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