Friday, May 27, 2011

Complete Renovation

What is the end game?  We know the healing process is about removing the pain we inflict on ourselves, others and God when we embrace evil.  But what does it look like when there is nothing left to heal?  No more infection.  No more addiction.  No more pain from what we choose and then what we do.  Make no mistake; the end game has always been about complete and total perfection.  The scariest text in the Bible uttered by the disciple prophet John during his revelation of the end of our world … “let he who is holy, be holy still” becomes words of hope, rather than a curse of doom.  You might call it “Destination Enoch”.  You might also call it the most nerve racking phenomenon a Christian will ever expect to experience.

We have already discussed how difficult it is to measure progress in our journey to perfection.  But to have arrived at it presents the greatest fundamental danger – believing you are perfect when you are not.  The most dangerous condition any Christian can find themselves in is to believe they are not doing wrong, when scripture points out otherwise.  Almost every Christian can name you a few examples of friends they have that meet this condition.  And almost never does their own name make the list.  It is one thing to struggle to submit to Christ in order that He give us the victory over something we once struggled against.  It is another not to ask for victory because we feel there is no need to.  Our entire journey to perfection is one of Christ fixing one flaw after another.  Sometimes along the way we have discovered that the sin we longed so much to get rid of, was merely the tip of the iceberg in our lives.  What we formerly thought as mountainous requires a new definition when we truly see what must be altered in our characters.
So how do we bridge the gap of asking God to change what must be changed, when often we may not be sure what that is – to finally arriving at His work being done in us?  It is much easier for those who die in Christ.  They will arise from the grave absent all defects.  In the twinkling of an eye their entire characters will finally see perfection.  But for those who are alive and remain – we stand before the throne of God – without a mediator.  There was always a veil of Christ between us and the Most High until He journeys to earth to bring us home.  It is then that the fateful prophet’s words echo so loudly.  It is then that the work of Christ to save us is ended once and for all.  No more are prayers of forgiveness to be offered, as forgiveness has been granted.  No more the desire to embrace evil as now all those remnant of the Lord long only to do and love as He would.  It is a great day.  And it precedes His second coming.
Enoch saw this fulfilled in his own life.  Some modern Christians belittle Enoch’s accomplishments because he was able to live 360+ years before translation.  They argue he had more time to perfect himself than we do living only a third or less as long.  They argue that pre-flood the people did not face nearly the temptations of our modern world.  After all we don’t believe they had radio, TV, films, the internet, cheap access to crime of all types, and the affluence and time to abuse these things.  But these assumptions are based on the premise that man is evolving to a higher state and simply because knowledge will increase before His coming, it must by comparison be greater than in times of old.  But Christ Himself counters this argument by comparing the end of the world to the days before the flood.
One must remember Christ lived in the times of the Roman Empire when Jewish life was hardly worth the effort of a roman cross.  Forests of crosses decorated Judea as the people continued to rebel against the oppression of Rome.  It was a common form of a torturous death.  Life had little meaning in the time of Christ, and yet He points to the age of Noah as being worse.  How much more evil would Hitler have been, if he had access to the other 90 percent of his brain?  How much more evil would scientists be if they had similar abilities?  Would men who could easily gather gold from the ground, and had easy access to any raw materials find themselves affluent in a short period of time?  Would they indulge in all manner of perversions, perhaps even seeking to blend life forms mixing and splicing DNA until they “created” dinosaurs, centaurs, cavemen, and other such mixtures that God had nothing to do with?  Yes it is only speculation, but speculation based on logic and the demonstrated attempts of modern man since beginning to understand DNA.  In short, Enoch lived in a world far worse than our own.
Environment is not an excuse.  Christ lived a perfect life despite the conditions of His birth, oppression of a foreign government, persecution of the established religion, and ignorance of His chief disciples.  Enoch walked with God so closely, He found himself translated to heaven – as did Elijah some years later.  It is possible, as scripture tells us, it was done.  In order for Enoch or Elijah to reach heaven and pick up where Lucifer left off, something in them had to reach perfection itself.  Their characters had to have been made into total harmony with the government, principles, and values of our God.  They could not see this city and still harbor evil in any form.  Even the slightest evil would have precluded them from reaching this goal we all seek.
Sometimes our compromises blind us.  We follow the commandment not to bear false witness, by trying hard never to tell a lie under direct examination.  However, we shade the truth through omission, or carefully selected language chosen so as not to offend.  Little white lies as they commonly known are often embraced even by Christians in the “greater” effort of not hurting the feelings of another soul.  Enoch had no such moral dilemma.  God requires no such dishonesty on our parts, nor does He offer us any.  The truth is the only language God speaks.  He does not hide the truth from us.  But He does not use the truth to kill us either.  God speaks His truth in love and only love.  His motivation is never to inflict pain, but actually to remove it from us.  His truth may at first seem harsh to us, but as we come to embrace it, we are liberated and made free by it.  This is the beauty of His truth.
No, both Enoch and Elijah were perfect before they walked through the pearly gates.  As we will be, and those who die in Christ will be.  Our journey then has a destination.  We are not on an endless road that never arrives anywhere due to the exceptional size of our evil.  No matter how much work Christ has to do in us, it is a work He is able to complete.  Herein comes another test of trust.  Do we trust Christ enough to believe He will complete His work in us in the allotted time?  We may not doubt His ability, rather doubt our steadfast willingness to submit and see it done.  Regardless of our fears, can we still trust Him to save us?  This was the same dilemma Adam faced.  He loved God.  He loved Eve.  He could not imagine how love could be greater than justice.  Adam failed to trust God to find a way and sin was born into the world.
It is now, here in our world, that we are faced with the same issue that plagued Adam so long ago.  Can we trust God enough to find a way to make perfect in us, what we have never been able to affect?  Can we trust the love will find a way, even when we cannot imagine what that way could be?  I love my wife and my family – can I trust God to save them?  Can I risk losing them eternally to remain faithful to God no matter what choice my spouse, my parents, my children, or any that I love make?  This is where Adam failed, and I must succeed.  Christ Himself risked eternal separation from God while hanging on that cross.  The weight of sins he carried that he had never committed was so great, he thought the stain may be enough to eternally separate Him from His father.  He could not see past the grave.  He did not know what would happen.  It was nothing close to a done deal.  And He submitted to the will of His Father anyway.  He died NOT knowing.  He risked it all, on a level we will never understand.  And the magnitude of love was so defined.
Yet as our world grows more wicked and our memories more acute, we will remember keenly the past and our sins in it.  Satan will not simply give up on us, write us off as being too late to plague.  He will attack those who submit even more fiercely than those under His sway.  We will be public enemy number one in his doomed kingdom.  And of course even though he lies, he has the truth of our past on his side.  He will torment us with sins we have committed, suggesting that we are not really sorry.  That we are only afraid of the consequences of our actions, not beyond the desire to do them again if we could get away with it.  He will suggest that lack of opportunity to sin is not the same thing as lack of desire to sin.  He will suggest that the pain we have caused others in our past is TOO great to be truly forgiven by them, nor should it be let go by us.  He wants us to have eternal guilt.  He wants us to focus only on our sin, not on its cure.  Our minds will search for sins we thought we might have buried even from our conscience mind.  It will be an agony of looking under every rock in our soul to ferret out anything that still needs Christ to fix.  It will be the time of Jacob’s trouble for us.
Environment will matter for nothing.  The fact that this mental anguish comes at a time when the plagues are falling, Satan is loosed and running amuck in the world, men are out to persecute and kill those who will not yield their morality to the edicts of the majority – these things that would normally paralyze a man with fear mean nothing to those marked as saved.  It remains the mental agony of knowing we come from a life of sin, and being unable to detect any further sin in our lives.  This agony is a product of our history.  It can be reduced if we can remember it is our Christ who is faithful in His work in us.  It is He who saves us and not ourselves.  We can put our faith, our trust, and our anguish in Him and His mercy to us.  Our actions will reflect His motives.  And the world will be blessed by what we do, even as they attempt to kill us for doing it.
We do not really know when this work will be completed in us.  We only know it will be complete before the Lord returns.  However this does not preclude it happening significantly earlier than that.  It begs the question, will we know it when we see it, and are we the thing preventing it from reaching completion now?  I pray it is not my stubborn desire to hold on to sin, that keeps the Lord from completing His work in me today.  I pray it is not my lack of steadfastness in surrendering to Him each day and each evening that delays His work in me.  I pray that He ends the evil in the world, and the evil in me completely.  There is nothing here worth holding on to.
The trust we build in Christ to save us here in our world of sin is the trust that keeps us from stumbling into sin for the rest of eternity.  Lucifer became Satan over a dispute regarding ideas.  He had no prior knowledge of sin, and had only the wisdom of God’s counsel to trust that his new ideas would lead where they did.  Lucifer did not trust God more than his own wisdom, and sin was born into the universe.  We who must learn to rely on Christ to save us in this world, can safely rely on Him to keep us from evil for the rest of eternity.  We who have discovered that His only motives are to show us what love means on a one-to-one basis, can be trusted to continue His love for us forever.  The work He does in us here will echo for all eternity.  It will bear ceaseless fruit for the ages.  It is not just a never ending process – it is one that will reach maturity and our lives will never be same because of it.

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