Think Again

I was talking to my brother the other day.  He had just been reading the book of Hebrews and was excited about chapter 11 and the heroes of faith that are listed there in such detail and filled with all sorts of enthusiasm and he wanted me to be able to share in that excitement and talk to him about what I thought.  Well, I couldn't say much because I didn't feel that way.  I read it and it might as well have been in another language.  It was completely incomprehensible to me.  What I really felt when I read it was condemned, because I knew that I was nothing like all those heroes.  But, I had a feeling that that wasn't the message I was supposed to take away although what that message might be I had no idea.  So, I did what any obsessively analytical person would do, I read the whole book, after all, "Context is king."  This particular strategy proved a total failure.  All I could see in Hebrews was my failure, I mean sure it talks a lot about how great Christ is, but what really resonated with me was this,

For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, if they fall away, to renew them again to repentance, since they crucify again for themselves the Son of God, and put Him to an open shame.
For the earth which drinks in the rain that often comes upon it, and bears herbs useful for those by whom it is cultivated, receives blessing from God; but if it bears thorns and briers, it is rejected and near to being cursed, whose end is to be burned. Hebrews 6

I saw myself.  There is no doubt that Christ has enlightened me concerning His Word; I have tasted His goodness I know it every time I see my wife and our soon to be born babygirl, I know what it feels like to have His Spirit, to think His thoughts, to love His loves and hate His hates.  And I have absolutely fallen away.  I have been backsliding into my sins since I first gave them up in baptism so long ago.  I am the dog who goes back to his vomit over and over again, except that the dog isn't disgusted by it and I am.  Yet I still go back, I wretch and gag on my own filth even as I wolf it down.  So, it is impossible for me to be renewed to repentance.  That is what I see when I look in Scripture.  It is as plain as day and absolutely wrong.

We have been taught that falling away, "backsliding", apostasy, refers to sinful actions.  That is to say, that as Christians we give up all of our bad behaviors and if we pick them up again then we are screwed.  All of the Shepherds for Hire have tried to mitigate the force of these verses.  They talk about patterns of behavior, the overall trend and characterization of your life and various other garbage.  My only response is to ask, "When we find a place in Scripture that seems strong and full of power should we water it down?  When we get the good wine, even if it kicks like a mule, that the Bridegroom has held back for us, should we water it down and make it into the swill of our daily lives?  I would rather be damned by a Christ who is powerful and sovereign than be lightly chastised by the wuss those guys preach."  So let's not make excuses for ourselves that Scripture never makes for us.  But is that what the writer of Hebrews is talking about?  He doesn't say renew them again to good behavior, but renew them again to the most misunderstood word in Christianity, to repentance.

We are told that repenting means to feel bad about something and to stop doing it.  It is confounded with penance that is doing good things to make up for the bad things that you have done, known more popularly by the Hindu name Karma.  But there is no question that that is not what the word used in the New Testament means.  Our word "repent" is a transliteration of the Greek "metanoia" which simply means, "to change one's mind".(I don't claim to know jack about Greek but literally every single person who does agrees with what I have just written.)  So, what does that do to our understanding of the New Testament?

John came baptizing in the wilderness and preaching a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. Then all the land of Judea, and those from Jerusalem, went out to him and were all baptized by him in the Jordan River, confessing their sins. Mark 1

 John came telling people that their minds could be transformed such that God would not count them guilty of their sins.  They could literally become new people, that is people with new minds, through the death and resurrection pictured in baptism.  And suddenly, all of the things that they had been too ashamed and scared to tell anybody they were shouting to anybody who would listen, like freemen, just as if they were right with God in spite of all that.  And this newness was not something that applied to their actions, anymore than their bodies were literally drowned to death by John.  It was a newness in the mind, a new way of thinking.  They stopped thinking that they were right, that they were good people, that the religious crap they were doing was pleasing to God.  They stopped thinking that they were justified and wallowed in the fact that they were condemned, because condemnation and failure are what qualifies us for the mercy of God.  They stopped thinking that they were free and good and saw themselves as "sold under sin" and thus they found mercy and forgiveness.

This seems very different, is there somewhere that we can see what this looks like, has someone who had this new mind expressed what was in his new mind?  Good news, I can show you that mind not just in somebody but in an apostle, in fact in YOUR apostle assuming you are a gentile.

For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin. For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.
I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!
So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin. Romans 7

This is not some average example.  This is the goal, the target, this is where our Apostle, our foundation, our Father in Christ found himself at his absolute greatest, for did anyone ever get closer to Christ than Paul did when he penned his letter to the Romans?  Just a few comments on what he has made so clear.  First "carnal" has nothing to do with your mind.  It is literally meat, the meatsuit you are walking around in.  It simply means physically descended from Adam and an heir of his sin.  Paul's actions haven't changed, they are still sinful, "sold under sin", and I have no doubt that the jews accused him of "backsliding".  Second, when he says that nothing good dwells in his flesh, this is kind of an obvious point but his mind and his heart dwell in his flesh.  His new mind hasn't convinced him that his mind and heart are good.  Far from it, his new mind agrees wholeheartedly with the law that it and all of him are bad.  It knows that only one is good and that he is not that one.  And for all of our "pattern of behavior" preaching friends look carefully at that word "practice" in verse 15.  The evil that I will not to do I practice.  Evil is Paul's pattern of behavior at the very moment when he is inspired by the Spirit of God.

Now that is all very nice but what does it have to do with Hebrews 6 and my apostasy?  Let's go to the top of Romans 7 for a second.

For when we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit to death. verse 5

What sinful passions are aroused by the law?  The things that we usually think of as sin, aren't unconnected to the Law, but it is only an accidental connection.  I think that he is talking about something more direct, something stemming from the very nature of the Law.  What does the law do? Well the Law shows us all of the good reasons that God has to be angry with us, and makes us want to fix that.  It makes us want to justify ourselves.  The Law is the mother of religion, and the religious passion is the primary sinful passion.  Our theological gymnastics and our great sacrifices and feats of righteousness are filthy in the sight of God.  Our offerings and our sacred gatherings make Him nauseous.  What we mainly need to think again about is the idea that our religion is worth something other than as a joke.  He desires mercy but our religious sacrifices are getting in the way.  And that brings us back to where we started.

For the earth which drinks in the rain that often comes upon it, and bears herbs useful for those by whom it is cultivated, receives blessing from God; but if it bears thorns and briers, it is rejected and near to being cursed, whose end is to be burned. Hebrews 6

This is how the author explains the words that we found so condemning.  How does his metaphor work?  The earth is us obviously.  What is the rain?  It is the Gospel, not some word telling us to do right or else, but the word that God forgives sinners.  The "useful herbs" of the Gospel are the new mind, the joyful acceptance of our own damnation because it brings to us the mercy of God, the knowledge that He will not count our sins against us which frees us to confess.  So then, We drink in the Gospel that comes to us, and it creates in us a new mind, a mind that feels its own evil but also its justification in Christ.  Then what are thorns and briars which keep us from God?  Self-righteousness.  The religion that teaches us that we have gotten it right, that we used to be in trouble but have since cleaned up our act.  The belief that our sins are in the past and that in front of us is victory and "sanctification".  This is the religion of the Pharisees and I think that that makes it plain enough how it crucifies Christ again, the same way it crucified Him the first time.

So, what you need to not "fall away" from, is the forgiveness of sins and the confession that you are still not good but that "all are confined under sin that He might have mercy on all".  Our idea of salvation is that we are good enough, we do the right thing even if it is as simple as believing or trusting, and that God looks at us and declares us good.  His idea of salvation is to condemn us utterly and then forgive sins freely.  Think your religion is worth something to God?  Think again.

Omega Male

I wrote this in the fall of 2016.  I had written a new message for today that continues our series on Revelation that I wasn’t tremendously happy with when I realized that I had already said most of what I was trying to say much better.  But before I start I want to read the introduction to the series again.

"We are wrong about everything else but we are right about the Gospel."  It's a pretty good one liner and I have kind of been using it as the unofficial motto of our church.  "We are wrong about everything else but we are right about the Gospel."  What I mean to imply by that is that the Gospel is the only thing that matters.  The Gospel, quite literally, justifies all of our other mistakes, errors, and failures.  So, for our look into Revelation the key that I intend to use is something like this.  "I am wrong about eschatology.  I am wrong about numerology.  I am wrong about symbolism.  But I intend to be right about what the Revelation says about Christ."  Where it is necessary to try and interpret John's visions to tell my story, I don't intend to seek a coherent system of symbolism, I don't intend to offer any opinion on the chronology of the "End Times", not even in the most general of ways.  Instead, I will shamelessly use all of the imagery and mysticism to try and illustrate the Christ of Revelation.  If that is how John intended it to be used then it might work out pretty well.  If it isn't, "Oh well."

Growing up in a small town deep-south Fundamentalist church the "End Times" were always being talked about and thought about.  We were devoutly committed to the pre-tribulation, pre-millenial, futurist, vision of God raining down punishment on all of the people who did the things that we weren't free to do, and giving us bigger and better versions of the few things that we were allowed to enjoy, mostly ruling over others and being spiritually rich.  I heard the views of our microscopic clique defended as the very Word of God and treated as if it were impossible for anyone who knew God to come up with any other conclusion when reading the strangest, most mysterious piece of literature ever written.  Of course, we didn't really recognize John's Apocalypse as mysterious, poetic, and certainly not literary, in fact my mathematician grandfather wrote a book explaining all of the numbers in Revelation as if it were as straightforward as arithmetic and proving beyond all doubt that the "Tribulation" would begin in 1993 and the Lord would return in 2000 to set up a government in Jerusalem.

My childhood seems like an example so extreme as to be ludicrous but this idea of the Lord's return is deeply entrenched in Christianity.  While we were willing to excommunicate over the details of our eschatological scheme, it seems like no one ever questioned the big picture of Jesus Christ as the ultimate Alpha male.  Now, in a certain sense, no one should question that picture.  He spoke the worlds into existence, He stared Adam down and judged the whole of humanity with all the authoritativeness of the most A-type CEO imaginable.  He wiped the slate clean in a flood that forever changed the face of the earth, arbitrarily chose Abram from the rest of the idolaters as never a revolutionary dictator reshaped his country.  He got straight in Pharoah's face and drug several million people, kicking and screaming, from the slave pens of Egypt like the greatest Superman comic book ever, and then proceeded to regulate the smallest details of their lives from a burning, storming mountain with unimaginable tyranny.  This is a true picture of Christ, the Lord who never changes.  But it isn't the only picture of Him.

I long ago rejected the theories of God which imagine some discontinuity between the God of Genesis and Exodus and the Christ of the Gospels.  Christ must be the same both in Eden and Gethsemane, on Sinai and in the Sermon on the Mount, walking the forty years in the desert and walking the Via Dolorosa else He is not Himself.  But the two pictures seem so radically different that it is hard, maybe impossible, for our minds to combine them in a single consistent picture.  What two things could seem more opposite than Joshua conquering Palestine city by city, terrifying the inhabitants with divine might and disposing of all things as he chooses; and the Apostles chased from city to city, a laughingstock and a joke, in prison, on the execution block, helpless and foolish.  As I grow older, I have become more respectful of those who seeing this difficulty simply throw up their hands and exclaim that this must be the work of two different Gods.  At least they are taking an honest look and choosing an option that seems credible, rather than defending something that they think ridiculous simply out of fear that rejecting it will exclude you from the love of God.  Is there a combination of the two in which we can rest?  Can the Firstborn of All Creation be the last and least of men, rejected and despised?  Can the Alpha of all Alphas be Omega?  He claims that He is, and He is faithful and true.

It seems as if we are stuck with a picture that we can't get into focus.  All of the lines seem blurred like a photo of a moving object.  And I think that is the problem.  Alpha and Omega is a snapshot at one moment in time of that which is outside time, the Eternal One.  He never moves and He always moves.  From the beginning He works but His whole being is a Sabbath rest.  To begin to understand Him, we need that snapshot but we also need a video, a narrative and a story requires more than one character.  The other character is made from the dust, the lowest and humblest imaginable.  His life is lived in the very dust from which He came, toiling dragging his living from the soil.  He is a murderer, a madman, a thief and a liar.  It is fair to say that he has "sought out many schemes" which have turned Earth from a Paradise into a Hell.  Every advance we have made has proven to simply be a way to increase the mayhem we cause.  This man "made in the image of God" seems more like a photographic negative, and as God is all light we seem to be all darkness.  And that is the problem which causes the plot of our story.  Like all good stories it is a love story, a love story between one who is high and lifted up and one who is wallowing in his own filth.

It is the story then of a great prince in love with a peasant woman.  The glory of love is to make the unequal equal.  And in our imagination this can be done by raising the lower to the level of the higher, but reality is more glorious than that.  In the real world, this must always be done by the greater willingly making himself less that He and His love might be one.  The prince then becomes a peasant, not just in appearance but in reality.  Reality is that Cinderella doesn't move in to the palace, happily ever after happens in a shack with the Prince digging ditches to put food on her table.  He who previously owned the cattle of a thousand hills, must now either work or starve, but to get closer to the matter, He who once said, "Your brother's blood  cries out to me from the ground." must say, "I am not a judge between you and your brother.", The wisdom which ordered all things is reduced to a simplicity which honest men find difficult to tell from retardation.  I can't make this story as true as the Four Evangelists, somehow they show Him as both at the same time, which is the truth and beyond my poor ability.  We get that He made Himself the lowest and least of men, but somehow we think it was just a show, that at the Ascension He became again what He was before.  Such a thought is unworthy of Him.  To do so would be for Him to go backwards, but He is not a man to repent.  The great pattern of His story cannot be reversed, the Prince gets ever lower and lower.  He was once All that Is, by His choice, He can now be trivialized, marginalized, overlooked.

The only thing that we can see lower than a baby in a stable, is a condemned man on a cross.  But there is something yet lower.  I don't know what it is because, despite it being almost 20 years after His predicted return, He has not shown it to us yet.  Might I suggest, that His Second Coming will be yet more humiliating than His First, and will cement Him to ourselves yet more surely?  The glorious picture that John, the greatest of all poets saw, can only be seen by the poetic part of man.  In a literal way, His return will be pathetic, laughable, and probably end yet more tragically than His life.  But, the question is, will your heart sing at the poetry of the Lord of Heaven and Earth becoming literally garbage for the woman He loves?

 the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each having a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song, saying:

“You are worthy to take the scroll,

And to open its seals;

For You were slain,

And have redeemed us to God by Your blood

Out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation,

And have made us kings and priests to our God;

And we shall reign on the earth.”

Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne, the living creatures, and the elders; and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice:

“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain

To receive power and riches and wisdom,

And strength and honor and glory and blessing!”

And every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, I heard saying:

“Blessing and honor and glory and power

Be to Him who sits on the throne,

And to the Lamb, forever and ever!”

Then the four living creatures said, “Amen!” And the twenty-four elders fell down and worshiped Him who lives forever and ever

WWJD: The Opposite

When I was a teenager there was a big craze centered around the words "What Would Jesus Do?"  The idea of course was that Jesus wouldn't drink alcohol, wouldn't have sex before marriage, watch tv shows where people cuss, wouldn't binge on hot wings and mountain dew, would tell everyone around them how to clean up their life in a very encouraging and motivating way, would probably even call these things "The Gospel" and condemn everyone who messed them up to the Centerpiece of Evangelical Faith.  Even worse, I was told repeatedly that the reason the world was going further and further from Christ was somehow because I wasn't living enough like Christ.  Somehow I had been given the master flusher and it wasn't just my life that was circling the toilet bowl.  Tied up in all of this is an idea about the importance of how other people see you.  You can't just do the right things(which for me always stalled more in the region of "you can't even do the right things") you have to be seen doing them.  The world is judging Christ based on how a few dumb teenagers in a town that isn't even a dot on most maps eat, drink, and entertain themselves.  I assume that the world is disguised as a herd of cows because there sure as hell wasn't anybody else around to watch me.  But anyway, what you were perceived to be doing was vitally important.  The way one teacher put it to me is that it is all about the way your life is characterized, kind of a what are they gonna put on your tombstone kind of thing.  I finally know what I want written on my tombstone, perhaps I am reaching too high, overestimating my own level of piety, but I know what I want my life to be like by the time I am done with it, and I am already halfway there.

Here lies Jonboy

Drunkard and Glutton

Friend to Tax Collectors and Sinners

The big problem with What Would Jesus Do, is that our answers never matched What Did Jesus Do, or at best they only matched a heavily edited edition of His life.  Basically I grew up thinking that Jesus spent His life being nice to everybody, living a life that matches the human ideal of holiness, and basically just being such a sweet heart of a guy that nobody would ever want to beat the crap out of Him and certainly no one would ever nail Him to anything because of the way He lived and the way He ran His mouth.  It has taken me years to understand that He didn't just not live the way that I thought He did, He lived The Opposite.  Watch this video.(Ignore the weird captions)

Christ charted the course of His life for precisely the purpose of showing us that everything we thought, especially about God, was so far off as to be ludicrous.

“To what can I compare this generation? They are like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling out to others:
“‘We played the pipe for you,
    and you did not dance;
we sang a dirge,
    and you did not mourn.’
For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is justified by all her children.” Matthew 11

I think that John Baptist was a genius, one of the truly great contributors to human civilization and tremendously undervalued, possibly second only to his Master.  Christianity is filled with various imitations of his asceticism, we all abstain according to our personal fetishes.  And we certainly have plenty of people trying to live like they imagine Christ lived,  and almost all of these religious fanatics begin with abstinence from everything that makes life worth living and avoiding the "wrong company".(which is like a turd trying to keep itself clean and pure, it might be in our best interests for the religious turd to be isolated but that is to keep the rest of humanity away from his((my)) crap, not to keep the turd from being contaminated with filth)   Jesus was not accused of being a drunkard because of His love for nonalcoholic drinks.  Being a religious turd, like the ones who accused Him, I know how they operate, and let me just say that religious turds do not accuse you of things with no basis.  If they called Him a drunk, and they did, then He must have thrown back a few brews.  Maybe He needed His beer goggles on to think I am worth saving, I don't know.  He was obviously drunk when He picked us, cause lets face it He ain't going home with no prize.  He wasn't accused of hanging out with the lowest elements of society because He invited them to Bible studies a lot.  He was and is our friend, and those who hate us have never ceased to hate Him for it.(or those who hate Him have never ceased to hate us for it, not sure which way that works)

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn

“‘a man against his father,

    a daughter against her mother,

a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—

    a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’ Matthew 10

How did that sweet little baby grow up to be such a freakshow?  I mean the person who would turn families against themselves would seem, in my estimation, to be more of an Antichrist than a Christ.  Deliberately starting a war is generally frowned upon, even by those who are not wearing their WWJD bracelets.

 Those of us who imagine that Christ came to give us a more practical version of the Law that is easier to fulfill can't possibly have ever read what He actually said.

“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.
“It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
“Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but fulfill to the Lord the vows you have made.’ But I tell you, do not swear an oath at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. All you need to say is simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Matthew 5

He did just the opposite.  He took the Law and really tightened the screws down.  His plan to save the world didn't involve excusing our faults, it began with thoroughly condemning us for them.  And anytime we think that we have gotten beyond that it turns out that we haven't even gotten that far.  We think we have made great progress in holiness but we haven't even met the prerequisite yet.  No one will enter Heaven who hasn't been fully and finally damned by the Law.  Our fear of being left out makes us try and get to the end before we have even begun.  We are trying to be perfect Christians and don't realize that we probably aren't Christians at all.

I have known a lot of people who were spiritually rich, who must have lots of crowns and piles of treasure in Heaven.  They lived a life of being holy, doing good, and pointing others to Christ.  Poor dumb bastards.  "Blessed are the spiritually poor, Heaven is for them.  Blessed are those who have no righteousness, no good works, no testimony, for my righteousness, my good works, my testimony is theirs."  What is truly sad about Christianity is that we are so determined to make a good show, to run a good race and fight a good fight, that we miss the whole thing.  We have to smile and sing during our suffering and so we miss out on the whole point.  "Blessed are those who are sad, who are miserable, who are depressed for they will know Me and my name is Comfort."  We use our difficult circumstances to prove that we are superChristians instead of actually mourning and being comforted.  We trade the true peace of Christ for a stupid show.

"Be careful not to have a testimony. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. When you help somebody don't preach them a sermon and don't tell your Sunday School about it. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.  Don't bless your food in the middle of a restaurant and please please don't leave a tract for a tip.  And when you do pray, which should be like 007-nobody should know about it-don't give me a bunch of religious crap, don't beat me over the head with how much you care about missionaries and sick old people, and how thankful you are cause I know you aren't." paraphrased from Matthew 6

My Lord didn't come for the spiritual winners.  I got some sad news for you, it is the spiritually rich who will really have a hard time getting into Heaven.  He doesn't want people who get it all right, or even any of it right.  He wants just the opposite.

Easy Answers

Recently a friend of mine has been wrestling with the question of how the God of Christianity, a God of love who looks upon all of mankind as His children, can ever abandon any of those children, ever send them to Hell.  As a father he says that nothing that his children do could ever make him abandon them and reasons that as God is a better father than he is such is unquestionably true of Him.  As I considered this issue it caused me to take a second look at why it is that Christ does and will rain such terrible judgment on the very ones that He died to take their punishment away.  It seems to me from the Prophets that the sins that chiefly anger Our Lord are when we harm our brothers and sisters, His other children.  And so I rephrased the question that has been so much on Al's mind.  How could a God who loves His children so much, ever forgive, ever fail to avenge His children on those who hurt them?  If one of your children, your beloved children, rose up as a Cain and slew another as much beloved, where does that leave you?

I have written about Cain and Abel before, but it seems that I neglected to consider it from a crucial point of view, that of Adam and Eve.  The parents who can never stop loving Cain are also the parents who can never stop loving Abel.  When God banished Cain, sentenced him to be a fugitive, who do you think the instruments of that divine justice were?  It must surely have been his parents.  They drove out the child, the firstborn of all humanity, that they had had such hope for.  They made their first son the first villain.  This, I think, is the abyss that God, that Christ, finds Himself always staring into.  I won't bother proving to you that we are all Cains, that the anger God feels towards you and I is the same that Adam must have felt towards Cain.  We must take that as a given if we consider the lofty duties we have to our brothers and our behavior towards them.  He calls us the apple of His eye and swears that He will not forgive those who hurt us(Zechariah 2) and will He Himself do us the greatest harm that anyone could do another, that is eternal damnation?  I said that a parent in this situation is staring into an abyss and I was going to say that I hope that we don't ever find ourselves in that situation, but that isn't true.

For as long as I can remember I have had all of the answers.  Answers have always come easy for me, including answers to religious questions.  I received a pretty full and complete faith from my parents, my grandparents, and numerous teachers of all sorts.  I never had questions about how God could send sinners to Hell because I knew all of the proofs of it in the Bible.  I believed all of the right things because I was afraid if I didn't I would go to Hell.  But what if Christianity isn't about the right answers or the right responses?

I can think of one man who would have understood Adam's pain immediately and deeply, the prophet Hosea.  Hosea watched his wife going out whoring(whether sexually or through idolatry makes no difference in this context), He must have begged, pleaded, and threatened; must have used everything he had or was to try and straighten her up.  And, if I have read his story rightly, there came a day when He had to watch her leaving, and what's more taking the children with her.  I don't know what kind of a man, what kind of a husband or father, Hosea was, but can there be any doubt about the distress he must have felt at the thought of his children being raised by a crack whore mom in the religion which had brought her to that place?  He must have felt that the day would come when his children would be unrecognizable to him, and perhaps unrecognizing of him.  I can't draw a picture for you of the anguish he must have felt at the thought of the boy he named "Not my son" no longer being his son, of the thought that next time he saw his daughter "No mercy" he would not have mercy on her because of what she had become.

Hosea understood Adam's pain, but more to the point He understood Christ's pain.  And that is the point.  The answers have come too easily to us.  We have reached the zenith of religion.  We have had faith because only faith could guarantee our acceptance.  We have gone beyond faith, to it we have added on top Calvinism or speaking in tongues, great knowledge of the Bible and church history, we have added our stupid works.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of religion but faith is not.  Faith is the end.  In 100 years of true devotion, Abraham got no further than faith, barely found faith.  To believe in the resurrection of the dead, of Isaac, is the farthest he ever got, yet it is where we are told we must begin.  We have received the content of our life ready made from our parents, without the dread, the fear and trembling, that Adam and Abraham and Hosea knew so well.  Why did these men have to go through so much?  Because they were elect, beloved of God, as you and I are.  Because it is the only way to KNOW God.  I find in Hosea's words a more beautiful understanding of God than is anywhere else recorded, and it only came through the horror of staring into Hell.

And she conceived again and bore a daughter. Then God said to him:

“Call her name Lo-Ruhamah(literally No Mercy),
For I will no longer have mercy on the house of Israel,
But I will utterly take them away.
Yet I will have mercy on the house of Judah,
Will save them by the Lord their God,
And will not save them by bow,
Nor by sword or battle,
By horses or horsemen.”

Now when she had weaned Lo-Ruhamah, she conceived and bore a son.Then God said:

“Call his name Lo-Ammi(Not my Son),
For you are not My people,
And I will not be your God.

“Yet the number of the children of Israel
Shall be as the sand of the sea,
Which cannot be measured or numbered.
And it shall come to pass
In the place where it was said to them,
‘You are not My people,’
There it shall be said to them,
‘You are sons of the living God.’
Then the children of Judah and the children of Israel
Shall be gathered together,
And appoint for themselves one head;
And they shall come up out of the land,
For great will be the day of Jezreel!

Say to your brethren, ‘My people,’
And to your sisters, ‘Mercy is shown.’

“Bring charges against your mother, bring charges;
For she is not My wife, nor am I her Husband!
Let her put away her harlotries from her sight,
And her adulteries from between her breasts;
Lest I strip her naked
And expose her, as in the day she was born,
And make her like a wilderness,
And set her like a dry land,
And slay her with thirst.

“I will not have mercy on her children,
For they are the children of harlotry.
For their mother has played the harlot;
She who conceived them has behaved shamefully.
For she said, ‘I will go after my lovers,
Who give me my bread and my water,
My wool and my linen,
My oil and my drink.’

“Therefore, behold,
I will hedge up your way with thorns,
And wall her in,
So that she cannot find her paths.
She will chase her lovers,
But not overtake them;
Yes, she will seek them, but not find them.
Then she will say,
‘I will go and return to my first husband,
For then it was better for me than now.’
For she did not know
That I gave her grain, new wine, and oil,
And multiplied her silver and gold—
Which they prepared for Baal.

“Therefore I will return and take away
My grain in its time
And My new wine in its season,
And will take back My wool and My linen,
Given to cover her nakedness.
Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers,
And no one shall deliver her from My hand.
I will also cause all her mirth to cease,
Her feast days,
Her New Moons,
Her Sabbaths—
All her appointed feasts.

“And I will destroy her vines and her fig trees,
Of which she has said,
‘These are my wages that my lovers have given me.’
So I will make them a forest,
And the beasts of the field shall eat them.
I will punish her
For the days of the Baals to which she burned incense.
She decked herself with her earrings and jewelry,
And went after her lovers;
But Me she forgot,” says the Lord.

“Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
Will bring her into the wilderness,
And speak comfort to her.
I will give her her vineyards from there,
And the Valley of Achor as a door of hope;
She shall sing there,
As in the days of her youth,
As in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt.

“And it shall be, in that day,”
Says the Lord,
“That you will call Me ‘My Husband,’
And no longer call Me ‘My Master,’
For I will take from her mouth the names of the Baals,
And they shall be remembered by their name no more.
In that day I will make a covenant for them
With the beasts of the field,
With the birds of the air,
And with the creeping things of the ground.
Bow and sword of battle I will shatter from the earth,
To make them lie down safely.

“I will betroth you to Me forever;
Yes, I will betroth you to Me
In righteousness and justice,
In lovingkindness and mercy;
I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness,
And you shall know the Lord. Hosea 1:6-2:20

In our time nobody is content to stop with faith but wants to go further. It would perhaps be rash to ask where these people are going, but it is surely a sign of breeding and culture for me to assume that everybody has faith, for otherwise it would be queer for them to be … going further. In those old days it was different, then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, because it was assumed that dexterity in faith is not acquired in a few days or weeks. When the tried oldster drew near to his last hour, having fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten that fear and trembling which chastened the youth, which the man indeed held in check, but which no man quite outgrows … except as he might succeed at the earliest opportunity in going further. Where these revered figures arrived, that is the point where everybody in our day begins to go further...

To be sure, Mary bore the child miraculously, but it came to pass with her after the manner of women, and that season is one of dread, distress and paradox. To be sure, the angel was a ministering spirit, but it was not a servile spirit which obliged her by saying to the other young maidens of Israel, "Despise not Mary. What befalls her is the extraordinary." But the Angel came only to Mary, and no one could understand her. After all, what woman was so mortified as Mary? And is it not true in this instance also that one whom God blesses He curses in the same breath? This is the spirit's interpretation of Mary, and she is not (as it shocks me to say, but shocks me still more to think that they have thoughtlessly and coquettishly interpreted her thus)–she is not a fine lady who sits in state and plays with an infant god. Nevertheless, when she says, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord"–then she is great, and I think it will not be found difficult to explain why she became the Mother of God. She has no need of worldly admiration, any more than Abraham has need of tears, for she was not a heroine, and he was not a hero, but both of them became greater than such, not at all because they were exempted from distress and torment and paradox, but they became great through these...

If worse comes to worst, a doubter, even though by talking he were to bring down all possible misfortune upon the world, is much to be preferred to these miserable sweet-tooths who taste a little of everything, and who would heal doubt without being acquainted with it, and who are therefore usually the proximate cause of it when doubt breaks out wildly and with ungovernable rage.

-from S. Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling

Freedom

All of my life, when I have had something that I couldn't handle I have turned to my Grandmama.  Whatever I have needed she has always been there.  When Cheyenne and I first got married, we had a lot of money problems.  We barely had enough to live on and had borrowed some money from Grandmama.  As tough as things were we worked hard at paying her back.  After we had made a few payments though she announced that she wouldn't accept any more money from us, she considered the loan paid off, of which we had only paid a small fraction.  Cheyenne and I both wanted to continue paying her back, largely because she has always been so good to us that we didn't want to take advantage but also as a way of proving ourselves I think, proving our character.  But this is where I came to a realization that I have been trying to understand since.  When someone gives you grace, and that is exactly what she did, there is nothing you can really do about it.  There was simply no way that I could make her accept a payment that she didn't want.  I consider myself fairly inventive but there were no arguments against her grace, no weapon formed against it would prosper.

In the Reformed tradition, we talk a lot about Sovereign Grace or Irresistible Grace.  And I think that we usually have the idea that Grace is sovereign or irresistible because it is supported by some kind of divine power.  But what I learned then, and have been trying to understand since, is that Grace is naturally sovereign.  Most of the things in our lives are bound by various forms of obligations.  The fundamental rule of our world is that everything has to come up to the standard of Justice.  That is if you cheat someone, if your actions are below the standard of Justice then you ought to bring them up to that standard, by compulsion if necessary.  There may be differences of opinion about how this applies to specific situations but I don't think anyone would deny the general principle.  And that is where we live, we live a life in which all of the things that we do, we are bound to do, we can choose to do them well or poorly, willingly or unwillingly, but if we don't obey the Divine Law from prudence and wisdom then we will obey it from necessity.  In this whole system there is not a single thing that is free, it is slavery from top to bottom.  So, if Justice is a bar that we must meet and anything below that bar is required to be raised to the bar, is bound to meet the standard, then there is a sort of freedom which this idea forces on our consciousness.  Everything above the bar is free.  All grace is free grace, it ceases to be grace to the degree that it ceases to be free.

Suppose you owe someone, let's just say $100.  As long as you pay them less than you owe you are required to make up the difference, and I fully believe that in the end God will bring everything up to that standard, every failure to meet justice He will correct(in fact has already corrected preemptively but that is not our theme right now).  But you are free to overpay.  If you choose to pay $120, no one can force you to only pay the amount owed, just as no one can prevent you from forgiving a debt.  The freedom to overpay may seem laughable, but not to those who are sick of slavery, not to those who know the value of freedom.  Our lives have become so closely shut up in obligations, in fact we already owe all that we have and all that we are, to our God, to our spouses, and to our children.  We also owe various other debts to others.  So we are already, by simple addition, owing more than triple of all we are and have.  No wonder we are always behind.  If we get more then we owe more.  So we could begin to have some freedom by overpaying some of our debts, we could exercise a sort of sovereignty over our creditors, we can be as irresistible as God wherever we choose to be gracious.  But what about those to whom we owe everything, the debts that can never be satisfactorily paid?

I don't want to pass over the freedom I talked about above too quickly.  It is not the receiving of grace that makes us free but the giving.  Being gracious makes us as free as the Only Begotten, the Fullness of Grace and Truth.  But because we owe more than we have, or can have, there is no absolute freedom.  Only God, who is, and has, more than He can ever owe is absolutely free.  He is absolutely free because He gives to everyone more than He ought.  His every action is an over-payment with no recompense expected or in fact allowed.  I said previously that He will raise every thought and action, everything whatsoever, to the level of Divine Justice.  But, in truth, I believe that He will give everyone and everything better than they deserve.  I believe that with Him there is no justice which is not infused with grace.  This can be proved simply by the fact that He is never under compulsion and justice is always subject to compulsion.(This BTW functions as a proof that Justice is not one of the Divine Perfections, His character is not strictly speaking just it is gracious.)  In order to be free everything He does must be gracious because only grace is free.  He made Himself under the Law to redeem those who are slaves to the Law, but even then His every action exceeded what was required from us and therefore exceeded what was required of our substitute.

And all of that seems great and warm and fuzzy but we are still left slaves to the debts that we can't pay.  But there is a solution to this, the one and only solution is the Covenant of Marriage between Christ and those for whom He gave His life.  The simple truth is that His Bride has the perfect and inalienable right to write checks on His bank account, to draw from His infinite resources as much as she likes.  We have enough to be gracious in any situation that we choose to. We have received double for all of our debts.  Take comfort, you are free, you are gracious.

“Comfort, yes, comfort My people!”
Says your God.
“Speak comfort to Jerusalem, and cry out to her,
That her warfare is ended,
That her iniquity is pardoned;
For she has received from the Lord’s hand
Double for all her sins.”

The voice of one crying in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord;
Make straight in the desert
A highway for our God.
Every valley shall be exalted
And every mountain and hill brought low;
The crooked places shall be made straight
And the rough places smooth;
The glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
And all flesh shall see it together;
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

The voice said, “Cry out!”
And he said, “What shall I cry?”

“All flesh is grass,
And all its loveliness is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
Because the breath of the Lord blows upon it;
Surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
But the word of our God stands forever.”

O Zion,
You who bring good tidings,
Get up into the high mountain;
O Jerusalem,
You who bring good tidings,
Lift up your voice with strength,
Lift it up, be not afraid;
Say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!”

Behold, the Lord God shall come with a strong hand,
And His arm shall rule for Him;
Behold, His reward is with Him,
And His work before Him.
He will feed His flock like a shepherd;
He will gather the lambs with His arm,
And carry them in His bosom,
And gently lead those who are with young.

Who has measured the waters in the hollow of His hand,
Measured heaven with a span
And calculated the dust of the earth in a measure?
Weighed the mountains in scales
And the hills in a balance?
Who has directed the Spirit of the Lord,
Or as His counselor has taught Him?
With whom did He take counsel, and who instructed Him,
And taught Him in the path of justice?
Who taught Him knowledge,
And showed Him the way of understanding?

Behold, the nations are as a drop in a bucket,
And are counted as the small dust on the scales;
Look, He lifts up the isles as a very little thing.
And Lebanon is not sufficient to burn,
Nor its beasts sufficient for a burnt offering.
All nations before Him are as nothing,
And they are counted by Him less than nothing and worthless.

To whom then will you liken God?
Or what likeness will you compare to Him?
The workman molds an image,
The goldsmith overspreads it with gold,
And the silversmith casts silver chains.
Whoever is too impoverished for such a contribution
Chooses a tree that will not rot;
He seeks for himself a skillful workman
To prepare a carved image that will not totter.

Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
It is He who sits above the circle of the earth,
And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers,
Who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
And spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.
He brings the princes to nothing;
He makes the judges of the earth useless.

Scarcely shall they be planted,
Scarcely shall they be sown,
Scarcely shall their stock take root in the earth,
When He will also blow on them,
And they will wither,
And the whirlwind will take them away like stubble.

“To whom then will you liken Me,
Or to whom shall I be equal?” says the Holy One.
Lift up your eyes on high,
And see who has created these things,
Who brings out their host by number;
He calls them all by name,
By the greatness of His might
And the strength of His power;
Not one is missing.

Why do you say, O Jacob,
And speak, O Israel:
“My way is hidden from the Lord,
And my just claim is passed over by my God”?
Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
The everlasting God, the Lord,
The Creator of the ends of the earth,
Neither faints nor is weary.
His understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the weak,
And to those who have no might He increases strength.
Even the youths shall faint and be weary,
And the young men shall utterly fall,
But those who wait on the Lord
Shall renew their strength;
They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary,
They shall walk and not faint.