An Atheist's Anthem ...

 “If I only saw a sign, I would believe.”  This is a familiar chorus I have heard from nearly every non-believer I have encountered.  Sadly, it is also a familiar refrain I have heard from many Christians.  We look for the impossible to validate a faith that does not make any sense.  We ask to see the impossible for ourselves, unwilling to take the words or testimony of others on this account.  It needs to be personal.  It needs to be tangible.  Or else, how could I believe?  And in this we destroy our journey-of-faith and wish for certainty in its place.  But be honest, how could you ever be certain, of the impossible?  Even if you witness a single incident of it, will one witness be enough to believe in all the others, and for the rest of your life?  So if you must witness more than one incident, how many will be enough?  All of them?  Would it really take time travel to finally make us believe that what is recorded in scripture was real?  If you are looking here, you are cheating yourself.  There is another venue, and something a lot more personal for each of us.

To begin, certainty is not the goal.  If I asked you to trust me, how would you go about it?  You might evaluate our interactions, our history together.  You might conclude that if my behavior was always in line with your expectations, that you could extend trust to me, and then see what happens.  But therein lies the catch.  No matter how I have behaved with you in the past, no matter how consistent our history may be, each time you extend trust to me, you take a risk.  If past is prologue, then you may believe the risk to be low.  But that “belief” is still a “belief” you hold about my trustworthiness, based on a myriad of factors, but none the less a “belief” that I will not let you down.  This is how trust works. 

You may trust your mom for example, because your mom has demonstrated that she loves you.  Even if she screws up, she still loves you, though her mistake proves her human.  You may even elect to extend trust to her again after a huge mistake, because there has been only one (or few you know about), and generally she does not make them.  But even with mom (mistakes or no), every time you extend trust, you hold a “belief” that it is worth it, to trust her.  Certainty is impossible.  Because you cannot absolutely predict what anyone else (including God) may do, or why they do it.  In the end, you have ideas about it, guesses about it, even educated guesses about it.  But behavior is a tricky thing to absolutely predict, and so people surprise us sometimes (for better or for worse).  To trust anyone, is to embrace “belief”, at the exclusion of absolute certainty.

But where God is concerned, it is more blame that goes around, than trust.  That has directly to do with our picture of “who or what” God is.  The media, our parents, our church, our friends, our professors, may have all played a role in forming an image in your mind about who God is.  Suffice it to say, it boils down to one of 2 main images.  Most folks think God is a version of Santa Clause.  We go to Him to ask for stuff.  We are happy when we get it.  Mad when we don’t.  But are generally quick to ruthlessly blame God for anything bad that happens, under the logic that Santa should have been watching and been able to prevent the bad stuff before it ever happened.  After all, He has done it for others, why not me?  Way too many Christians have this exact image of God, despite all the scriptures.  Most Atheists just don’t believe in any kind of Santa Clause, or any god, but if there were a God, He would be to blame for everything.

In the Santa Clause picture of God, no trust is required.  Neither is certainty.  If you get the stuff you asked for, hallelujah.  If not, it must not be in God’s time yet.  So Santa has a slot machine sort of response to what you ask for, the odds are low, but you never know.  How could faith ever grow in you, if this is the image of God you believe in, or have the most experience with?  And believe me, Satan is WAY too happy to keep this image of God in your mind.  Perhaps enough to grant you some of those wishes himself, in order for you to never shed this image of the God you pray to.  But our real God, needs us to trust Him.  That trust is a critical component of His ability to save us – from us.  Denying yourself to let some random God you don’t really know remake who you are, is just not likely.  Better to keep the Santa image, and just hope for the best.

So God’s problem is getting you to stop thinking of Him in terms of doling out rewards and punishments, and start thinking of Him for the Being He truly is.  The other image of God (a saving God).  God wants to save you, from you.  He loves you (being the primary and singular motive of His).  God sees sin as the punishment and the addictive disease.  And He has only one way to rid you of it.  But for that to work, you have to trust Him enough to let Him do it, in spite of how it looks.  Trust, in spite of common sense.  Trust, in spite of what everyone else tells you.  Trust, that He is able to do the impossible in you, where history demonstrates, you are clearly unable to do it.  So if that is His mission, and trust is what He needs from you.  Offering you certainty does nothing to accomplish it.  If you witness a 1,000 different acts of the impossible, all you will have learned is that it is possible for God to do the impossible.  You might have already imagined that.  But you will still have no reason to let Him reconstruct who you are.  A thousand elements of certainty do not build trust, they build resentment.  Back to the Santa Clause image – now that I have seen 1,000 impossible things – I intend to open complaints about why I did not benefit from any of them.  A thousand acts of love and impossibility for others, does me not one bit of good.  So now I am mad at Santa, because there was only coal in my stocking, while my neighbor got Barbie’s playhouse.

The first problem with asking for signs, is that it does not bring trust.  The second, is that it will only make you mad they were not for you, or selfish if they were (who does not want more miracles in their own lives).  And lastly they are usually requested as a condition of belief (instead of a result of it) doing nothing to foster trust, so there will never be enough of them, to really make a believer out of you.  You will either find a way to let your skepticism reduce the impossible, to a scientifically explainable trick (or perhaps a random set of circumstances that worked out just right despite the incredible odds, like say the hypothesis of evolution) - or you will find you have an insatiable appetite for more signs, at the cost of what you profess is a belief.  In any case, the mission God has to save you, from you, by remaking you fails because He grants your wishes for signs as a condition of belief.  A change in thinking, on the other hand, will pull back the veil that has blinded your eyes to the impossible.  What you witness after a change in how you perceive life, is going to be mind blowing.  Sounds crazy right now, but that’s the point.  It is crazy.  But it is also real.  And it will be a lot more personal to you than you could possibly imagine now.

Take as a case in point the story of two types of people in the gospel of Matthew the 27^th chapter.  Picking up in verse 38 it reads … “Then were there two thieves crucified with him, one on the right hand, and another on the left.”  You could argue these men might have been believers in the Jewish faith (though obviously not perfect observers of the Law).  It is not known exactly what they believed at least from Matthew’s account.  However we know from other versions of the good news, that one repented before he died, the other did not.  Dieing in the company of known criminals tends to make one look like a criminal even if this is not true.  This death will do nothing to uplift the reputation of Christ.  But Jesus does not care about His reputation.  In His trial all manner of lies were told about Him, and His response was perfect silence.  No condemnation, no calling people out on their sins, only silence.  But Jesus was eager to speak to anyone who seeks salvation.  When the dying theif seeks Jesus, Jesus responds, no matter what kind of physical pain He was in.  When that same theif was hurling insults at Him, Jesus remained silent.

Matthew continues in verse 39 saying … “And they that passed by reviled him, wagging their heads, [verse 40] And saying, Thou that destroyest the temple, and buildest it in three days, save thyself. If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross.”  Dying in the company of thieves, and up on a Roman cross, was decidedly NOT the sign the Jewish people were looking for where it comes to proving Jesus was God.  These were believers.  These were those who studied scriptures.  And yet their ideas about what God was supposed to do – that is, to throw off Roman oppression and setup a Kingdom that would last forever – overpowered all the other texts and prophecies that predicted exactly this part of the mission of God to save us.  “Believers” who desired something else of God, and refused to accept what God was actually doing to truly answer their prayers.  When Santa does not behave how we want Him to, what good is Santa right?  And so in this case, the very fact Jesus was actually fulfilling prophecy, was the very fact that disqualified Him as being the Messiah in their minds.  Sound familiar?

How often do we ask God for a thing, and threaten Him that if He does not do it, we will believe no longer?  Save me.  Save my child.  Save my spouse.  From the disease and death that stalk them.  If the results are not what we expect – we become angry and decide there cannot be a God – or else why did He not answer my prayer.  But perhaps He did, just not in the way you expected.  Perhaps from Gods point of view, saving you, your child, your spouse, for eternity is most important to all of you.  Should earthly life end today, and infinite life begin tomorrow, reunited, with infinite love in all of your hearts – is this not the preferred outcome all of you would want, even if it comes at the price of shortening how long you live in this world today?  Let’s say instead of focusing on the eternal, that God allowed you the answer to your prayers, and saved that life in the here and now.  As time passes, you, or your child, or your spouse, begin to change (not for the better).  Perhaps over time, one of you decides there is no God at all, and if there is, He is not worth following.  Sin is more “fun”, instead of the disease it truly is.  If that is how you meet your end in this world, and the eternal world is sacrificed in the process.  Did God really do what was in your best interest all those years ago when He saved you only to meet this new end?  And God knows what you will choose long before it happens.  Santa might let this play out.  But God would rather it didn’t.  God would prefer to cherish you while your free will choice reciprocates that love, rather than let you exist long enough to discard it under the weight of sin’s embrace.

So because God does not do what we want or expect, does not make Him any less trustworthy.  Keep in mind Jesus was doing what ALL of us need for salvation.  Not trying to prove Himself to nay-sayers at the time and place of His death.  Matthew continues in verse 41 saying … “Likewise also the chief priests mocking him, with the scribes and elders, said, [verse 42] He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he be the King of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him.”  And there we have it, the Athiest’s Anthem coming right out of the mouths of the very top leadership of the church at that time.  What image of God do you suppose they had, the one of a saving God who would die in our place, and fulfill prophecy – or the one of Santa who doles out punishment and reward emphasis on punishment.  And had Jesus descended off that cross in front of their eyes, gliding right down in front of them fully healed, what do you suppose their response would have been?  They would have hated Him all the more, because now Roman oppression still abounded, and Jesus would be impossible to kill after all.  Think about it, they already had ALL the previous miracles Jesus did to consider in weighing whether or not He was the Messiah, and NONE of them changed their course of action or belief.  They chose to dismiss every previous sign and still pursue killing Him.

And should Jesus have chosen to assuage His own ego, by proving to these priests He truly did have this power, what kind of God does that truly make Him?  A God of ego?  Who would gladly sacrifice our eternal considerations for those of the moment?  How could we be saved then?  It is often our expectations of what God should do, that could never be met anyway.  Because we come from a place of ego and selfishness, where God comes from a totally opposite perspective.  Jesus believes it is better to die to save all of us, than to do anything shortsighted, and gain nothing.  Jesus never used any of His power to benefit Himself.  Instead He used it unceasingly on us, the objects of His love, restoring us, removing the pain of sin and death from us.  Our restoration tops the mind of a saving God.  Not just getting rid our physical diseases, but getting rid of the way more deadly sinful disease of bad motives driving bad choices we continue to embrace.  Curing us of our desire to sin, is way more important.  Saving us from an eternal perspective way more important than saving us in the moment.

The ridicule continues as Matthew writes picking up in verse 43 saying … “He trusted in God; let him deliver him now, if he will have him: for he said, I am the Son of God. [verse 44] The thieves also, which were crucified with him, cast the same in his teeth.”  Matthew hears the mockery of the thieves, but misses the repentance of the one.  Here we have an example of Jesus suffering the same fate as we do from time to time.  Jesus trusted in His Father.  And yet, He was dying, very painfully in this world.  The Father had NO interest in seeing His Son be tortured and die.  But the Father had a GREAT interest in seeing all of humanity be saved and reconciled unto Himself.  The death of His Son was that price.  In order that the need for Justice be satisfied.  So Jesus dies, in extreme pain we inflicted.  And the Father must sit there in silence and watch.  The eternal salvation outweighing the salvation of the moment.  This is how great our God desires to save us in the eternal realm, not just the here and now.  It is a different way of thinking.

So the repentant thief represents one kind of person, the mocking priests another.  For those mocking priests, no sign would ever be enough.  And frankly the next section of texts are going to have some doozies.  For the repentant thief however, for those of us who seek salvation from Jesus, what will happen in us is a change.  You will note that repentant theif was NOT saved from the cross.  He died in this world, but with certainty about his own place in the next one.  And change began to occur even in the worst dying circumstances any of us can imagine.  We too will become different than we are today.  Not because we work for it.  But because we begin to choose to trust Him, and allow Him to remake us however He sees fit.  Then change is surely on its way in us.  We read scripture differently.  We begin to see love as the primary motivation, instead of some wild afterthought.  We begin to reason differently.  And over time, the blinders of bad choices, the blinders of doubt, fall away – and what is revealed is a regular diatribe of the impossible happening all the time.  For example, the changing of hearts.  Not just of others, but of my own.  Learning how to love differently, and more deeply, than you had ever imagined.  No seminar could ever get this done.  But allowing Jesus full access sure does.  Without Jesus, things tend to degenerate.  But with Jesus, things tend to improve, especially in areas where it matters the most.

That sign, that impossibility, is very personal, very tangible, and you will live with its benefit every day of your life.  Does it cure your cancer?  No.  It could.  But it does not have to.  It fixes something more important.  The quality of your days expands exponentially, whether you are beset by physical pain and disease, or whether you are healed from them.  Keep in mind, disease does not exist in heaven.  So whether here or there, you are destined to see disease, pain and death no more.  And what happens to the desire to see a sign now?  You lose the selfishness part of that.  Instead of asking for goodies for yourself, you have no thought of yourself.  But you are swamped with thoughts of others.  You want to BE a sign for someone else, help them, meet their need if you can, no matter how you are feeling at the time.  And where you are powerless to meet their need, you do ask God for the impossible.  Not as a condition of belief, but because you are SURE He can, and will do what is right for that person’s eternal interest.  Where it comes to the removal of sin, 100% guarantee He wants that.  Where it comes to all the other worldly stuff, His gifts must fall in line with our salvation.  Knowing He longs to give them, and knowing He must hold them back, if they would add to our downfall.

Life, instead of existence, is a very tangible, and personal thing.  No one else can define it for you.  No one else can deny the impossible you are witness to in your heart and life.  For you know what is true for you.  You see what God does in your life.  What you suffer from in the eyes of others matters not.  Whether you are burdened with wealth, sickness, persecution – those do not represent the favor or curse of God.  They represent the danger of evil in this world, and are used by Satan to try to get people to believe in a Santa Clause image of God doling out rewards and punishments.  But for the one who truly believes, and chooses to truly trust, the curtain is pulled back – and the impossible is revealed every day no matter what our circumstances or positions may be.  Certainty has never been the goal.  Trust in spite of not knowing has always been it.  That kind of trust prevents the next Satan in the world to come.  And creates a new creature of you in the world we live in today.

 

Achieving Greatness ...

How do you measure greatness?  Is it in the singularity of doing something few, if any other, has ever done?  Does it take the field of sport to accomplish it?  Imagine the greatest athletes that come to mind; Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth, Jack Nicholson, perhaps Michael Phelps.  They did things few others appear as good at.  They set records.  And while all records are meant to be broken, the style and finesse and shear accomplishment is hard to dispute.  And every sport has them.  Or do you measure greatness in financial terms?  Would then Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg come to mind.  They are worth billions of dollars, and Warren and Bill have tremendous records of philanthropy they continue to improve.  Does that much money equate to greatness, and giving it away, even more?  Or perhaps do you lean to discovery and look at those who pioneered in the field of medicine as those who found what it means to be great.  Names like Louis Pasteur, Jonas Salk, Walter Reed, or Karl Landsteiner; people whose passion for discover was aimed at finding medical improvements to benefit the whole of us.

When you stack yourself against names like this, against accomplishments like this, or records like this; do you even begin to enter their league?  It is easy to accept the premise that it takes being unique in some fashion to be great.  It is hard to imagine being common, and still being considered great.  But Jesus may have the hardest of all premises for us to accept.  To lose all uniqueness, abandon all ideas of accomplishment, and measure our greatness in equal parts of humility and childlike trust.  The more humble; the more great.  The more childlike; the more great.  This is something ALL of us are capable of, it only requires a choice on our part to seek it.  We submit ourselves to Jesus, and He works this work within us.  There is nothing unique about it, in that everyone can/should be an equal participant.  There is no exclusive offer, just a common one, made to everyone.  If there is any exclusivity, it is that so many refuse the offer, and so few accept it.

This is hard for us to wrap our brains around.  But it might have even been harder for the Hebrews in the time of Christ to wrap their brains around, and Matthew was going to attempt to present this truth to them regardless.  Their system of caste was far more developed, and strict than anything we see today.  They had centuries of tradition, even the scripture seemed to support their premises, yet Jesus was about to turn their world, and ours, on its head.  The story begins in chapter eighteen of Matthew’s gospel.  It does not start out from a question of discovery, but more likely, from a question of ambition or greed.  Matthew picks up in verse 1 saying … “At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”  This was not about generic interest, this was purely about which one of them was to be greater than the others.  After all, you only need one governor, or one chief of the military, etc.  Not all 12 would likely get the same level of cushy job in the new Jesus administration.  And His transition to becoming King could not be too far away.

The answer would astound them all.  Mathew continues in verse 2 saying … “And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, [verse 3] And said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”  There was something far more insidious in the question the disciples posed than ambition from one over the other.  In that question lurked the ideas of self-reliance.  Each thought himself better than his contemporaries based on his innate abilities, perhaps drive, or passion, or steadfastness, or energy.  Each disciple assumed a position of greatness would come to them, based on what they had done to earn it, or would do to earn it.  And this disease of thinking infected their ideas of salvation – just as it has our own.  While we may not aspire to greatness in the Kingdom of Heaven, we still view it in our own world as being tied to the uniqueness of self.  And we foster those same ideas right into our salvation, that we can conquer our sin on our own, by our choice to simply sin no more.  We look to Christ as merely a partner in helping us do what we were meant to do.  We ask for Jesus to only “make up the difference between our best efforts and what is required of us”.  But that difference is more vast than our arrogance will allow us to believe.

The disciples shared our current line of thinking.  And so to begin Jesus counsels that we must ALL be “converted”.  Now keep in mind He was talking directly to His own disciples who were believers in Him, and had been following Him for several years now.  They had cast out demons, healed the sick, and learned from the mouth of God directly, along the way witnessing first hand the miracles of that transformative love in both body and soul.  But so far, refused to taste it.  They, like us, still clung to the notion of self-reliance as it relates to entry into the Kingdom of Heaven.  So Jesus begins by stripping them of the idea that “they had made it”, or, that they were ever going to make it on the path they were on.  We must ALL begin with conversion.  Letting go the notions of self-reliance, and begin to accept a role of complete dependence upon Jesus just as a 2 year old accepts the notion of complete dependence on his/her parents to survive.  Children do not do the work, they trust, and simply reap the benefits.  This was a concept those seeking greatness never saw coming.  If this was the standard, none of them would be great based on how they were thinking.  None of us will either.

Jesus continues in verse 4 saying … “Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”  To become great begins with humility.  It begins with the recognition, that we have extreme need, and CANNOT fill this need ourselves.  We will never beat Satan at the sin game, he is much better than us, smarter than us, and knows how to play and win.  But Jesus beats him in a New-York-minute.  We must humble ourselves and admit we cannot win; and allow Jesus to win on our behalf.  We must stop fighting our sin, and let Jesus do the fighting on our behalf – allow Jesus to change what we like, which leads to changing what we do, which leads to changing how we love, how we think, and puts us back into harmony with the laws and precepts of our God.  ONLY then is obedience possible.  Everything else is distraction, and deception.  We kid ourselves, fool ourselves, and hold ourselves outside of the Kingdom because we refuse to accept this simple premise.  What Jesus lays out with respect to our conversion, is NOT an excuse to keep sinning, it is the only escape from sinning in the here and now.

This changes the nature of greatness from something only the few can do, to something anyone can do.  You are not limited by the muscles of your body, the size of your wallet, or the intellectual power of your mind.  You only need to be converted (change your thinking), and become like a 2-year-old who trusts his Parent (the heavenly One) completely, for everything.  God is NOT our partner, in our salvation.  He is the Author of it, and the Finisher of it.  We are the beneficiary of it.  We do nothing, but accept it, and allow Him to do all the work of it in us.  Jesus continues in verse 5 saying … “And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.”  There is no such thing as “too young”, or too immature, to too dumb to follow Jesus.  Anyone, at any age, regardless of what we perceive as spiritual maturity or understanding is fully accepted by Jesus as a follower the second they choose to become one.  This idea turned on its head, the contemporary thinking that you had to study first, and upon gaining an understanding of scripture, only then could you join the ranks of the religious institution.  Jesus says no.  All you need is to trust Him and begin to love, and you are ready.  What children do best is to trust and love.  They love naturally; and are only taught to hate.

When we receive a child in the name of Jesus, we are receiving Jesus Himself.  This is no small promise.  This is the foundation of a church built upon love, transformative love, the love of Jesus Christ.  Jesus says to the sinner (and the saint), I love you, let me take your pain and the trail of death you have chosen from you.  When the sinner (or the saint) agrees to this, they need nothing more, to officially join the ranks of the church of Jesus.  No matter their age.  No matter their level of doctrinal understanding.  The rest of education can wait, the acceptance into the family of Jesus begins immediately.  The sinner (and us saints) begin every day forward with making this same choice – to love, and to allow His love to do the work it needs to do within us, to bring us into harmony with our God.  We should take joy in this.  We should have our arms ever outstretched to love sinners (even while still in their sin) and saints (even when they make repeated mistakes).  The love of our God is unconditional, and has the power to transform, all of us who still do not yet live rightly.  We need only focus on letting it do its work in us.  Submission based in a humility that recognizes its own need.

And what does the alternative look like?  Jesus continues in verse 6 saying … “But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”  We, that is you or me, are NOT to “offend” one of the 2-year-old’s who belong to Jesus.  Better for us to keep our mouths shut.  Better for us to love in silence, than offer words of good intent, that have negative impact.  Better to be liberal with our love towards those who sin, than to restrict it, thinking we do them a service, we do not.  The loss, of causing a child of God to stumble or look away from God’s love is so profound it will one day break our perfected hearts.  Whether in this world, or the next, to look back and realize you had a key role in causing a precious child of God to turn away from God – because of what you said, or did – will cause a grief in you so deep you will wish you had been strapped to a millstone and throne into the sea before you caused that kind of damage to one who is now lost, at least in part, because of your role in their lives.  You may still be saved, this is not about “your” salvation.  But to know you caused the loss of another, will devastate you in a way NOTHING else ever will.  There is no greater grief.  I would expect weeping and gnashing of teeth over this one even from inside the walls of heaven.

Jesus continues in his warnings of what happens when we give ourselves not to Him, but to our own ideas of self-reliance and the evil it brings.  He continues in verse 7 saying … “Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!”  This was a warning to Judas over his upcoming betrayal.  The betrayal of Judas was foretold by the prophets and it had to take place in order for scripture to be fulfilled, but the devastation to Judas would be crushing.  Jesus knew it, and this warning was to try to warn Judas about what it would do him.  But these same words were also meant for Peter.  The betrayal of Peter, by denying Christ, was not needed, it was chosen.  Peter too would be crushed by what he chose to do.  And these same words echo through the ages to you and I, for the constant failures we choose to embrace, and the stubborn refusals we hold to give up our ideas of self-reliance in our salvation.

Then Jesus speaks to us in an allegory we do not yet fully comprehend.  He continues in verse 8 saying … “Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire. [verse 9] And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.”  Where it comes to offending a little child of God, how often do we find our feet or our hands engaged in activity that drives a child away from God.  While God is not our partner in salvation for He does it all; very often we have partners in our sins, real human partners.  We encourage each other in our sin, rationalizing our actions, and saying we can always ask for forgiveness later.  Better to lose hands and feet, than to be a partner in the demise of another child of God.  And our eyes.  How often do we train our eyes to find and see evil, most often because it appeals to us.  We look at other children of God, not as family, but as potential victims of our lust or our greed, or our avarice.  Better to pull out our own eyes, than to see other children of God in this way.  To embrace evil, is to embrace the pain of hell fire a long time before the flames ever touch our skin.  This is what Jesus is so desperate to help us avoid.  Protecting His little children from others even within the church is Him protecting you and me as well.

Finally Jesus brings it back to a more positive note as this encounter concludes in verse 10 saying … “ Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven. [verse 11] For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost.”  Little children, of a very young age, in fact since they were born, already have guardian angels assigned to them.  Those angels behold the face of His Father which is in heaven.  When you despise the beloved of our God, you despise yourself, and face a grief in yourself you cannot now imagine.  We must all remember the Son of Man is come to save that which was lost.  Jesus is not talking about loving that which is easy to love, but that which is steeped in poo and very hard to love.  2-year-old’s very often make a mess in their diapers which no one, is too eager to have to clean up.  It smells.  It can make you nauseous.  When they have spread it all over their face and hands and clothing, that is how we look when covered in our sins.  But even in this condition, our Father loves us, enough to embrace us even then, clean us up meticulously until we shine like a new born day.  To avoid offending a sinner, even when they are still steeped in their sin, is the message from a Savior who came to save us ALL from those same sins, namely to save that which was lost.

And our Savior had much more to say …

 

Darkness Has a Plan for You ...

We talk extensively about what plans Jesus has in mind for you.  They begin with your liberation.  Your freedom from slavery to self-love, and the sin you embrace.  The plans of Jesus for you, start by breaking your chains to pain and death, and in their place granting you a new life, a real life, something way more than mere existence.  In short, what Jesus has in mind for you (and only you), is unique to you, and offers a purpose without end, an infinite place in His Kingdom that will never expire – and they begin in the here and now, as soon as you allow them to begin.  But unfortunately, these are not the only plans that exist where you are concerned.  Your life is a not a simple choice of what you want, and what Jesus wants.  That is not the two-way choice you face.  If it is not the light you choose to embrace - that will form a shield around you; the darkness is all that is left to you.  The darkness tells you, that “you” are strong and in charge of your fate.  Submission is an act of weakness, you need not submit to Jesus (though the reality is that through submission, you replace your weakness, with His strength).

The goal of the darkness is to first deceive you into believing that there is no darkness at all.  Once you accept this premise, darkness will have full sway over you, and you without the slightest recognition, that events, circumstances, and results are not “just” because of what you choose, and why you choose them; but because you are under attack by a darkness so black its malevolence cannot be fully measured.  Yet so many, even within the church, come to believe the darkness is not real, something of bed time stories, and tools to control the masses through fear.  But fear, is not a tool to escape sin, it is a reason for sin, and a symptom of sin.  Jesus does not want your fear, He wants your trust, and ultimately He hopes you will make a choice to love Him.  The devil is slick in projecting the negative aspects of who he is on to God, accusing God of the things he (the devil) is most guilty of himself.  Obfuscate, hide the idea of darkness at all, and convince you that your life is a matter of luck, and God’s punishment, that darkness plays no role in it at all.

But what happens when you begin to deviate from “normal” behavior.  What happens when you entertain thoughts of the abnormal, of the unacceptable to social norms, and find them attractive, appealing, and ultimately ideas you wish to follow and embrace?  What is perverse, becomes a part of who you are, and who you have chosen to become.  And perversity need not have only to do with sexual expression, it can exist in a number of plains.  The kleptomaniac steals, like you and I take a breath.  We look at these people and refer to their condition as a sickness, as a form of mental disorder.  But that is not how they see themselves.  What is aberrant and perverse to us, is fully normal to them; even if normal is different, just a different idea of normality.  The drug addict, and addicts of every variety, understand logically the danger of their behavior but choose it anyway to get the fix.  The child who entertains the ideas of torturing small animals, and works his way up to humans, becoming a serial killer and a sociopath – chooses not to see himself as a “problem” but as a “solution” to our society.  The perverse expanding its reach across our populous more insidious than any virus, and more effective in its spread.  Until every man looks in the mirror and determines that they are good person, despite whatever differences there might be in how they behave.

But facts remain.  The timeline for darkness is finite.  It will one day come to an end.  John wrote in revelation about the very end of evil, when Satan himself will finally be consumed in the lake of fire.  And once that is done, death itself will be consumed.  The ultimate death of evil.  The ultimate death of death.  No eternal minions to propagate the existence of evil, or torture, or dying.  Instead the absolute end of it, in thought, in motive, in deed, and in instruments of its expression.  This means Satan is on a clock.  Where once he existed from his creation, in a life not intended for an ending, now he is destined to one day be finally consumed in fire, never to exist again.  That clock ticks loudly in his ears.  Every day is a day closer to his final end.  He cannot avoid it (though he will try).  He cannot overcome it.  He is bound to his fate.  So as evil does, it looks for a way, to plot revenge.  Forgiveness does not exist in the mind of evil, any more than mercy does.  And to strike with revenge, he must strike at what God loves the most, namely at you.

So darkness formulates plans for your life, just as firmly as what Jesus does.  The darkness can hurt God, by hurting you.  They can make the pain of God greater, by having you blame God for the pain that comes your way (when in secret it was never Him).  They can make the pain of God better, when they get you to hurt yourself.  They can make this pain better when they can deceive you into believing that a “new normal” is just as good as any old normal, even if that includes being a serial killer, or an addict, or someone who thinks forced sex is better than consensual sex especially as it relates to children.  In morphing what you do, the evil spreads, and impacts itself on other children of God further increasing the pain.  And do you then have value in the dark kingdom … no.  You are nothing to them, merely a tool to spread pain, and a victim to have pain inflicted on.   Lest you believe any differently, or think it could never happen to you, or think you are too innocent (or your baby) is too innocent, to ever be caught up in this – lets take a look at a story Matthew recorded in his gospel in chapter seventeen.

Matthew picks up in verse 14 saying … “And when they were come to the multitude, there came to him a certain man, kneeling down to him, and saying, [verse 15] Lord, have mercy on my son: for he is lunatick, and sore vexed: for ofttimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water.”  First note, that the victim is not the man himself, a father, and someone who believes in the power of Jesus Christ.  The victim is the son, a child, presumably an innocent child.  But his state or age in life, did not prevent his possession, by a demon of the darkness.  And what does this demon force the victim to do, to fall into fires to burn, or into waters to drown.  The darkness plagues this boy, to send pain to his father, his parents, his family.  The darkness tortures this boy to rebuke the church (whether old or new).  And the boy, or what happens to the boy is of no consequence.

Matthew continues in verse 16 saying … “And I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him.”  Yikes!  This father, brought the boy to the disciples of Jesus.  You know, the ones with the keys to the kingdom, who are able to bind things on earth (figuratively) and have them reflected or heard in heaven.  James the future leader of the church in Jerusalem, Peter the future evangelist to the world, and John the chief prophet of the Christian faith, as well as all the others and none could cure him.  Now everyone of us, looks at Judas and says in our hearts – figures.  But then Judas had the same gifts of demon repulsion as did any other disciple, and was no less a leader in the church, and in the faith as Peter, or as you, or as me.  So the failure of Judas was no more or less the same failure as Peter.  It was not about what Judas would ultimately do, that causes him to fail.  For Judas could have been forgiven of that future sin, just as Peter was forgiven for ones he would commit in the heat of those events.  The problem of this father, and his boy, were in the here and now, and in the here and now – not one of the disciples could overcome the darkness nestled in this boy.

Matthew continues in verse 17 saying … “Then Jesus answered and said, O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? how long shall I suffer you? bring him hither to me. [verse 18] And Jesus rebuked the devil; and he departed out of him: and the child was cured from that very hour.”  First note, that the child is healed immediately.  There is no delay on the part of Jesus.  The misery the darkness brings to this child’s life is over for now.  But the words of Jesus look none too happy.  “O faithless” generation.  Is Jesus speaking to the dad, seems very unlikely as the dad believes, and tried the disciples of Jesus, before coming to Him personally.  And the boy may or may not even be present, and is infected with a demon, so unlikely Jesus is challenging his faith.  There will be no blaming of the victim here.

But the church?  Is Jesus challenging his own disciples?  Is He challenging the Pharisees and Sanhedrin?  Or is He challenging you and I?  Perhaps all of the above.  But it is not just our faithlessness that warrants the attention of Jesus, it is also our perversion.  Have we adopted the aberrant as normal, perhaps just a different kind of normal, but one far outside of harmony with the laws and character of a God of love?  Do we see ourselves in the mirror, and see nothing wrong.  Have we perverted the Word itself.  Have we used the Word to justify our traditions, our ideas, and our notions of separation with the brotherhood of Christ – each group claiming purity, while ostracizing any other “less informed” groups of believers.  Our perversion need not just be in our sexual expression, it can also be founded in how we read the Word, and what we do with what we find, using it as a weapon against other sinners, instead of a hospital field manual of how to love others back to the feet of Jesus, ever pointing them there for the relief they so desperately need. 

How long shall I be with you?  And more poignantly; how long shall I suffer you?  These questions of Christ imply a seeming limit to His patience.  But I believe it is more a statement of His absolute frustration with us.  He offers total healing.  He offers a path to perfection, and a life beyond our wildest dreams.  And we sit around delaying that choice, avoiding it, postponing it.  As if the pain and death we now embrace is somehow better than what He offers.  Our blindness, our stupidity, so amplified against what the alternative is.  This is the plans of darkness for you, unfolding in your real life.  To keep you from submission to Jesus.  Making up all kinds of excuses why you should ever avoid that choice.  Not yet, you need to make more money first.  Not yet, you need to have unbridled sex with as many as you can first.  Not yet … the list goes on and on … each choice a hidden pathway to pain and death and misery along the way.  The words of Jesus reflect a coming finality to making that choice for something better.  There is a clock, and it is ticking – whether for Satan, or for you with him.  This is not about fear, it is about a choice for something so much better, that could be made now, right now.

Matthew concludes this snippet picking up in verse 19 saying … “Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast him out? [verse 20] And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. [verse 21] Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.”  We have our answer.  Jesus tells the disciples, that it is “their” unbelief that caused their failure.  That was not a slight against Judas alone.  It was an assessment across all of them, even the ones who will one day take a more leadership role in the faith.  And perhaps a continued assessment of you and I.  Faith as small as a grain of mustard seed is a tiny thing, and yet none of us seem to wield it.

We accept the cancer we encounter as “a fact of life”, never once considering it might be a direct result of the darkness.  We accept the need and the poor, as just another “fact of life”, again ignoring the influence and direct plans of the darkness on the lives of those impacted.  And none of us wield our grain of mustard seed to provide the fix – not a relief to suffering, only an accompaniment through it – instead of a true miraculous fix.  We just let the pain linger.  Afraid to test our mountain to be moved.  Afraid to be shown publicly, we lack the faith to even make it rumble a little.  And the plans of darkness triumph at the expense of the weak wielding of our mustard seeds of faith.  What is more, Jesus offers that this particular demon requires prayer and fasting to get it to leave.  As we try to pray with our tiny faith, perhaps our faith would be better augmented if we were willing to fast quietly, pray incessantly, and then look again to see if our mountains have been moved, and the demons of darkness vanquished against the bright light of Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray.

Your life will come down to only two paths.  It will not be a choice between good and evil.  That is too easy.  It will be a choice between submission to Jesus, and a liberation and freedom that leads to real life as it was meant to be enjoyed.  Or it will be consumed with the plans of darkness who care no more for you than does a tyrant stepping on an ant as he moves from one place to the other.  There is no middle ground.  There is no happy median.  There is life abundantly.  Or there is misery even more abundantly.  Everything else is deception.  Everything else is fear.  There really is only one way out, and His name is Jesus Christ.  And Jesus had more yet to say …

 

The Unknown ...

Despite our prayers, despite our scriptures, despite the countless commentaries and books written by authors seeking to help us; there are some questions that simply remain unanswered.  Not just mysteries of the universe or existence, but sometimes personal questions or situations that do not seem to make sense, and require an answer, though none are evident.  How does a person of faith contend with the great unknown?  It is easier to follow doctrines and ideologies about spiritual matters that form our faith, but harder to contend with an unanswered question that directly impacts our day to day lives.  Surely the Christ whose ministry was one of active love, involvement, and concern for the smallest among us, would not leave us without an answer for any great length of time.  But sometimes that is exactly what happens.  What should a Christian do about it?

When there is no doubt that God exists, when there is surety about His character being one completely composed of love; unanswered questions, the unknown, the future, the next step can still remain a black as night.  Prophecy tells us what lies ahead in general terms, but seldom is aimed directly at me.  Biblical principles can greatly help me in making a decision, provide guidance, and keep my decisions in accordance with the love of Heaven; but they say little about my choice of career, immediate health concerns, or my choice of a mate.  They provide guidance, oversight, values, but rarely specifics.  Most specific guidance is found in what not to do, rather than what to do.  When confronted with a question that affects our lives, we seek the Lords response in His word, in His still small voice, and on our knees.  But when His word provides no specific answer, or perhaps multiple answers, and His voice seems silent, we are left with only patience to face the unknown.  It does not diminish our belief in God’s existence, or His love, but it does provide us with a cause for concern.

The unknown often brings with it a sense that we lack faith, or perhaps that our sins and evil thinking cloud our judgment and make us unable to see what the Lord would have for us.  We doubt ourselves, if not our God.  And the unknown remains.  The patriarch Job faced a series of calamities in days of old and questioned what he had done to warrant his fate.  He wondered aloud why God would punish him, as from his point of view, he had done nothing to deserve what had befallen him.  He never doubted God’s existence, nor did he doubt the integrity of his own actions, but he could not resolve why his life had turned out the way it had.  He lost wealth, he lost children, he lost health, but he did not lose faith.  Nor did he find the answer he sought, he suffered in silence.  His friends could offer him no comfort.  His wife encouraged him to curse his God and die, to end the suffering.  He did not.  He maintained his faith, and eventually he was able to converse with God about what happened to him.  But even in that conversation God’s “answer” was not to Job’s liking.  God simply reminded Job, that He was God, Job was not.  Job’s life was restored to him in greater measure than what he had lost, but even in this there was no real answer from God.

You and I know why this happened, because we have the benefit of reading the story of Job in scriptures, with the author’s vantage point of an argument in heaven between God and Satan over the faithfulness of His servant Job.  Job’s life was a focal point in a much larger question before the universe – why does one trust and serve God?  Satan proposed the God’s love and blessings were the motivation for service, Job proved otherwise.  And he proved it in darkness.  Job proved it in the unknown, in the unanswered, in the NOT knowing.  Job could not be told of his part in the larger question without influencing his outcome.  Job could not be assured that his life would one day be restored, nor that he continued to enjoy the tender favor and love of God.  Job had to suffer alone.  Job had to face calamity, and the unknown, and decide for himself what he was going to believe, or who he was going to trust and serve.  It was not fun.  It was not pretty.  It was darkness, isolation, pain, with no end in sight.  In this condition, Job made and reaffirmed his choice.

Sometimes Satan brings much calamity into our lives, even when we did nothing we know of to bring it to our door.  We do what we think are the right things.  We believe what we think is truth, and follow our God, hoping for His blessings.  Yet Satan enters our lives and presents us with darkness and the unknown.  With luck, our condition is not ever as bad as Job’s was, but for some of us the pain feels as great.  But as we suffer, we continue to hold to our belief that God is with us, even though we cannot see Him, or perhaps hear Him.  We can know from the story of Job that God is always with us, even when we do not understand.  But this assurance does not always lift the blindness, or illuminate the path we need to take to move forward.

It does make one wonder why a God who is so careful to protect His word to us, and so involved in our lives as we daily submit to Him, would still leave us with unanswered questions, and unknown issues.  When we face these situations we always believe that God will answer us, even if it is not yet.  But how long is too long?  How long did Job have to wait?  Job’s conditions changed, but his answer never came.  Moses waited 40 years tending sheep, and then another 40 years wandering the desert, and still did NOT enter the Promised Land.  Abraham waited till he was nearly 100 years old before being given his promised heir.  Noah waited 120 years toiling on a boat on dry land for a phenomenon called rain that had never occurred before.  Enoch was over 300 before leaving our world for Heaven without seeing death.  Clearly our ideas of immediacy do not match Gods.  Imagine how Abraham continued to age, and wished he could have his son, in order to play with him, teach him, and love him, while he still had time; but year after year passed with no heir.  The children of Israel had already spent 360 years in slavery in Egypt before Moses rose up and slew the Egyptian.  Instead of freeing them, he fled for his life.  They waited for his return for another 40 years.  Young men became old men, still kept in hard bondage as Moses tended sheep in Midian.  Every day spent under the lash, was no less painful, no less immediate.  I am sure some older folks who wished to see freedom died before Moses could return.  Yet for His own reasons, God delayed the return of Moses for 40 more years.  Our ideas of “when” we need an answer are not always in sync with Gods.

So why does God allow us to face the unknown?  The question is fundamental to faith.  We can trust to facts, science, our eyes, our ears, our senses, our logic – or sometimes in spite of all of those, we can trust in God.  Sin began with a choice to trust in the brilliance of our minds, versus the counsel of God.  Lucifer did not trust that what God told him about the pursuit of serving self would lead to where it did.  He trusted himself, his own wisdom, his own logic, the brilliance of his mind, and he was wrong.  God was right, not because the facts were evident, they were not.  God was right because He is God.  He is always right.  What makes sense to us is not always the correct answer.  What seems logical is not always what is right.  In order for us to never experience evil again, we will have to learn to let go of our own superiority and trust God instead.  We need to allow God to be God.  And that means like Job, we must decide to follow God’s wisdom despite a lack of answers, despite what is contrary to common sense, despite what outcomes we experience.  We must trust in God’s love even when pain is all we see.  Because God is love, and everything we experience has a part in the story that is needed, even if it is not evident.  Our wisdom, our logic, our common sense, our sensory organs are simply not enough.  For evil to remain extinct for eternity, we must learn that God alone can be trusted, NOT us.

It is easy to trust in God when what He asks of us, lines up with what we want, or what makes sense.  God tells us to flee persecution and we are fine with that.  He tells us to seek His protection and we are fine with that.  But when He tells us to love our enemies and turn the cheek to someone who just knocked the heck out of our other one, we somehow are not quite as fine with that.  When He tells us to build a boat to avoid a flood we have never seen, that does not make sense.  When He tells us to literally sacrifice our only son on an altar to Him, a crime for which He normally allows Israel in later year to be invaded for, that does not make sense.  When He tells Peter to step out of the boat and walk on water, or tells His followers it is better to die believing in Him than live denying Him, those things make less sense.  They defy logic.  They defy reason.  And therefore they form a conscious choice to believe in a God that is a God, and define our place in the universe as created beings, subservient, less wisdom, less logic, less truth.  We are inferior to God, whether we like it or not.  This is something Satan refused to accept, trusting himself, instead of God.  And evil was born into the universe.  But to rid the universe of evil, all of creation must accept that only God is God, and only His words can be fully trusted.  No more will one third of the angels ever follow another liar into doom.  No more will another world be set with a tree of temptation to follow a competing ideology than Gods.  No more, because from now on, all will rest comfortably following the counsel of God – even when it does not appear to make sense, or go along with what we want or think.  This is the basis for the end of evil.  This is the basis for the extinction of evil for all time.  And it is the only way to keep affliction from rising a second time.

The unknown should be a welcome friend to us.  It is OK to content with the presence of the uncertain, the unknown, and the seemingly bleak in our existence.  It is not a lack of God we see, but the manifestation of His trust in us, to face the unknown and seek Him anyway; to trust in Him despite what we experience, and our complete lack of knowledge about the outcome.  For God Himself, in the form of Christ set our example in this too.  When Christ hung upon the cross of Calvary, He did not know if having been so stained with the weight of our sins, if the Father could ever accept Him back into His presence again.  Christ faced the unknown.  Not just a temporary what if, but a question that could keep Him forever separated from His own Father.  It was the biggest unknown any being could ever face, and He faced it for us.  He loved us anyway.  He died for us anyway.  He chose to love in spite of the unknown, and we are saved as a result.  How can we expect to participate in the process of salvation without the trying fires of the unknown in our path, to validate our decision to follow God despite what we do not know?  How can we truly say we trust God, if we are never faced with a situation with which we do not have control?  Let us welcome the unknown, and rest in our decision that to follow God in spite what we do not know, is ALWAYS the right decision.  It is the one we will repeat for eternity, and it can begin right here and right now.  Outcomes do not matter, but trust does.  Let us always trust God over ourselves, or our insecurities, for He is faithful to us every time – especially when there is simply no answer.