Miracles: The Apparent vs. The Real

 From Exodus:16 And they journeyed from Elim, and all the congregation of the children of Israel came to the Wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they departed from the land of Egypt. 2 Then the whole congregation of the children of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. 3 And the children of Israel said to them, “Oh, that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and when we ate bread to the full! For you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

This story starts right after the Israelites crossed the Red Sea.  They had been brought out of Egypt by the Lord's mighty hand and outstretched arm.  They had been miraculously delivered from the hand of Pharoah at the Red Sea.  But their problems were far from over.  Now they were truly out of inhabited lands.  They were in a real wasteland, dry, barren, and empty.  They were led by God in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.  And He had brought them to water, Elim where they were camped had plenty of water but the issue of food was becoming serious.  And as soon as problems showed up on the physical level they showed the lack of trust and the willingness to turn on Moses and Aaron and God.  Problems immediately brought forgetfulness, forgetfulness of the road that had brought them here, a road paved with the Lord's Salvation and care for His people.  And forgetfulness of where they had come from, such that they described their Egyptian slavery as sitting around beside stew pots and stuffing their faces with bread all day.

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you. And the people shall go out and gather a certain quota every day, that I may test them, whether they will walk in My law or not. 5 And it shall be on the sixth day that they shall prepare what they bring in, and it shall be twice as much as they gather daily.”6 Then Moses and Aaron said to all the children of Israel, “At evening you shall know that the Lord has brought you out of the land of Egypt. 7 And in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord; for He hears your complaints against the Lord. But what are we, that you complain against us?” 8 Also Moses said, “This shall be seen when the Lord gives you meat to eat in the evening, and in the morning bread to the full; for the Lord hears your complaints which you make against Him. And what are we? Your complaints are not against us but against the Lord.”9 Then Moses spoke to Aaron, “Say to all the congregation of the children of Israel, ‘Come near before the Lord, for He has heard your complaints.’ ” 10 Now it came to pass, as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the children of Israel, that they looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the Lord appeared in the cloud.11 And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 12 “I have heard the complaints of the children of Israel. Speak to them, saying, ‘At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall be filled with bread. And you shall know that I am the Lord your God.’ ”13 So it was that quail came up at evening and covered the camp, and in the morning the dew lay all around the camp. 14 And when the layer of dew lifted, there, on the surface of the wilderness, was a small round substance, as fine as frost on the ground. 15 So when the children of Israel saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was.

In the morning, when the dew was gone there was a tiny layer of...well, of something, on the ground.  In a minute we will hear about it's very strange properties.  It seems to have been tiny white balls...of something, that they scooped up into baskets.  Any that didn't get gathered up in the morning melted and was gone when the sun got hot.  Any that got left in the cool darkness of their tents quickly bred worms and was gross, but sometimes more quickly than others.  The Israelites couldn't figure out what it was.  And I can't either.  I have tried to fit something to its described properties, maybe little colonies of bacteria or blooms of fungus, or just protein self-assembling on the ground as the evolutionists are convinced happens, somehow catalyzed in the night by the otherwordly light and radiation from the pillar of fire?  But whatever it was it was truly outside of human experience.  It didn't belong to our ordinary world.  They called it, Manna, which literally means, "Unknown", what is this crap?, and they baked it into wafers that were like flatbread.  They were fed with mysteries, with sacraments.

We are gonna skip down to 19 for now: And Moses said, “Let no one leave any of it(in their tent or basket) till morning.” 20 Notwithstanding they did not heed Moses. But some of them left part of it until morning, and it bred worms and stank. And Moses was angry with them. 21 So they gathered it every morning, every man according to his need. And when the sun became hot, it melted.22 And so it was, on the sixth day, that they gathered twice as much bread, two omers for each one. And all the rulers of the congregation came and told Moses. 23 Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord has said: ‘Tomorrow is a Sabbath rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord. Bake what you will bake today, and boil what you will boil; and lay up for yourselves all that remains, to be kept until morning.’ ” 24 So they laid it up till morning, as Moses commanded; and it did not stink, nor were there any worms in it. 25 Then Moses said, “Eat that today, for today is a Sabbath to the Lord; today you will not find it in the field. 26 Six days you shall gather it, but on the seventh day, the Sabbath, there will be none.”27 Now it happened that some of the people went out on the seventh day to gather, but they found none. 28 And the Lord said to Moses, “How long do you refuse to keep My commandments and My laws? 29 See! For the Lord has given you the Sabbath; therefore He gives you on the sixth day bread for two days. Let every man remain in his place; let no man go out of his place on the seventh day.” 30 So the people rested on the seventh day.31 And the house of Israel called its name Manna. And it was like white coriander seed, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.32 Then Moses said, “This is the thing which the Lord has commanded: ‘Fill an omer with it, to be kept for your generations, that they may see the bread with which I fed you in the wilderness, when I brought you out of the land of Egypt.’ ” 33 And Moses said to Aaron, “Take a pot and put an omer of manna in it, and lay it up before the Lord, to be kept for your generations.” 34 As the Lord commanded Moses, so Aaron laid it up before the Testimony, to be kept. 35 And the children of Israel ate manna forty years, until they came to an inhabited land; they ate manna until they came to the border of the land of Canaan.

The manna was clearly a miracle from outside, a transcendant experience that was contrary to normal experience, maybe contrary to biology, maybe even contrary to terrestrial physics.  The Lord stepped in to provide for His people.  But it was also a Sign, it was intended not merely to feed the people but to educate them about the One who provided it.  It appears to have been, and was certainly gauged to suggest, Creatio de Nihilo, creation from nothing, to illustrate that the provider was in fact the Ultimate Creator, the Beginning.  All of the miracles of the Exodus are otherworldly, they, on their face, illustrate the holiness, the separateness of God not just from sinful men but from all creatures whatsoever.  They proclaim the giant gap between God and man.  They are unambiguous declarations of a truth, that while easily relegated to the back of our minds is not in any way subtle or elusive.

Why don't we have miracles like that?  Although we have been together a long time now, I don't necessarily know the specific miracles that you are looking for.  But I do know that we are a needy people.  God has gathered us together, the broken rejects of society and I know that we all have plenty of pain that we can't find healing for.  As for me, I just want my boy to walk again.  That seems straightforward enough.  Why isn't it like this for us?  Where's the pillar of cloud, the pillar of fire?  Where's the bread from heaven, the food of angels that bears our burdens and takes away our infirmities?  Where's the healer who bears our sicknesses in His own body and says to the lame "Rise up"?

From John 6: 26 Jesus answered them and said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw the signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled.  27 Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man will give you, because God the Father has set His seal on Him.”28 Then they said to Him, “What shall we do, that we may work the works of God?”29 Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.”

This happens about a day after Jesus fed the 5000 with the loaves and fish.  And here Jesus uses the word that is so characteristic of John's Gospel when it describes miracles.  He calls them signs.  And that is the first point that I really want to look at.  The manna was a sign and Jesus miracles were signs.  But although they were both miracles of healing and provision when you dig into them a little the form was very different and I think maybe that is because they were signs of different things.  When Jesus fed the crowd with just a handful of food, they don't seem to have realised what happened right off the bat.  Each guy sorta saw that he was eating and the people around him were eating, but he didn't know that the food had been multiplied until later.  Even the disciples seem to have had to sorta compare notes when they gathered up the baskets of leftovers which were indisputable more than they started with before they were sort of in on the miracle.  When He turned water into wine, the servants didn't taste the wine, at least not until afterwards.  They went and gave their boss what they knew was water.  The guests didn't fill the jugs.  They just drank wine out of them.  They didn't know the wine used to be water.  Not until later.  With Jesus' miracles there is introduced this element of subtlety, of obscurity.  To see the miracle you kinda have to be in on the whole story.  But to get the miracle you don't have to know nothing.  You are only called to believe and receive.  You just eat the bread when it is handed to you.  Drink the wine when it is offered.

 

30 Therefore they said to Him, “What sign will You perform then, that we may see it and believe You? What work will You do? 31 Our fathers ate the manna in the desert; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ ”32 Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, Moses did not give you the bread from heaven, but My Father gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”34 Then they said to Him, “Lord, give us this bread always.”35 And Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst. 36 But I said to you that you have seen Me and yet do not believe. 37 All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will by no means cast out. 38 For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me. 39 This is the will of the Father who sent Me, that of all He has given Me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day. 40 And this is the will of Him who sent Me, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him may have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at the last day.”41 The Jews then complained about Him, because He said, “I am the bread which came down from heaven.” 42 And they said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How is it then that He says, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”

When The Word of God entered this world as the Man Jesus Christ everything changed.  We look back at antiquity, the BC era and don't realise how different everything is.  More things have changed than we realise and they have changed in ways that are unexpected.  As a general rule that is fairly indisputable.  But specifically, in this case, miracles have changed.  We saw above in a couple instances that their form has changed, but we haven't talked yet about why.  If miracles are signs then they have changed their form to reflect the change in the deity which happened when Christ took on flesh.  They no longer appear as something outside of nature, because God is no longer outside of nature.  Miracles need not appear to be outside of physics or biology, in fact, to picture a God who placed Himself under the Law, all of the Law including physics and biology as well as the moral law, no sign could be more perfect than one that appears to be in accord with normal life.  We hear of miracles quite a bit.  A friend got just what they needed for no apparent cause, most of us have heard Al's story of his mortgage being inexplicably paid off.  Someone was in the hospital and their disease disappeared, without cause, between one scan and the next.  We hear these things and we don't so much doubt that they happened, but we wander if they were really miraculous.  We suspect that they have fairly ordinary causes that are just unknown.  But if you think about the miracles of the New Testament, it seems clear that quite a few of them are just like that, anyone without inside knowledge wouldn't consider them a miracle.  A little girl was thought to be dead and Jesus "discovers" when He tells her to "Get up", Greek word anastasius, literally resurrection, that she was just in a deep sleep.  And I guess the people who had heard she was dead thought something was a little fishy but went their way.  And mom and dad are left there with their jaws hanging open.  "We know she was dead.  He is sent from God but He is still out of His gourd." they say to one another.  Christ has become a part of nature and under the Law but when His people need a miracle Heaven and Earth have to just look the other way and pretend everything is kosher.  An angel breaks Peter out of jail and he thinks it is just a dream and when he knocks on the door the guys inside have all of these normal explanations about him sending a messenger and the servant girl being confused.  And in the morning, when Peter is at the breakfast table, we pretend everything is normal.  But the ordinary explanations that we have been promised for so long are still held up in traffic.  The Jews knew where Jesus was born, they knew Mary and Joseph.  So where did He get off claiming to have come down from Heaven?  Where do I get off hoping that Christ still performs miracles when the ordinary explanations for events will show up any day now?  Maybe more to the point, how can we believe in the Real Presence of Christ, His body and His blood, when we all know that Margaret went to the store and bought the bread and wine and probably still has the receipt?

 

43 Jesus therefore answered and said to them, “Do not murmur among yourselves. 44 No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day. 45 It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me. 46 Not that anyone has seen the Father, except He who is from God; He has seen the Father. 47 Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and are dead. 50 This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.”52 The Jews therefore quarreled among themselves, saying, “How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?”53 Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. 55 For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. 56 He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on Me will live because of Me. 58 This is the bread which came down from heaven—not as your fathers ate the manna, and are dead. He who eats this bread will live forever.”

The Manna had all the hallmarks of a miracle of the highest order.  No one ever questioned its credentials as a miracle.  Really, it is kinda the standard by which miracles are judged.  At least until the Man who cared only for the Real and ignored the Apparent came into the world.  The people who ate the manna are dead.  In fact, the ones to whom that miracle originally came, were all excluded from the Promise, none of them entered the Promised Land.  But our bread and wine which no one even suspects of being miraculous, carries in it the substance and fulfillment of the Promise, the miracle of miracles, the Body and Blood of Christ.  I am aware that people can and have twisted Christ's words here, He Himself after His full tilt praise of consuming His flesh and drinking His blood, cautioned the disciples at the end of this chapter that the flesh profits nothing but the Spirit is life and His words are Spirit and life.  Mysterious words which fools have used to make the Word which He preached and we have just read ineffective.  Let's not make that same mistake.  We are in little danger of overemphasizing the miraculous at the cost of the rational.  The church at this time seems to err very much in the opposite direction.  The great contrast here is between the Apparent and the Real.  Between the Manna which appears to be miraculous bread yet does not carry with it the Covenant, and the plain bought crackers and juice which are the vehicles of Communion with Christ and the Fellowship of the Saints.  Between the miracles that point to a God outside of nature and the miracles that point to Immanuel, present whenever two or three are gathered.  One last point.

4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you. And the people shall go out and gather a certain quota every day, that I may test them, whether they will walk in My law or not.

Second half of 15 where we skipped earlier: And Moses said to them, “This is the bread which the Lord has given you to eat. 16 This is the thing which the Lord has commanded: ‘Let every man gather it according to each one’s need, one omer for each person, according to the number of persons; let every man take for those who are in his tent.’ ”17 Then the children of Israel did so and gathered, some more, some less. 18 So when they measured it by omers, he who gathered much had nothing left over, and he who gathered little had no lack. Every man had gathered according to each one’s need. 

God announced on His people a test, whether they were worthy of the miracle, whether they would follow instructions and gather the right amount at the right time.  Some gathered too much and some gathered too little.  But God is not Goldilocks.  And everyone who believed enough to receive, that is not some high and exalted faith, not some rarified perfected faith, but just stuck their hand out to take what He handed to them and then ate it received the miracle.

The Ravens and the Lilies

I said before, that the culture war is not our fight.  Both sides are against the Gospel, one openly and one more subtly.  The left seeks out new sins and the right wallows in old sins.  The left denies the reality of His resurrection and the right denies its power.  But if, as I say, we are not to fight this fight, which so many churches think is the bulk of our mission, what are we to do?  How should a Christian in America in 2021, live the life that God has given him or her?

From Luke 12 3 Then one from the crowd said to Him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”14 But He said to him, “Man, who made Me a judge or an arbitrator over you?”

How did we arrive at unelected bureaucrats telling doctors what medicine to give their patients, property owners when they can remove someone from their property, parents when they can send their children to the schools that they pay for, all of us where we can go and what proof of our right to be there we must show?  The answer I think is a small and simple thing, called task creep or mission creep.  Every agency, every worker, starts out with a simple task-dig this hole, build this house, answer this phone, fill out this form, treat this patient, improve this process, administer this law, believe this truth, forgive this sin.  And slowly, innocently, other things creep in.  Help out over there, show the new guy the ropes, make things a little more fair, build this kingdom, set wrongs right, we use our position to do good things, and I won't bother to drag you through the whole slippery slope thought process.  That seemed a lot more necessary on the other end of the slippery slope, but here at the bottom it is enough to point to the root cause, the results seem pretty apparent.

And I think that the awareness of mission creep is a good way to begin and a good explanation for Our Lord's surprising answer to this man.  We read "Who made Me a judge over you?" and our instinct is to yell at the Lord, "Well you are the judge.  Your Father gave all authority into your hand.  My brother is doing me wrong.  If not you, Lord Jesus, then who is the one who will fix it?"  Our desire is to fix our nation, and ultimately our world.  To build a righteous kingdom, if not for ourselves then at least for our children.  Jesus Christ refused to build the kingdom.  He refused to do this good deed, and it would have been a good deed, certainly He would have judged well.  He refused to have a righteousness of His own, a righteousness that His Father had not called Him to.  And in everything that follows that is the example that we must keep in the front of our minds.  The Lord who didn't come to judge but to seek and to save that which was lost.

 15 And He said to them, “Take heed and beware of covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses.”16 Then He spoke a parable to them, saying: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully. 17 And he thought within himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no room to store my crops?’ 18 So he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build greater, and there I will store all my crops and my goods. 19 And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, and be merry.” ’ 20 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?’21 “So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”

How many of us have prudent friends, or are prudent friends, who have been saving and prepping either for the general uncertainty of our world or specifically for the dark time we find ourselves in?  Before saying something like what I am about to say there are a lot of weasel words that are conventional, but I think that there is far more danger of these words being taken too lightly, viewing them in too airy and spiritual a way, then there is any danger of being taken too literally, too seriously so no weaseling, no CYA.  Just gonna say what I was given to say.  Whatever supplies you have, whether food, or ammunition, or silver and gold, or real estate, or medicine or I don't know what isn't going to get you through to the other side of the problems that are coming your way.  You and I haven't put back enough.  Not nearly enough to see us through the problems that are coming our way.  And it is too late to do anything about it now.  More to the point, our preparations, whether financial, or material, or mental, or spiritual are not a suitable place to lodge our hope or our trust, even for things that seem to be in their realm.  I am not trying to bludgeon you with the idea that you can't buy eternal life but more directly that you can't buy just regular old life.  But I am getting ahead of our text, Jesus said it more simply and more directly than I can.

22 Then He said to His disciples, “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat; nor about the body, what you will put on. 23 Life is more than food, and the body is more than clothing. 24 Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap, which have neither storehouse nor barn; and God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds? 25 And which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? 26 If you then are not able to do the least, why are you anxious for the rest? 

All of our preparations come from worry.  There is no need to dance around and justify our "prudence", our "preparedness", our "thoughtfulness".  We do these things because we are worried.  Because life is scary.  I am intending to convict you of this sin, and if you feel like you have slipped around the edges then you don't understand what I am saying, or more to the point what the Lord is saying.  Whether or not you think or feel psychologically or emotionally worried or anxious your actions and mine identify us as behaving in a way that Our Lord is about to describe as heathenish unbelief.  But a brief stop in our parallel passage in Matthew 6 is appropriate.

24 “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.

During the Reformation, Calvin would accuse the Papists of idolatry towards the saints and the Lord's Mother and their defense was that they only "worshipped" God the honor they gave to the saints they defended by saying it was only "service".  To which the intrepid Reformer replied, "It is a smaller thing to worship someone than to serve them.  Many worship God but will not serve Him.  The smaller thing, worship, is included in the larger thing, service."  And on that reasoning I am going to accuse us all of idolatry.  You cannot worship God and worship this world.  You cannot worship or serve God if you also worship or serve riches or wealth or health or life or peace or food or safety or freedom or any other created thing.

24 Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap, which have neither storehouse nor barn; and God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds? 

The ravens make us look like fools.  And that is what we are.  Fools and sinners.  The birds don't work at any of the things that we do.  And which of us doesn't envy their freedom?  "I'm as free as a bird now, and this bird you cannot chain."  All of our work, doesn't get us anything that we wouldn't have without it.  In fact, if we do provide more food for ourselves than God would have given us without our works, and our kingdom, and our righteousness, we find that not only have we made ourselves slaves to the getting of the food, but slaves after the fact, whether because we exercise the extra food off, or we resist the temptation to eat all the things in our barns, or because we have to maintain or improve our barns like the guy at the beginning of the story.  Our works only make us slaves, only make us beholden to the God in the Belly.

25 And which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? 26 If you then are not able to do the least, why are you anxious for the rest? 27 Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 28 If then God so clothes the grass, which today is in the field and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will He clothe you, O you of little faith?

If Christ used the birds of the air to condemn our works, He uses the lilies of the field to condemn our righteousness and our sanctification.  What does He say?  Which of you can make yourself grow a foot?  And then He claims that this is the least.  What are you comparing a grown man getting a foot taller to that that is "the least"?  I don't think it is a stretch here to say that He is making a spiritual point now.  If we can't even make ourselves taller, then we can't "grow in Christ".  One is at least in the category of things that people might could do, growing in Christ is not even a task for angels, but only the Lord Himself can do anything in this field.  The lilies have no works, yet they grow in the way that they were made to grow.  If you are in Christ then you will grow, if His seed is in you then that seed will grow.  Nothing we do is going to have any affect on that one way or another.  Which is good news because I have a pretty good idea which way we would affect it if we could.  To drive the point home, He says that they don't spin, they don't make clothes for themselves, like Adam and Eve did after they sinned.  Throughout Scripture clothes are a sign of righteousness, whether Adam's poor attempt to cover his sin or the skin of his Substitute that God clothed him in, or Aaron's vestments or the filthy rags of our righteousness, or the linen clean and white without spot or wrinkle which is Christ's righteousness covering us.  Without getting into the soteriology and eternal destiny of grass, the Lord's provision of righteousness for the most insignificant is greater than the righteousness which all of Solomon's works could provide for him.  If then God so clothes the grass, which today is in the field and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will He clothe you, O ye of little faith?

29 “And do not seek what you should eat or what you should drink, nor have an anxious mind. 30 For all these things the nations of the world seek after, and your Father knows that you need these things. 31 But seek the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added to you.

And there is God's Law with the screws tightened down as much as they can ever be tightened.  He no longer says don't worry about what you will eat or drink or your future or your freedom or your health or peace or safety, but He says, "Don't even seek them."  Thou shalt not seek any of the things that the gentiles, the nations of the world seek.  Thou shalt not be anxious, for all anxiety is unbelief, is gross idolatry and atheism.  The only way to obtain any of these things is by seeking the kingdom of God and His righteousness, seeking His kingdom and His righteousness ONLY, to the absolute exclusion of any kingdom or righteousness of our own.  You may be sitting there thinking that I have pretty well excluded anything that you can do that seems like it might qualify as seeking God's kingdom and His righteousness.  I have tried to make most of the things I have talked about today into seeking God's kingdom and I have failed pretty absolutely.  I usually assume that anything that I can't do is humanly impossible so it's fair to say that if you haven't failed already you will.  A great thing to do right now would be to tell you what to do to seek God's kingdom and His righteousness, since that is what is required of us.  It would be nice to know what qualifies as being "rich toward God" since everything else is worthless.  But I can't tell you.  Cause I don't know.  Jesus has cranked our Law problem up to 11 and we have no solution.

32 “Do not fear, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

The Father's Good Pleasure is the whole of the Gospel, start to finish, front to back, cover to cover.  We are a fearful Little Flock.  The Law and the wolves are at our door.  We have no righteousness nor any method for obtaining righteousness.  The protections that we once thought we had are evaporating like mist in the hot sunlight of reality.  We are not only the refuse of humanity but unrepentant idolaters.  Our only hope is the one that we ought to really fear, the one who when He is done killing us can cast us into Hell, as Christ warns us at the beginning of our chapter.  And none of that matters.  All of reality, all of the Universe, physical, social, moral, spiritual whatever joins together in telling the Little Flock, "NO."  But there is a Father who reserves to Himself the right, the power, the freedom to say, "Yes."  He doesn't need a reason.  He doesn't give an explanation.  He gives us the whole kingdom, everything just cause He wants to.  Protocol be damned.

The Father has prepared food for you.  The body and blood of Christ.  He has prepared clothes for you.  The righteousness of the Perfect Messiah.  He has prepared the whole kingdom for you.  What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?  The table is set.  All you are called to do is eat.

An Open Letter to Hall County School District -names removed and updated

The school system threatened to take away my child because I wanted him to be in school.  The <Name removed> of Hall County Schools told me that if I didn't come and get him she would call Family and Children Services on me.  When I asked her not to threaten me she told me it was "just policy" and she wasn't personally threatening me.  I got upset and said a bad word so she said I was being abusive on the phone and when I reminded her that she had threatened to have my child taken away she denied she ever said she would call Family and Children Services.  This was on August 19, 2021 about ten o'clock, about 20 minutes ago as I am writing this.  I did get upset and say that I thought if they wouldn't let my boy go to school and they didn't want to teach them that I thought they all should lose their jobs.  So I wasn't a real nice guy, and I am sorry about that.  But my children are already behind on their education.  They have missed too much school in the last eighteen months and I won't let fear of a bureaucracy and how impossible it seems to hold them to account for failing to teach my child stop me from making every effort in my power to get my little boy an education.  So here is the story from the beginning.

Kingsley is my nephew.  He turned 6 in May and started first grade almost 2 weeks ago.  My wife has had legal custody of him and his big sister since he was 2 and she was 4 and I am the only father figure they have ever had.  We also have two little girls who are biologically ours.  Kingsley is a great little boy, and he is very much a little boy.  He cries a lot and plays tricks on his sisters.  He is trying to play football this year so far he isn't that good at it and is mad for days when somebody knocks him down on the field.  He is really good at karate though, and was so proud when he got his orange belt.  He isn't great at school though.  Part of it is cause he is really shy and hates direct questions.  And part of it is because he would rather trade punches and Pokemon cards at school than pay attention.

So, I guess by now everybody suspects that this is a COVID story.  It is.  But I hope you won't let whatever you think about any of the politics of this make you forget that this is really a little boy's story and to a lesser extent a family's story, and if you see in it a microcosm of the story of the American people being crushed by an impersonal bureaucracy that they are struggling to find a way to hold accountable, please remember that the main thing is a little boy who needs teachers to teach him how to read and do math and science.  We would rather leave the unaccountable bureaucracy alone.  We will happily make peace with them any time that they stop interfering in my children's education.  But not before.

Tuesday morning, August 17, Cheyenne, my wife, got a call from White Sulphur Elementary School.  The school said that Kingsley had been exposed to someone who was COVID positive, that his last exposure was Friday, and that he was going to have to be picked up and quarantined.  We had a lot of questions about what the exposure was, how close, and if they had been sick, but they didn't answer, probably because of legitimate privacy concerns which is cool.  But I can't give you any details cause I don't have them.  So Cheyenne gives up her first morning alone, with no kids at all, that she had been looking forward to for a month, to go and pick him up.  She was upset.  And while we are calling everyone heroes for how they have responded to the pandemic, how about the mothers, who have given up their plans and their time on a moment's notice time and again throughout this whole mess to answer the call of someone else's "abundance of caution", someone who can afford to be cautious, without thinking about whether the caution is reasonable, because they aren't the ones who pay the price for their abundance of caution, Cheyenne is.  All the parents are.

Kingsley cried when he found out he had to get another COVID test up his nose.  He hates them.  But like I said before he cries at the drop of a hat.  Some things he is pretty tough about and some things he is a total baby.  But Wednesday morning he took his test and we got an email from his doctor before lunch that he was negative.  So, Cheyenne immediately called the school to let them know and to get him cleared to go back.  Which is where the problems started.  They said that even with a negative test he couldn't come back to school, because they were following CDC recommendations and that was policy.  But really they aren't.  They are picking and choosing.  The CDC recommends masks for all schoolchildren.  I can't show video of other people's children but I watched them today and I promise none of the children are masked.  The CDC recommends 3 ft of social distancing in Elementary schools.  I watched kids walking with their teacher just like kids walk, laughing, touching one another, playing, teacher standing right there.  No social distancing.  Which is fine with me.  I don't have a problem with that.  But they can't blame this on the CDC if they pick which rules to follow and which ones to ignore.  The Georgia Department of Public Health has confirmed for me that it is the Hall County School District that is making these decisions.  And the The Hall County School System is responsible for keeping my kid out of school and no one else.

<Name removed 1> emailed us from the Hall County School District Central Office and said that Kingsley couldn't come back to school until Monday, 8 days from his last exposure.  So I called her and told her how important it was to us to have him back in school and how much he had missed last year because of COVID, and she was very nice and helpful and understanding.  And she agreed that he could return to school today August 19 if he had a signed note from his doctor to that effect.  I found out later that that was not the case.  I don't know if she thought I couldn't get the note or if she just wanted to stop talking to me but Longstreet Pediatrics Triage Department was very helpful to provide proof of Kingsley's negative test and told me that he could return to school the next day and they sent the school a note to that effect.  And I hoped that it was over, that my little man could go back to school, but my gut and my wife told me that this wasn't over.

Kingsley got on the bus this morning, and thankfully I had the day off work.  Chey and I were taking the girls to preschool when Kingsley's <Name removed 2>, called.  She told me that Kingsley was not supposed to be back at school, and that they had him in Isolation.  I explained that it was a misunderstanding and she told me that to clear it up she needed to hear from <Name removed 3>.  So I promised she would hear from her soon, and I called and left her a voicemail, I think she wasn't in her office yet, this was about 9 AM.  <Name removed 3> called me back 30 minutes later.  She told me that Kingsley could not come back, that the school district was following CDC guidelines and that nobody could change that, nobody could do anything about it and I had to come get him right away.  She told me that his doctor didn't have any say in it.  She told me that I didn't have any say in it.  This was guidance from the Ivory Tower of the CDC and that if I didn't come get him that she "didn't know what they would have to do about me".   I told her that all I cared about was getting my boy back in school and that her threats didn't mean anything to me.  It sounded like a veiled threat.  I thought that this morning and I still think so now.  As we finished our pancakes and talked it over, Cheyenne pointed out that they weren't following CDC guidelines.  That the children didn't have to wear masks, they didn't social distance.  So the defense of an all powerful, unassailable bureaucracy was a lie.  Someone at the Hall County School District was calling the shots.

We were on our way home, just after 11 o'clock when <Name removed 4>, called.  And she said the same thing that <Name removed 3> had, but she was more specific in her threats.  She told me point blank that if I didn't come get Kingsley from the school that she would call the Department of Family and Children's services.  She says that isn't a threat but how would you take it?  No offense meant to DFCS, I know for a fact that they protect children that are being neglected or abused, but when you tell a parent that you are going to call them, that is a threat to take their child away.  It was a totally asinine threat.  Unspeakably foolish.  And I called her out on it.  I told her that I thought she should do just that.  That I was excited about telling this story to a judge or to whoever.  And it got heated between me and <Name removed 3> after that.  She denied that she ever threatened me and I called her a liar, about the threat and about claiming they were following the CDC, and somewhere along the way I dropped the f bomb.  I think that she knew she had messed up.  Anyway, we picked up Kingsley because Chey didn't like the thought of him in Isolation.  Isolation, by the way, was pretty bad for a first grader.  It is sitting alone, in a chair in the hall.  They required him to wear a mask, I'm not sure who authorized that but I do know that they didn't have his parents permission, and if there is a protocol for Isolation and it wasn't made up on the spot, then it needs to be reviewed.  I think it was made up on the spot because Tuesday after Contact Tracing identified that he had been exposed he sat in class the rest of the day participating in class sans mask, sans social distancing and when Cheyenne asked about him being left in class she was told that they were "doing their best".  I don't know if Isolation was made up by someone who was taking out their ire at an uncooperative father on a first grader, but I can't help but wonder.

Not long after that a nice lady from the Georgia Department of Public Health called, I didn't get her name.  None of this was her fault.  They told her I had "some questions" and thought maybe I would be intimidated by a state bureaucrat since local bureaucrats weren't doing so well.  She was very nice and helpful.  She confirmed for me that the Hall County School District made their own decisions on what health guidelines to follow and was sympathetic and apologetic that they had lied to me and threatened me.  But she wasn't really any help.  She probably would have been if she could find a way to.  But she wasn't.  And then <Name removed 5> called not long after.  He was very understanding.  He agreed that they should have took responsibility, which he did do.  He said that someone saying they are gonna call DFCS to get your kid isn't a threat and he sorta used a strawman about they don't just call DFCS and come get your kid that isn't the way it works, like I didn't know that.  No , duh.  A stupid, empty threat is still a threat.  <Name removed 4> tried to bully me into complying with their policy with an underhanded threat about taking my child or children.  Actually I kinda liked <Name removed 5>.  He seemed reasonable and understanding, like he really wanted to make things better for the kids, helpful about lots of things.  But not helping to get Kingsley back to school so far which is really the only thing I want.  I don't think he is gonna help, but I would be happy to be proven wrong.  I don't think the superintendant or the school board will help either.  And you might say, "It's only a couple days.  This is a big storm over nothing." but this isn't the first time.  And I don't think it will be the last.  COVID isn't going anywhere.  It makes too many people too much money and gives too many people too much power.  It'll be around a long, long time.  And until the schools do right by my child I am not going anywhere either.  This is my family, my child, my life.  Give my children the education that we are paying you to give them or get used to hearing from me.  Simple.  Easy.

Update 8/20/2021

Hall County School District sent out update to parents today.  Now quarantine can be served in class, wearing masks and submitting to temperature checks.  It isn't ideal but I can appreciate that they are trying to educate students while balancing that with "public health needs".  What they didn't say but I found out yesterday, is that only ~1% of students placed in quarantine are found to have COVID, I think that this means a positive test whether symptomatic or not but I am not sure about the metric.  So, essentially, under that policy students are missing 100 times as much school as there is any reason for.  If people want to have an "abundance of caution" with their own things fine, but when it means my children miss out on their education, I expect to have some say in it.  And to Hall County School District's credit, it appears that they are listening to parents concerns.  They are trying to educate our children.  But it is more important than ever for parents to be on top of what is happening.  When the parents fear the schools that is tyranny.  When the schools fear the parents that is liberty.

Dependence Day

 1 The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah.

2
Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth!
For the Lord has spoken:
“I have nourished and brought up children,
And they have rebelled against Me;
3
The ox knows its owner
And the donkey its master’s crib;
But Israel does not know,
My people do not consider.”

So, the Word that the Lord spoke to Isaiah starts out in a way that should be familiar enough to us.  It's about ingratitude, and about a nation that the Lord blessed and provided for turning against Him to the point that they can't even recognize Him or know where their blessings come from.  As the Lord put it to the prophet Hosea, "I held you by the hands when you were learning to walk, but you don't even recognize me."  We were His baby, Daddy's girl, and now the Lord and His ways are strange to us.  We imagine our nation is blessed because of its political system or its natural resources or its talented people but all that we have is really a gift from Our Father, and forgetting that has unavoidable consequences.

4
Alas, sinful nation,
A people laden with iniquity,
A brood of evildoers,
Children who are corrupters!
They have forsaken the Lord,
They have provoked to anger
The Holy One of Israel,
They have turned away backward.

5
Why should you be stricken again?
You will revolt more and more.
The whole head is sick,
And the whole heart faints.
6
From the sole of the foot even to the head,
There is no soundness in it,
But wounds and bruises and putrefying sores;
They have not been closed or bound up,
Or soothed with ointment.

We keep saying God Bless America, and praying to avoid His wrath, but what does He say about having wrath on us?  He says, "What's the point?"  We are too sick to be corrected by wrath.  No matter how hard He hits us, we are too stupid to improve.  A father knows that there is a time when punishing the child is a waste of time, no matter how you do it, and the grief of Our Father seeing that in us is a terrible thing.  Solomon says somewhere that a wise man turns at a mere rebuke, but a fool won't turn even if you beat him one hundred times.  That is where we are.  Our sin has penetrated every part.  We are utterly corrupt, beyond the point of correction.  The reason we don't see any great and signal judgments from the Lord on our country's sin isn't because of the divine patience or mercy.  It's simply because the sickness has gone too far for that.

7
Your country is desolate,
Your cities are burned with fire;
Strangers devour your land in your presence;
And it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.
8
So the daughter of Zion is left as a booth in a vineyard,
As a hut in a garden of cucumbers,
As a besieged city.
9
Unless the Lord of hosts
Had left to us a very small remnant,
We would have become like Sodom,
We would have been made like Gomorrah.

Once, when somebody wanted to apply words like this to our home it took some imagination, some poetic effort, but now our cities are literally on fire.  Everything is literally being consumed by a horde of foreigners, and the perversions of Sodom and Gomorrah are not merely accepted but enforced as a social orthodoxy.  You don't need a guy in a pulpit to tell you this.  None of this is news, certainly it's not Good News.

10
Hear the word of the Lord,
You rulers of Sodom;
Give ear to the law of our God,
You people of Gomorrah:
11
“To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices to Me?”
Says the Lord.
“I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
And the fat of fed cattle.
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
Or of lambs or goats.

12
“When you come to appear before Me,
Who has required this from your hand,
To trample My courts?

Not only is wrath useless in our situation.  But so is religion.  The funny thing is, it is the American people's zeal for religion that has caused our fall.  American exceptionalism was caused by our taking religion seriously in the public arena, we didn't just give lip service to our ideals, we set slaves free, lifted up the oppressed, and we had a real sense of guilt and made efforts to fix the injustices in our society.  That's how the false religion of equity and reparations made such deep inroads so quickly and the nation that once led the way in freedom and righteousness now leads the way in totalitarianism and sin.

13
Bring no more futile sacrifices;
Incense is an abomination to Me.
The New Moons, the Sabbaths, and the calling of assemblies—
I cannot endure iniquity and the sacred meeting.
14
Your New Moons and your appointed feasts
My soul hates;
They are a trouble to Me,
I am weary of bearing them.
15
When you spread out your hands,
I will hide My eyes from you;
Even though you make many prayers,
I will not hear.
Your hands are full of blood.

Many peoples have fallen into immorality and injustice through irreligion, but has any fallen so rapidly and completely as we have through our religion?  Our culture war, our attempts to save ourselves and our country have forced us down this path more quickly than the Progressives ever could.  The conflict between the two sides has driven both to more and more extremes of partisanship and each party works with any ally, uses any tool, considers nothing to be out of bounds in its quest to enforce its vision on us.  It is the betrayal by Conservative governors and Congressional leaders and Judges that has really made our current situation hopeless.  We have been betrayed by electability at the cost of integrity, by effectiveness at the cost of character, by pragmatism at the cost of truth.  But, we already knew all of that.  And I wouldn't have bothered to write any of this if that was all I had to say.  What I really want is for us to feel the reality of the first 15 verses of the Lord's Word to Isaiah, what I've already read, so that we can feel the sharp irreality, the intense discontinuity of what comes next.

16
“Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean;
Put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes.
Cease to do evil,
17
Learn to do good;
Seek justice,
Rebuke the oppressor;
Defend the fatherless,
Plead for the widow.

18
“Come now, and let us reason together,”
Says the Lord,
“Though your sins are like scarlet,
They shall be as white as snow;
Though they are red like crimson,
They shall be as wool.
19
If you are willing and obedient,
You shall eat the good of the land;
20
But if you refuse and rebel,
You shall be devoured by the sword”;
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

Does anybody really believe that this might happen?  Is there any chance of the American people, of us, just giving up our sickness and walking away from it?  Like the lame man took up his bed and walked?  Do you think that we are gonna cease to do evil and start to do good?  Can all of America make a turn as dramatic as the Damascus Road?  The Lord promises forgiveness and blessing IF we are good, and death IF we refuse Him and rebel, and my heart sinks because it is very clear in my mind which way it is gonna go.  The Lord's requirements of us are right, and they may not be impossible for us to meet in some technical sense, but we all know that they aren't going to happen.  We have been told as far back as I can remember what we need to do to win the country back, to find victory in the culture war.  And I have come to believe that everything we have done is only pushing us further down the road to hell.  What is actually gonna change things?

There is a long-standing debate on passages like this, going back at least to Martin Luther.  He would preach man's inability to change and His opponents would point to passages like this and say, "If we can't do what the Lord is requiring of us, then He is just mocking us.  To hold out all of these promises that we can never obtain is just cruel."  And there is a certain truth to that.  But when they hold out a false hope based on our ability to repent, our ability to make righteous contributions, our ability to save ourselves we know that they are false comforters.  The Protestants and Romanists debated the grammar of this passage and the logic.  Luther said that the Lord speaks in an imperative, a commanding mood, He requires what is right and that doesn't imply our ability to perform.  Although there are according to the grammarians several "moods" of speech, human speech all boils down to either an indicative, saying that something will happen, a subjunctive saying that something might happen, or an imperative saying something should happen.  And none of that is really good news for us.  When the Lord says "Cease to do evil.  Start to do good."  "Your sins are as scarlet but they shall be as white as snow."  How is He speaking?  How do we get from where we are to the place He requires us to be?  I have said that human speech all boils down to either indicative, subjunctive, or imperative, but what about divine speech?  What if He is speaking in a way that has no mirror in our experience, in the Creative mood, where He calls those things which do not exist, like our righteousness and forgiveness of sins, into existence?  What if, "Cease to do evil", is spoken as He once said, "Let there be light", and there was light?  The power then, is not in the doing but in the calling.  The burden is not on us to achieve victory but only to proclaim a victory which is already won.

21
How the faithful city has become a harlot!
It was full of justice;
Righteousness lodged in it,
But now murderers.
22
Your silver has become dross,
Your wine mixed with water.
23
Your princes are rebellious,
And companions of thieves;
Everyone loves bribes,
And follows after rewards.
They do not defend the fatherless,
Nor does the cause of the widow come before them.

24
Therefore the Lord says,
The Lord of hosts, the Mighty One of Israel,
“Ah, I will rid Myself of My adversaries,
And take vengeance on My enemies.
25
I will turn My hand against you,
And thoroughly purge away your dross,
And take away all your alloy.
26
I will restore your judges as at the first,
And your counselors as at the beginning.
Afterward you shall be called the city of righteousness, the faithful city.”

27
Zion shall be redeemed with justice,
And her penitents with righteousness.
28
The destruction of transgressors and of sinners shall be together,
And those who forsake the Lord shall be consumed.
29
For they shall be ashamed of the terebinth trees
Which you have desired;
And you shall be embarrassed because of the gardens
Which you have chosen.
30
For you shall be as a terebinth whose leaf fades,
And as a garden that has no water.
31
The strong shall be as tinder,
And the work of it as a spark;
Both will burn together,
And no one shall quench them.

 

When conservatives and liberals are both destroying us what is to be done?  When our religion and our irreligion are both turned against the Lord, when hope and despair, faith and cynicism are equally worthless, how should we now live?  Make no mistake, it is the entire system of this world that exalts itself against Our God and His Christ and that despises the foolish Way of the Cross.  It is both those who wish to conserve or restore the old versions of the system and those who press on ahead to systems that they imagine are our future who are our enemies.  

 

May I suggest a new and untried tactic in the war for our country?  We are involved in this war in a sense accidentally.  You see it isn't really poor, pitiful us that the masters of this world want to fight.  The current world system has triumphed mightily over all previous world systems and crushing you and I is not a victory worthy of the greatness that it sees in itself.  It really wants to make war on the Creator.  The world really wants to gather all of its economic, and scientific, and military, and moral and spiritual might and show itself greater than the Lord of Hosts.  We just happen to be in the way.  Crushing us is not the main event.  My suggestion is that maybe we should throw in the towel.  Stop fighting and let ourselves be pinned.  What if our strategy in the culture war is simply to wait to get out of the way?  Let the great war between the governments and systems of this world and the Angel of the Lord get going and we just pop some popcorn and enjoy the show.  What if there is nothing to be done until the Lord Jesus Christ stands up for us?  Sinful men work and scheme and struggle, but the Lord's martyrs wait under His altar and cry out, "How long Oh Lord faithful and true until you avenge our blood?"  We cannot act in any meaningful way until He calls us.  None of the same old shit is gonna change our situation.Until He speaks something new into existence, righteousness and repentance, it will not be.  You and I cannot call the things that do not exist into existence and we have no other hope. 

Mea Culpa to Credo remissionem peccatorum

I was 15 when my brother Chris came home from the Navy.  He had brought all of us little presents and whatnot and a day or two later we were alone and he was like, "Oh dude, check this out." and he introduced me to his collection of Playboys.  To a lonely young man, they were like heroin, drawing me to them over and over even as my disgust with myself grew, eventually the feelings of helplessness and loss of control caused me to throw them out just to get a little bit of peace.  And that peace lasted more or less until I moved into a college dorm with a broadband internet connection.  

A Psalm of David. To bring to remembrance.

O Lord, do not rebuke me in Your wrath,
Nor chasten me in Your hot displeasure!
For Your arrows pierce me deeply,
And Your hand presses me down.

There is no soundness in my flesh
Because of Your anger,
Nor any health in my bones
Because of my sin.
For my iniquities have gone over my head;
Like a heavy burden they are too heavy for me.
My wounds are foul and festering
Because of my foolishness.

I was raised very strictly Baptist, and 23 years of addiction to porn has brought me all of the guilt, and shame, and secrecy, and self-loathing that anybody is likely to find in this life.  I threw the magazines away so long ago, but I can't throw away every computer, every cell phone that I find myself alone with.  And no efforts to throw away the part of me that is drawn to what I profess to hate have been very successful.

I am troubled, I am bowed down greatly;
I go mourning all the day long.
For my loins are full of inflammation,
And there is no soundness in my flesh.
I am feeble and severely broken;
I groan because of the turmoil of my heart.

Lord, all my desire is before You;
And my sighing is not hidden from You.
My heart pants, my strength fails me;
As for the light of my eyes, it also has gone from me.

My loved ones and my friends stand aloof from my plague,
And my relatives stand afar off.
Those also who seek my life lay snares for me;
Those who seek my hurt speak of destruction,
And plan deception all the day long.

But I, like a deaf man, do not hear;
And I am like a mute who does not open his mouth.
Thus I am like a man who does not hear,
And in whose mouth is no response.

For in You, O Lord, I hope;
You will hear, O Lord my God.
For I said, “Hear me, lest they rejoice over me,
Lest, when my foot slips, they exalt themselves against me.”

We were always taught that Christians can rule over and conquer sin, and when we can't we are left lower than low.  Depression has lived in the backs of our minds for so long, ready with just a nudge to take over us.  And all of the inspirational racket the church makes has never changed any of that for me.  If I were to define addiction, one part of the definition would have to be that the addiction is stronger than you are.  You are bound to it, and all of the people that say you can overcome with willpower, and when the church tells this lie they add in the Spirit like the pixie dust that makes Peter Pan fly if he just thinks the right thoughts.  We just have to try harder, love God more than the sin and the self, do this, do that, and you will be free.  But I've been at this game long enough not to believe that anymore.  How many times do you think I will go around the same circle expecting to wind up somewhere different?

For I am ready to fall,
And my sorrow is continually before me.
For I will declare my iniquity;
I will be in anguish over my sin.
But my enemies are vigorous, and they are strong;
And those who hate me wrongfully have multiplied.
Those also who render evil for good,
They are my adversaries, because I follow what is good.

Do not forsake me, O Lord;
O my God, be not far from me!
Make haste to help me,
O Lord, my salvation!

Psalm 38

 

Mea Culpa-My sin, my fault.  Calvin said that whatever you feel, whatever is in your heart, the Psalmist has felt it and found a way to put it into words.  And maybe that is the great power of the Psalms, not their beauty or their uniqueness but their plainness and their commonness, their simple humanity.  Their power is the power to make us no longer alone, to let us see that at least one other person has felt what we feel and stood where we stand, and you know he did, David did, come out of it ok.  The Psalms descend into the miserable depths of the human soul, and they don't back away, they don't run off, they stay there, they live there unless and until God, through faith brings them out the other side.  And it's this common humanity, this lowliness, this refusal to draw back from humiliation that is the touchstone of the truly Christian.

The seed of all sin, the first lie is "You shall be like God".  If the truth is that God is way up there and we are way down here, then the lie works in two ways, it raises us up, at least in our own estimation, above common humanity, which is why Augustine says that all sin comes from pride.  And secondly, it brings God down, our desire to close the gap between ourselves and God causes us to see Him as less than He is, causes us to believe like Adam and Eve that He is holding out on us, that He has good things that He doesn't plan to give us, which is why Calvin says that all sin is unbelief.  Pride makes us see ourselves as more than we are, makes us despise humanity as something beneath us, while it actually erodes our humanity.  Unbelief, lack of faith, makes us see God as less than He is and do all we can to injure His Divinity.

For Moses writes about the righteousness which is of the law, “The man who does those things shall live by them.” But the righteousness of faith speaks in this way, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ down from above) or, “ ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith which we preach): that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the Scripture says, “Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.”  from Romans 10

The classic Protestant theory of preaching is to preach Law and then Gospel.  To use the Law to "afflict the comfortable", to make us feel our sinfulness, and then use the Gospel to "comfort the afflicted", to make us feel His salvation.  My criticism of this is that we have plenty of Law inside of us, our sense of our own failures is never far away, guilt and shame are the stories of our life.  When you see someone doing everything they can not to think about something, it's not really that necessary to remind them of it.  On the other hand, the Gospel is never inside of us.  It is always strange and alien, it always comes from outside as a shock and the Glorious Invasion of the Return of the King.  That is the only way that the Good News can still be news after 2000 years and good news to people who have lived with it their entire lives, by always being strange to us.  There is no little voice inside of us saying, "You are forgiven.  You are free.  God Himself has taken up your cause."  There is only the proclamation from outside, "I baptise you.", "I absolve you", "This IS my body, broken for You."

In our pride, we despise humanity, which we see as beneath us.  We have nothing but contempt for the weakness and foolishness which really are, and always will be, our defining features.  We despise the commonness of bread and wine and death, which are really the tokens of our humanity, which is what we truly despise.  But to Christ, and in Christ, humanity is become a chosen vessel and a royal priesthood, not by becoming something other than what it always has been, not by changing into something more than human, but by His glorious Choice, by His bare and solitary election to be human, to be weak, to eat and drink and die.  Because He has chosen to come to us in the things that we have rejected, we have rejected Him.

That means that all of our attempts to "draw nearer to Christ", are actually more of the same old shit.  Our spirituality remains a rejection of our own humanity, which is the only thing that we have in common with Christ.  God in Heaven was too high for us so we tried to snatch Him down.  God in the manger and the grave is too low for us so we try to pull Him up to an acceptable moral altitude.  But the "Word of Faith" latches on to His humanity, His humiliation, His lowliness and so comes to terms with our own sinfulness, our own humanity and this is the new thinking, the new mind which is real repentance.

A movement toward Christ must always be a movement toward our own humanity.  It is a rejection, a repentance of our upward striving, however spiritual we may believe that to be.  Our objective is the God in the Manger, the God walking in sandals laughing and crying, hungry and thirsty, lonely and tired, loving and frustrated, the God who is happily among His friends and the God who is betrayed and tried in a kangaroo court.  So, what is the movement to Christ?  Maybe the simplest way to describe such a move is to consider how it differs from religion.  Religion always aspires upward, to become increasingly removed from ordinary life and thus closer to God In Heaven.  But drawing nearer to Christ makes us closer to other people not further away.  Every religion is esoteric, which is to say that to move deeper into the religion involves obtaining hidden, secret knowledge that those at lower levels do not possess, that may even contradict the beliefs which are openly taught.   On the other hand, what is first taught In Christianity is the sum total of the whole and those who think that they have progressed are advised to hold the beginning of faith unchanged, and return to their first love.  The difference between the experienced saint and the novice is not that they have a different or larger creed but that they have more thoroughly internalized the creed we all share.  Growth in Christ is not knowing new things but taking the original ground of faith and integrating it more deeply into our lives. 

So, we know where we are, we are at Mea Culpa, I am the guilty one, it is my fault.  What will take us away from that, who will deliver us from this body of sin?  It is not some new stronger faith, not some will more impervious to temptation, not some strategy or trick, not some new knowledge, not some upwelling of love for God or one another.  It is to remain at and return to the beginning, the Creed.  To simply believe in the forgiveness of sins.

Come Quickly Lord Jesus

 So, a study of Revelation should end by talking about eternal life, about what our state will be when God's Mighty Acts are completed.  Which is a bit of a stumper since we don't, certainly I don't, know much of anything about the future state.  A much wiser, much more insightful, and much much much more inspired man than I wrote that, "Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." from 1 John 3.  I personally think that John the Apostle, is John of Patmos, that is the author of John's Gospel is the author of John's Epistles, and also the author of the Revelation.  I don't know it for a fact but I suspect it.  Further, I think that the visions He records in the Revelation he had at a rather early date, probably in the 40 AD decade, long before he wrote the epistle that we call 1 John.  I think, that much of what seems so different between John's writings and those of the other apostles, and the Christology that critics say is much too advanced and developed for the first century, especially that found in his Gospel, is explained by years, decades more likely, of thinking about the Jesus that he saw in these visions recorded in the Revelation and looking for the unity between that Jesus and the Jesus that he walked around Galilee with in his youth.  And the man who saw the throne room of heaven, saw the New Jerusalem come down out of heaven, saw the city that needs no sun for it's light is the Lamb, said that it wasn't really clear to HIM what WE shall be in that day.  So you can bet that I don't know.

So much focus is put on trying to bring men to eternal life, but it's an eternal life that is a big mystery to us.  So, I want to look at it another way, in the light of John's comments that "seeing Christ as He is" will make us like him, and " this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent." from John 17.  So, our stated goal has been to Reveal Christ, to bring men to the knowledge of Him, so I will attempt to recap what we have said about Christ, not merely as a conclusion, but as offering us the only knowledge about the next life, about who and what we will be, which can be meaningful to us in this life.

So,  the story is about a Scroll that's how we began this journey almost two years ago, the knowledge of God sealed in a scroll, a knowledge which must be opened not once, but seven times, that is to say continually, by the Slain Lamb, the knowledge of God must never launch itself into exalted speculation but must be unceasingly grounded in the Hill of Calvary.  The knowledge of God is described either as four separate horsemen or as the four activities of the Rider of the White Horse.  He is the Conqueror, who is righteous in Judgement and when He makes War, and who is followed by and holds the keys to Death and Hell.

In what sense is He the Conqueror?  We said that legalism is the placing of God in a box, it is limiting what He can or will do for us, such that we seek good from other sources, from our own knowledge, from an apple, from a snake.  And so the conquering Gospel is the news that the Heavens cannot contain Him!  All of creation is too small an arena for His grace to be fully unfurled, and He is sovereignly determined to be absolutely as good and gracious as can be, and so certainly no temple, no box, no statutes, no limitations on who or how or when he might be merciful can be stipulated.  We are bound to ways and means, but His Gospel rides over the whole earth.  In short, the Rider of the White Horse may be said to always be riding down the Damascus Road, always taking us stubborn Sauls so zealous for the Law, so eager to persecute any who do not walk according to our traditions, always taking us and making us into Pauls.  Thus He irresistibly conquerors our rebel hearts.  We, then, will be Conquerors, more than conquerors as John has it in another place.  We will have the ability to bring the Gospel to bear in any situation, as Christ did to Saul, to transform our world by applying the power of His resurrection.

We looked at His judgments, specifically those which seem most abhorrent to us, His plagues.  When we see Him raining fire on the Earth, destroying the trees and grasses, killing the fish and the animals, poisoning the water, and causing diseases on men, our fallen minds conclude that He is unrighteous, we ourselves, conclude that He is unrighteous.  But just and true are all of His ways, and these plagues only take away the means, the signs of blessing and not the blessing itself.  He separates us from those things on which we imagine we are dependant, water and food the grasses and trees, all of those things which we imagine bring us good, peace and health, which we imagine we need, life itself, so that we can see that He alone has always been the sole source of our good.  If we lose all else and retain Christ then we have lost nothing, and we have gained clarity.  This absolutely applies to us.  Paul tells us that we will judge angels and are absolutely competent to judge earthly matters.  In the Resurrection then, we will be able to do what men have been trying to do since the Fall, to set the systems of society and the earth right.  Utopia famously doesn't exist, and every attempt to create it has only led to hate and destruction.  Every Revolution has only been a swapping of one set of oppressors for another.  But there is a time coming when He will rule the world from His holy mountain.  

 From Micah 4: Now it shall come to pass in the latter days
That the mountain of the Lord’s house
Shall be established on the top of the mountains,
And shall be exalted above the hills;
And peoples shall flow to it.
Many nations shall come and say,
“Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
To the house of the God of Jacob;
He will teach us His ways,
And we shall walk in His paths.”
For out of Zion the law shall go forth,
And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between many peoples,
And rebuke strong nations afar off;
They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
And their spears into pruning hooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
Neither shall they learn war anymore.
But everyone shall sit under his vine and under his fig tree,
And no one shall make them afraid;
For the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.
For all people walk each in the name of his god,
But we will walk in the name of the Lord our God
Forever and ever.
“In that day,” says the Lord,
“I will assemble the lame,
I will gather the outcast
And those whom I have afflicted;
I will make the lame a remnant,
And the outcast a strong nation;
So the Lord will reign over them in Mount Zion
From now on, even forever
And you, O tower of the flock,
The stronghold of the daughter of Zion,
To you shall it come,
Even the former dominion shall come,
The kingdom of the daughter of Jerusalem.”

We considered when Christ makes war.  He makes war on those who accuse the Saints, whether in Heaven or on the Earth.  Though He waits long He will stand up for His martyrs and will show that in the words of the Prophets, "His arm is not shortened."  For our sake, He makes war on every idea, every Angel, every power, which is against His people and against the knowledge of the Cross.  Most of all, He makes war on the "handwriting that is against us", He makes war on Law, as it is understood by fallen hearts, He makes war on condemnation, He makes war on the whole system of the universe, when it proves itself, as it has, to be against Him and against His little flock.  Christ makes war on the Law, exactly by placing himself under it.  He makes war on the Law by being killed by it, and being justified against it when God raises Him not merely from the Grave but to the Right Hand of His Father.

But He has placed Himself not merely under Law but under Death and under Hell.  All of the things which condemn us are themselves condemned because they have condemned Christ, who is not merely undeserving of condemnation but is the Lord of Glory.  But they have been more than condemned, they have been conquered as completely as Saul of Tarsus.  Death is condemned for raising its hand against Jesus but is delivered from the futility to which it has been subjected so as to become the vehicle of Resurrection.  He has descended beneath all things that He might raise all things up with Him.

Law is confronted by something more primal, more basic than itself.  Mercy triumphs over justice in the way that the foundation triumphs over the superstructure.  And when all of the books of our works are opened and speak condemnation to us, they are silenced by Another Book, by the book of the True and Living Lamb.  And though we have grown old in the ways of this world, we will be made children again in His resurrection, though we have grown wise in evil and suffering, we will be innocent and simple once more.  There are New Heavens and a New Earth, an abiding home for us, a city with foundations, which Abel and Abraham and all of our Fathers before us have preferred to seek as pilgrims rather than to live in this world as their home.  If we didn't feel like strangers and pilgrims in this world previously, then the events of the past few months have made it painfully clear that we will never belong here.  Our home has been far away, invisible, it has been the stuff of dreams but it will not be so much longer.

Our beloved is returning soon, the very same Jesus who loved us and gave Himself for us, He is returning unchanged, returning in and through the Way of the Cross.  His feet shall stand again on the Mount of Olives shall again walk the paths of Gethsemane.  His return is a response to the cry of the martyr's under the altar who say, "How long, O Lord, until you avenge our blood?" for precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.  This world's attachment to its own righteousness is fundamentally irreconcilable with the Saints who do not justify themselves but hope that God will justify them, as He indeed does by raising them up just as He raised up Christ.  The Great Pauline Antithesis between Faith and Works must end, and it ends in blood, it ends with works being cast into the Lake of Fire that there may be rest.  The Lord has seen that all of Creation needs its Rest, its Sabbaths, and since we continue to deprive ourselves and our world of that rest by our obsession with justifying ourselves by our works, He will put an end to all works.  Human effort and the worship of that Beast is overcome by the Lord who would not fight the soldiers who came to take Him but healed the ear that Peter cut, the Lord who is returning is the Lord who said, "Take me then but let these go."  So that whatever attends the return we can see it is the return of the Beloved, and say with real feeling, "Even so, Come quickly Lord Jesus"