the past, as regret, and the future, as hopelessness.  Despair swallows hope like a black hole swallows light.  When we come to the point that there is no reason to go on, we naturally wonder why we still live.  It makes no sense.  A human life devoid of meaning and purpose cannot long be endured.  Many will find a false purpose, even if it is merely to satisfy an artificial craving or addiction. 

The third kind of light is revelation.  Why is a man who is hemmed in, unable to change himself or his circumstances given the light of the knowledge of God, the reality of God’s presence and of His goodness?  This is the most unbearable of all. It is this struggle with the goodness of God that occupies the central point in all of Job’s speeches and those of his friends.  There ought not be these kinds of calamities, this kind of pain and torment – if God is who He has told us He is.   

There is never a tidy answer.  Our suffering, we are told, serves a higher purpose.  Our lives are eternal, and we do go where the wicked cease from troubling.  We weary ones do get to rest.  No matter how unfair, unjust, hopeless, and excruciating our physical lives may turn out to be, this is not the end, and we cannot see the end. 

The grief may not fade away, but we find that we have One who comforts us.  We find hope in, if nothing else, His presence.  We find a purpose in doing His will – even if that is merely to get up one more time, to put one foot in front of the other and stick it out to the end.  They give out medals, the Medal of Honor to those who throw themselves on a hand grenade to save their comrades.  They ought to.  It is a sacrifice worthy of recognition and honor.  It is the mark of the brave and the noble.   

No one is going to give you a medal because you had no reason to go on, but kept going.  Yet, that is courage, too.  Faith looks out over the abyss, sees nothing but darkness and emptiness, and takes one more step. 

Not What I Had in Mind

Be strong and courageous, for you shall cause this people to inherit the land that I swore to their fathers to give them.  Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to do according to all the law that Moses my servant commanded you.  Do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, that you may have good success wherever you go. – Joshua 1:6-7

I could use this same title for every post.  As I often say, I am a much nicer person on the internet than I am in real life.

Faith, hope, love – I was thinking about that, rather bitterly, last night as I was filled with anger and frustration.  My first waking thought was one of hopelessness.  Then I decided to get up and have a cup of coffee and see if I couldn’t make it until sundown.  There is no way I can get everything done today that needed to be done yesterday.  I’m like the guy in “Sixteen Tons” – “another day older and deeper in debt”, except mine is “further behind”.  I don’t think I have accomplished anything tangible in the last year.  In other words, the call to “good success” is not really ringing true this morning.

I do not like to fail.  I do not like to be exposed as anything less than perfect – or at least competent and strong.  I am not inclined to yield the field.  I suppose there is such a thing as a tactical retreat.  It could be, I suppose, that the courage I need is not the courage to press on, but the fortitude to admit my vulnerability, the strength to acknowledge that my strength and ability have limits. 

The meek, Jesus said, shall inherit the earth, but flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom.  We are heirs of God, joint heirs with Christ Jesus (Joshua), heirs not of a bit of soil but of the spiritual reality of which Canaan speaks.  This inheritance is sealed and guaranteed by the presence of the Holy Spirit.  Those who followed Joshua typified the death of self by crossing the Jordan River at flood stage.  The Lord held up the waters of Jordan, as He had done on the Red Sea, so that the people crossed, in effect, under the water.  

Every day – especially lately, it seems that the world is poking and prodding me, wounding my pride and then pouring salt in the wounds.  Overmatched, hounded, hurting and hopeless, I fight on – not out of courage but out of fear.  It seems as if I have been here before, and maybe I have.  Israel passed through the Red Sea to find the Law before passing through Jordan to find grace. 

I hope no one else is as hard-headed as I am, as arrogant and defiant, yet cowardly when it comes to living a surrendered life.  It comes down, perhaps, to an idea that if God gives it, it is His; if I earned it, created it, built it, it is mine.  There’s nothing wrong with owning something in the material world – so long as we recall that even our natural strength and ability is from our Father and that even what we can hold in our hands, we hold only as stewards for Him.  

 But on the other side of Jordan – that place we are promised, that Life that is waiting for us to step into, there is no room at all for my inflated estimation of myself.  Pride has to die right here, and if I try to hang on to even a shred of it, it will pull me down to hell.  Under water.  I have to go under, but I can’t stay.  I can let my old nature pull me to the bottom, but it has to stay there, and I (not I but Christ) have to rise.  I can’t hold my breath much longer. 

A Cry for Repentance. Or Antidepressants.

The Lord said to me: “Do not pray for the welfare of this people.  Though they fast, I will not hear their cry, and though they offer burnt offering and grain offering, I will not accept them. But I will consume them by the sword, by famine, and by pestilence.” – Jeremiah 14:11-12

If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask, and God will give him life—to those who commit sins that do not lead to death. There is sin that leads to death; I do not say that one should pray for that.  All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that does not lead to death. – 1 John 5:16-17

Can a person or a nation get so completely out of kilter, so utter dysfunctional that they must be destroyed?  It must be possible, though it is not my call as to when that takes place.  Seeming devils can become saints.  God knows. 

Here is another one to contemplate.  There was open sexual immorality going on in the church at Corinth.  One of the church members was engaged in behavior that even the pagans would not condone, according to Paul who offered this remedy to the congregation:

For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing.  When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord. (1 Corinthians 5:3-5)   

 

I suppose this was a form of excommunication, though it sounds, on the surface, as if the assembled saints were being called on to pronounce a curse on the wayward one.  The devil take you, we might say – which should remind us to be careful of our words.  Paul expected that allowing Satan to have access to the sinner would lead to his ultimate salvation.  Far better to see the flesh destroyed than to allow a brother to fall away into spiritual death. 

We like to think there is always hope.  Even the Bible suggests that a live dog is better than a dead lion (Ecclesiastes 9:4).  There are times when a disease requires extreme measures.  Damage can be so extensive that the only way to save a life is amputation.  The way to spiritual life is always through death; sometimes it may mean physical death.  Sometimes only suffering and destruction can get us back on the right road. 

I don’t see how a person can have much hope in a society that embraces and exalts wickedness, that glorifies stupidity and wallows in unrighteousness.  But, as I said yesterday, it is not anything new.  If it seems strange to us, it is only because we were once, for a brief moment in history, a better people, or thought we were.  No, I don’t think the revisionists are right – I think we did rise above the churning mediocrity of human ignorance and apathy and selfishness.  It may appear only as a spike above the regression line of history, but it happened.  Our fall is the more evident for it.

Freedom.  Do we even know what it means?  

Oh, and that man in Corinth that the congregation cursed, ever wonder how that turned out?

Now if anyone has caused pain, he has caused it not to me, but in some measure—not to put it too severely—to all of you.  For such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough, so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow.  So I beg you to reaffirm your love for him.

There is always hope.

Big Daddy

And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.  --  Numbers 13:33

Success in life has a lot to do with perspective.  We are all aware of people who like to talk about their disorders, diseases, and the number of surgeries they have had.  Almost all of us, in our honest moments, have fears that nag and plague us.  Fear can be a powerful and positive motivator.  Men who would have eaten their weight in deep-fried ice cream will push back from the table after one serving following a quadruple bypass.  People who have smoked two packs a day since they were sixteen will find the power to quit when seeing a loved one dragging an oxygen tank behind them or laid out in the funeral home from lung cancer. 

On the other hand, I often point to The Princess and the Goblin containing MacDonald’s insightful quote:  “… but that is the way fear serves us: it always sides with the thing we are afraid of ...”.  Fear as a realistic motivator is a good thing, but fear is never content to motivate us.  If we are not careful, it will seek to control us and take away our hope and our courage.  I hate snakes, I dread snakes, but the likely presence of snakes never kept me out of the woods or off the river.  There’s no sense in stepping one, though, if you can help it. 

The Israelites, after 400 years of servitude in Egypt, were free to enter and conquer the land God had promised to Abraham.  “Enter” was no problem.  It was the “conquer” part they were having trouble with.  Since God has made us this promise, shouldn’t He be the one to clear out the Canaanites?  There are some Christians who seem to believe that encountering obstacles means they have missed God’s will for their lives.  Actually, giants and obstacles are usually a sure sign that you are on the right course.  Overcoming obstacles and overcoming the paralyzing effects of fear are part of God’s challenge that constitutes life in the material world.  Sometimes we think that there will be an end to our boot camp obstacle courses, and there is for many folks who decide that “getting out” is all that really matters, and the wilderness, after all, isn’t such a bad place. 

Anybody can say at any point that they have come far enough.  Anyone can saddle up the camel and head back to Egyptian bondage to live on carp, onions and watermelon.  No one has to face the giants.  I suppose that is true, in a sense, but I fear it is misleading.  Each of us has a destiny, a place in the Temple of God, a function and a purpose in the Body of Christ.  There are some diehards that insist if a particular person fails utterly, then the Body will simply lose the benefit of that person’s life.  Thus, you have deterministic Calvinists and patient Universalists agreeing that God will get a person into the right condition.  Calvinists will modify to say that it applies only to “the elect”.  Universalists will add the word “eventually”.  

Me, I don’t know.  I do know what Proverbs 13:15 says, “Good understanding giveth favour: but the way of transgressors is hard” (KJV).  In other words, if you haven’t got the sense to go on with God, you will have a hard row to hoe. Those who could not overcome their fear of giants moved on continually, finding no rest in the desert.  Life was a bitch. Then they died. 

It is easy to sit back in the recliner and wax eloquent about the need to “endeavor to persevere”.  When it is my boots on the ground and the entire enemy line looks like it is made up of Hulk clones, it might be understandable that I am a little less certain.  How do we press on when things appear hopeless and the opposition is simply overwhelming?  Look at what the faithless spies said, “… we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”  It was their own view of themselves in relation to their opponents that caused both parties to see them as insignificant. 

First, we need to be realistic about our own limitations.  I try to practice this in every venue.  The other day I had a review where my supervisor mentioned that my assessment of my own capabilities was pretty well in line with how others saw me.  This is not the case for all my colleagues.  Self-esteem is all right, but it should be based on something.  If I say I am good at something, I ought to be able to point to an accomplishment as proof.  The spies were not wrong in thinking that, one-on-one, strictly from a physical point of view, the sons of Anak could probably dunk on them. 

But, second and much more important is to realize that the game is, to some degree, about finding your limits and learning to transcend them in Christ.  As Philippians 4:13 says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”  It is not the task before us, whether easy or demanding that is the point, rather it is to be in Christ and relying upon Him and upon His strength.  The challenge just helps us realize the necessity of putting off the strange armor of the old man and putting on the whole armor of God.  David understood:    

Then Saul clothed David with his armor. He put a helmet of bronze on his head and clothed him with a coat of mail, and David strapped his sword over his armor. And he tried in vain to go, for he had not tested them. Then David said to Saul, I cannot go with these, for I have not tested them. So David put them off.   Then he took his staff in his hand and chose five smooth stones from the brook and put them in his shepherd's pouch. His sling was in his hand, and he approached the Philistine.  (1 Samuel 17:38-40)

We really can’t do much better than to conclude with David’s example, for he, too, faced a giant: 

Then David said to the Philistine, You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.  This day the LORD will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head.   And will give the dead bodies of the host of the Philistines this day to the birds of the air and to the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the LORD saves not with sword and spear.  For the battle is the LORD's, and he will give you into our hand.  (1 Samuel 17:45-47)

There were twelve spies.  Ten spoke of the giants and the fortified cites.  Two, Joshua and Caleb, dismissed the fears.  Like David, they knew that the battle was the Lord’s and that they need not dwell upon themselves and their own inadequacies. 

Our fears, especially during tough times, can loom large.  Just remember, our Father can beat up their father.