Everything, Everywhere... just not All at Once

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

     Call me silly, but I’ve never understood why the passengers and crew of the SS Minnow worked so hard to get off Gilligan’s Island. Never got why, when they cinched up the scrawny first mate to a wayward weather balloon, everybody groaned so loudly and Skipper threw his hat to the ground when Gilligan got no farther than the lagoon. Seems to me they had everything they needed – fresh water, food sources, sun, sand. True enough, it was an inconvenient life, as the theme song singers sang: “No phone, no lights, no motor cars – not a single luxury…” but my bride and I have paid good money to get just a week or two of what the Professor was trying to undo for himself and his shipmates.

     It’s a sitcom parable on the human condition, I suppose, and one more way to sell Kellogg’s Corn Flakes in the Sixties. Everything, everywhere… just out of reach. Coconuts will only take you so far. Life is a desert island, and all the good stuff is somewhere else.

     I’ve had some extra time to read this week, Church, which will be evident to you shortly. On the advice of C.S. Lewis, I decided to get-the-heck out of my own daggone century. That’s not exactly how Lewis put it, as you might imagine, but the concept is the same. I’m a product of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, and Lewis the Nineteenth and Twentieth, so I figured – even sticking to my home continent – the Eighteenth would be bare minimum. Get some perspective, unaffected by sitcoms. Found a volume titled Jonathan Edwards: Basic Writings.

     Following is an excerpt from a sermon Edwards preached in July of 1731 at Boston. At the time, he was under close scrutiny, his mentor and tutor having recently bolted from the “proper” denomination of the Christian church. Those who had invited him to preach were curious if the twenty-seven-year-old Edwards would hold to sound doctrine. He chose a passage from First Corinthians as his text…

     …God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,  so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord” (1:28-31).  

     And then he preached. Be advised: there’s some 300-year-old Colonial English coming up. Go slowly… stick with it… it’ll be worth the effort, I promise.

      “The redeemed have all their objective good in God. God himself is the great good which they are brought to the possession and enjoyment of by redemption. He is the highest good, and the sum of all that good which Christ purchased. God is the inheritance of the saints; he is the portion of their souls. God is their wealth and treasure, their food, their life, their dwelling place, their ornament and diadem, and their everlasting honour and glory. They have none in heaven but God; he is the great good which the redeemed are received to at death, and which they are to rise to at the end of the world. The Lord God is the light of the heavenly Jerusalem; and is the “river of water of life” that runs, and “the tree of life that grows, in the midst of the paradise of God.” The glorious excellencies and beauty of God will be what will for ever entertain the minds of the saints, and the love of God will be their everlasting feast. The redeemed will indeed enjoy other things; they will enjoy the angels, and will enjoy one another: but that which they shall enjoy in the angels, or each other, or any thing else whatsoever, will be what shall be seen of God in them.”

     How’s that for sound doctrine?

     Everything we’ve known, anywhere at any time, will eventually become as the SS Minnow: tossed up on the beach and useless, big whopping hole in its side. But the redeemed are not marooned. “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” It’s OK; he can make good on whatever checks your boasting writes. Edwards chose to boast in the Lord, to lay off whatever luxuries might otherwise have been his, if he had preached only the “party platform” in Boston that day.

     Honestly, Church, I have a hard time imagining what it’s like for God to be all sufficient. I want to live in the vigor of Edwards’ sermon, but like the castaways, I build signal fires on the sand; I lash together rafts and paddle out toward the horizon, convinced that redemption can be earned with a little more effort than I gave last time. Convinced, to exactly the same degree, that redemption can’t be earned.

     So I take it on faith, and look for evidence. I take God at his word that everything I need – temporal and eternal – is found in him. I choose to believe that before Skipper and Gilligan’s blunders; before the first cathode ray tube ever received signal through the airwaves; sixteen centuries before Jonathan Edwards gave his proof-of-concept sermon – an ordinary chosen man breathed in the words God breathed out, and put truth to parchment, guarded and preserved by the Almighty in every age.

     To those he has redeemed, Christ is:

    Wisdom from God.

    Righteousness.

    Sanctification.

    Redemption.

    What else is needed?

     “So join us here each week, my friends / you’re sure to get a smile…”

(I always did.)

“…from seven stranded castaways / here on Gilligan’s Isle.”

        But in between episodes, maybe go back and read that Edwards piece again.

  

Grace and Peace (aka sufficiency in the Lord),

 

John

All the Right Enemies

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

     The story was related to me as factual, and it came from a man in whom I had found no guile at all in the many years we worked together. I’ll relate it to you as accurately as I’m able. My coworker had helped a relative, his brother-in-law, work on the brother-in-law’s car. For the sake of not writing “brother-in-law” another 50 times, let’s call him the owner. They had done what’s known as a brake job, and after replacing the friction materials and a caliper or two, it was time to “bleed” the system. Every last pocket of air must come out, or the hydraulics won’t work, and the system is no good. Alas, bleed as they would, some air remained. More bleeding, no better results. As the night wore on, the owner became more agitated. At some critical moment, he snapped.

     The storyteller wasn’t surprised to see the owner start circling the car, shouting profanities. Nor did his eyebrows raise much when the owner began kicking the defenseless vehicle. But his attention was fully arrested once the owner had ducked into the garage, returned with a can of spray paint in each hand, and launched into creating visual expressions of the verbal explosions. And I can still remember the puzzlement on the storyteller’s face – a thoughtful and even-keeled man, mind you – as he told how the owner, having spewed the last of his paint, commenced to urinating on every fender and door at least once. I didn’t ask how much beer had been involved in this brake job – didn’t want to know – but we could make a good guess, couldn’t we?

     What, exactly, was the vehicle owner up against? Was it thoughtless engineering, a bad design? Was it a sudden reversal of the laws of physics, in which gases no longer move upward in fluids? Was it too much beer? Well, maybe the last thing. But essentially, he was up against the one or two things he didn’t know about how to properly bleed that particular hydraulic braking system.

     I’m going to scooch out onto a limb here and say that the owner and I are not the only two people who have ever fought the wrong enemy. I believe it’s common in the human experience to expend vast amounts of strength and passion on the wrong battlefield. Victory is unattainable because the enemy is laughing from the bushes next door.

     For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12).

      If you’ve been in churches more than a tiny bit, you’ve heard that verse preached – both well and poorly. Among Bible verses, this one lands somewhere in the Top Ten Most Likely to Become Trite. I can still picture some of the old-timers in my life saying, “Now, ya know, we wrassle not against flesh and blood…” followed by a tilt of the head and a crinkling of the crow’s feet on one side. Brace yourself, brother; brace yourself, sister; I’m about to ask a few sobering questions about this cosmic wrestling match.

     Did those first-century Ephesians have any better access to truth than we do right now? In the interest of saving time, the answer is No. Is the statement encapsulated in Ephesians 6:12 any less true than when it was first penned? No again. And since the end of the story is still in our future, is there any reason to think that the present darkness of long-ago Asia Minor isn’t THIS present darkness? Stick with a No, Church, it’ll help you be ready for what comes next.

     Everything perceivable in the natural is animated by a spiritual reality. God, who is spirit according to Jesus, created all things out of nothing. He spoke the dust into existence, then formed the first man out of the dust. Without a spiritual origin, nothing happens. Why, then, do we focus our life’s force on what is cultural, social, political – anything but spiritual? I’ll present a hypothesis.

     We have educated ourselves into delusion. Ever since the Enlightenment, there’s been a growing disdain for whatever is spiritual, even among Christians. We favor what we think we can control, and marginalize what we can’t. And again, the Church is not exempt. We shine artificial light into dark places, and call them no longer dark. But speaking as an old electrician, I can tell you for a fact that those bright artificial lights are exactly one missing electron away from going out.

     “What spiritual reality is animating what’s happening in the natural right now?” Put that question up front, and we are well on our way to knowing how to pray, how to do battle. God helping me, I’m done fighting the wrong enemies for the wrong reasons. Throughout my childhood, it was in my family and schools; through the first half of adulthood, it was mainly in the workplace; through forty years as a Christian, it’s been in various churches; lately, it’s been as a public servant. There’s been much flailing and wailing, every shred of it in vain – unless. Unless the spiritual origin was considered first, and considered foremost.

     I’m finding myself in a lot of meetings lately that don’t seem to be spiritual at all. I’ll be in another one soon after finishing this letter. You can be sure: the spiritual aspects will be at the top of my agenda. If the other attendees don’t take those into consideration, then they won’t have any explanation for what God will accomplish through our time together. They’ll have to find out on the tail end. Oh, well.

     I get it, Church: our natural methods are familiar to us, and they usually make something happen – for better or worse – right away. But if we step back to see the full range of human suffering and the mountains that seem impossible to move, can this be anything less than spiritually dark and cosmic, just as God said through the apostle?

     Jesus, teach us to engage at the spiritual first. Oh, and increase our faith… please!

     I like to get to a car show when I can. The story I told you up front is so old that, even if the car in view was late-model at the time, it’s an antique by now. I’m going to keep my ears open for the new story, the one that goes: “Picked ‘er up for next-to-nothing, but – Good Lord, the smell! Anyways, the brakes weren’t hard to fix, and with plenty o’ EL-bow grease, we got the graffiti off, and here she is!” That’s the kind of story I like: the right effort in the right places for the right reasons.

 

 Grace and Peace (for all the right work),

 

John   

Losing Well

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

     I posed a probing question to a couple of friends lately, and begged their brutally honest responses. The question was: What do you do when it looks like you’re losing?

     Think on it for a minute, Church, and jot down a few answers of your own. When your plan is falling apart, shot full of holes; when you’re caught in the crush of money and power; when the universe, nor any particle thereof, will turn your direction – what are your go-to tactics?

     For my friends and me (no, I did not stand aloof from the question), I opened it up to pre-salvation days, before we were Christians. I’ll make you the same offer because, even though as Christians we do have regenerated souls and the mind of Christ, we will, at times, revert to some oh-so-not-Christian methods. At times. You know, those times when the sovereignty of our King is in question, and trust is just out of reach, and doubt wins the day. Yeah, those times. Have I opened up the range of responses for you yet? As you ponder and wrestle with your conscience, brace yourself for some of what my friends and I tossed onto the whiteboard.

     “What do you do when it looks like you’re losing?” And of course, we got:

    Pray.

    Trust God.

    Lean on faith.

     But just when it appeared we were only going in that direction, we also got:

    Fight dirty.

    Change the rules.

    Run away.

     From that point onward, we could respond freely and openly:

    Give up.

    Get help.

    Blame somebody else.

    Work harder.

    Get violent.

    Get drunk and/or buzzed.

     Of all the responses we came up with, I’ll nominate this one as the most helpful:

    Read the end of the story.

     There’s a word I’d like you to consider, Church, along with its many connotations. The word is “remnant.” From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definition reads “a usually small part, member, or trace remaining.” An alternative definition goes “a small surviving group – often used in plural.” For the quilters and sewers among us, the following definition has a special intrigue: “an unsold or unused end of piece goods.”

     Has it ever occurred to you that all of humanity was once pared down to eight persons on Noah’s ark? Or that the entire race of the Israelites once consisted of only six dozen blood relatives coming out of Canaan? Or that, of the whole generation of Hebrews who left out of Egypt, only Joshua and Caleb entered the Promised Land? In the history of God’s people, the remnant is a thing.

     In the English Standard Version of the Bible, “remnant” occurs 84 times across both Testaments. In the Old, the remnant were those who stuck with Joseph or Joshua or Jehoshaphat, for example. In the New, the remnant were those who stuck with Jesus, even after his mind-blowing discourse in the synagogue at Capernaum. Whichever Testament you check, the remnant shared this distinction: It looked, for all the world, like they were losing.

     In this present time, here’s the trouble for Christians: the remnant don’t weigh heavily in the so-called balance of power. The remnant don’t win elections with votes. Remnant and democracy are not on happy terms. When I look around – and I look around a lot, and God helping me, with clear eyes – I can’t see a single social issue in which morality is winning. Whatever God has described as good and just and pure, throughout all ages, is currently losing in the polls. The really big money is on immorality. Of every flavor. And money talks.

     That’s why it’s essential for us to keep the end of the story in view.

     For the Hebrews in the wilderness, the end of the story was getting to the Promised Land. In this present age, the end of the story is called out in the Gospels and Epistles, and most clearly in the Revelation. Here’s a sampling:

    For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words (1Thessalonians 4:15-18).

    Encourage one another, also, with these words:

    Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems, and he has a name written that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords (Revelation 19:11-16).

     When, as a newly minted Christian, I first came across those two Bible passages, I thought they were too good to be true. I expected, once I became better-versed in Scripture, to find other passages that cancelled them out, or some technicality that left me, at least, outside of their promises. But forty years in, no such passage has appeared. Without abandoning humility entirely, I can claim to be fairly well versed in Scripture, and I’ve quit expecting to find any such technicality. The end of the story, in all its glorious detail, is thoroughly true – and believable. Will we believe? Jesus, help our unbelief, and compel us to act on truth.

     Anything that doesn’t work toward the end of the true story is wasted blood, wasted sweat, wasted tears, wasted time and money. There’s a commission on us, we who are the remnant right now, to pull for what is right and just and pure, as declared by our true King – to use every ounce of righteous energy to slam the door on immorality. Even when it looks like we’re losing. Jesus, help us again, to use righteous energy, and not the other.

     As pilgrims in this walk-around world, when we’re faced with a decision, the question on our minds must be: “Is there a moral issue in view here?” If so, and the world’s system provides a moral option, go with it. If there’s no moral option, work to change the system. But by no means are we cornered into choosing from nothing but immoral options just because the system has hijacked moral issues. We are free to choose only what works toward the true end.   

     The crucifixion of Jesus looked like utter defeat. Remember how the apostles, all but one, refused to make an appearance on that awful hill. And for the next several weeks, they huddled and hid behind locked doors. No, the remnant don’t win every battle. But we win some. And we certainly win the war. And as the sons and daughters-in-law of Noah repopulated the earth, we also are called to repopulate the number of those who believe the end of the story – until we become, as John the apostle saw, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”   

  

Grace and Peace (as we wait for you, Lord Jesus),

 

John