Keeping Company with The Dead II

For fear of making even less sense than I normally do , I stopped early last night to sleep.  There are a number of things that I’m still thinking about regarding this whole concept of living among the dead.

It’s a hard thing to accept physical death.  All of us have experienced, at one time or another, the death of a friend, a family member, or someone else.  But at least there is a clear sense that something has passed away.  What happens, though, when we find ourselves walking among the dead?  To give you some sense of what I’m saying, I’ll briefly quote Matthew 8:18-22:

“Now, when Jesus saw a crowd around him, he gave orders to go over to the other side.  And a scribe came up and said to him, ‘Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.’  And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’   Another of the disciples said to him, ‘Lord, let me first go and bury my father.’  And Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead.’”

Leave the dead to bury their own dead. What does this mean?  On the one hand, it doesn’t make any earthly sense.  How can the dead bury their own dead?  There’s no life to give them energy, no work that they can do if they’re physically dead.  That is, unless they’re zombies.  I could spend some time reflecting on what it means to be a zombie and how very closely related to the lives of many people the condition truly is.  But I won’t, for your sake and for mine.   On the other, we have a profound insight into the spiritual condition of the follower of Christ as opposed to the citizen of the world.  And an extemporization of the cost associated with such a radical lifestyle change.  But centrally, this passage speaks to me about one thing.  The necessity of considering eternal life in Christ as more important than anything that we or our enemy might raise up against it.

The second point of this whole idea of keeping company with the dead is the fact of the loneliness of the condition, the isolation and wretchedness of letting Satan have his way.  I’ve heard many observations about the fact that Christ crossed the sea of Galilee for one man…the demoniac who, in Mark and Luke becomes the messenger of the life-changing purpose of Christ.  But one thing I haven’t seen much on is the causality of the whole thing. Look at it with me for a time.

Christ has just come down from the Mount of Olives, having preached revolutionary ideas to a culture with hundreds of years of entrenched legalism.  He’s going to want to rest for a bit, because he’s just led a service of worship for five or six hours.  He still has time, however, to make two crucial statements to two different people regarding the essentially nomadic lifestyle that His followers must subscribe to. The first declares that He has no home, no place of permanent rest.  The rest of the follower of Christ is in Him.  The second statement declares the ultimate value of following Christ, that those who would follow him are called into life, while those whom we have lived with, been raised by and been loved by are left in death.  Jesus then asks for a boat to be made ready to cross the Galilee, is obeyed, and promptly falls asleep.  A storm blows up, during which Jesus remains asleep while his disciples, frantic, wake him up.  He rebukes them for having little faith, and calms the waters of the sea completely.  Finally, he arrives amidst the tombs of the region of the Gadarenes, meeting two men (more likely one man) and casts a legion of demons out of him.  I could spend a post on authority here, but the essential point I want to make is that, in my thinking, Christ is using this man as an example of rebirth, something that, until now, he had not demonstrated.  Furthermore, that this man is going to physically leave the houses of the dead that he has been living among and go to spread the message of rebirth to those who still live among the metaphorical dead.  Here’s the crucial part…Christ’s message hinders the men of privilege who ask Him if they may follow, but the men (or man) without even a home or a given name, who have nothing, are given health and wholeness.  The most despised and feared become the most readily transformed, and this after those who have willingly asked have found the cost too hard.

Blessings;

Christ-bearer.

Heart-Sabbath

The phrase “heart-sabbath” keeps coming up in my mind, so I thought I’d look at it a tiny bit. Mostly, I’m just trying to figure out what it means. When it came up in prayer, I made a record of it, which I’ll return to now.

Hmm. Apparently not as clear as I’d like it to be. It came up in a discussion I was having, and the context was in the neighbourhood of letting the heart rest from depression. Spiritual depression, actually. I’m currently reading a book by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones on spiritual depression, and it’s providing some unexpected insights into some of the things that have been coming up in my posts throughout this version 2.0. I’m going to be into version 2.7 with this post (pretty much a random number, by the way, but indicative of where on the scale of voice it fits.)

So. Heart-sabbath, as I’ve been thinking about it, is letting the heart rest in prayer and from the burdens it carries. It is also, in a sense, speaking to the discontent of the soul that seems to plague some who are in the church, or who call themselves Christian, but can’t find a crucial bit or an important piece of the faith. Holy and unholy discontent itself is a different topic, and I’ll look into that tomorrow, I think. In the meantime…

The problems that we cause for ourselves in opening our hearts to the wrong people are often avoidable ones, if we are discerning correctly (that is, by the Holy Spirit and through the Word). However, so often in life we are guided into error by those whose approval we seek, or those whose lives we want to try and emulate. We make small compromises here and there, which, taken apart, seem like nothing. But if put together, they become troubles that weight us down, and which can vex to no end. The Bible itself cautions, in Jeremiah, against the heart’s tendencies to error. Here’s Jeremiah 17:7-10:

“Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? ‘I the Lord search the heart, and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.’”

What really sticks out to me from these verses is the peace of a tree by quiet waters, the man whose trust is in the Lord. See, we often manufacture mistrust in our hearts because of poor discernment in offering up its contents, and then we are left with the consequences, which become burdens that we carry around. I say ‘we’, but certainly this is not the case in all. I (who I generally mean when I say ‘we’) have a habit of carrying around a great many burdens, and so I guess the real point of taking a heart-sabbath is to acknowledge that, and unburden myself.

Not really much on what it means to take a heart-sabbath, but therapeutic nonetheless. Perhaps I should simply rest beside the still waters, as in the oft-quoted Psalm 23.

Blessings;

Christ-bearer.

Easter Sunday: The Resurrection Miracle – New Birth

It is tradition in many churches to observe a sunrise service on Easter Sunday, wherein those souls who really, really want to have a good cup of hot chocolate in the morning will get up at 5 or so to spend time with fellow silly people; or, if they’re particularly foolish, stay up all night, in preparation for the service. I fall in the latter category, because if I’m asleep, I like to be asleep. Regardless, the sunrise service is, hopefully, the first step in the redemptive resurrection of Jesus Christ. We walk in the steps of those women who, early in the morning, rose to go and prepare the body of their Lord, only to find that He had risen. We rise early because God’s mercies are new every morning, especially on this one. He is risen indeed.

This is the third and final Easter Weekend post, where I hope to put together the reflections of the past few days and come up with a tie-together to end part II of TRUTH. I’ll be turning to a new posting style come this week, as befits the new birth that I’m going to talk about briefly today.

Let me first say that A World Apart has given me some insight into a number of things, but that it’s reached its limit for now. There’s only so much you can say about rebirth, about resurrection and redemption – the three Christian R’s, intertwined but distinct. It’s a good idea to put them in the proper order. For our redemption, Christ was resurrected that we might be reborn. He is sole mediator. But what does that literally mean?

I find that I’m really not getting into the meat that I want to get into in these most recent posts. They’ve been completed out of a sense of obligation, but I don’t know to whom. They’ve been dealing with some of the truths of the Christian faith, but not in any way that you can really hear them. That, I can’t do. Most cuttingly, they’ve become too intellectual even for me. I find reading them is rather tiresome, and that’s not where I want to be with them. So onward and upward, as we’ll hear coming up in Prince Caspian, to be released very soon. I’m looking forward to it with a great deal of excitement and hope. It’s probably one of the most carefully thought-out allegories in Lewis’ Narnia, and I pray that Walden has remained faithful to it.

That’s slightly tangential, so I’ll move on. I was planning on looking at two major themes today: the legacy of Christ and His resurrection; and rebirth.

What is the problem most people seem to have with accepting the gospel? I’ve said that Christ is the gospel, and Him alone. If that is the case, then what do people find so repulsive or so worthy of conflict? If you look back at the passage from Isaiah in yesterday’s post, you’ll find that God knew what He was saying when he inspired Isaiah in prophecy. There is certainly nothing in the form of a whipped, crucified, bloody man that one would find appealing…at least not in any normal moral sense, so that is certainly true. Paintings, sculptures, classical understandings of Christ have beautified Him, making the suffering servant palatable and robbing the Isaiah passage of a great deal of its significance (Hmmm. Interesting thought for a later post). I read the passage in church on Good Friday and I could feel the presence of the Holy Spirit in it, and I tried to convey some of that sensation to the congregation. It may have succeeded, and if so, to God be the glory. So on the one hand we have a stinging picture of our sinfulness punished in Chrsit, and on the other we have a feelgood, holiness-emphasizing canon of illustration regarding Christ. Where’s the joy in a holy (and wholly) unreachable God-Man, so pure in his appearance that we cover our eyes or avert them from his radiance? Well, I’d like to suggest that the joy comes from knowing that He’s alive, that He is as pure and good and holy as He looks, and that in Him, in the destruction and rebirth of something beautiful, sin is atoned for. With this in mind, let me return to the question of Christ’s appeal. I’d like to think that what people find repulsive is the knowledge of their own sin, their own shame and their own failure, all lifted up on the cross for all to see. That’s the core of repentance, by the way: Humility and maybe even humiliation, your darker places dragged out into the light for people to see. And that’s the core of what Christ did for us. He who knew no sin became sin for us, that we might be spotless before the radiant and holy Father. He dragged our sins out into the open and put them to death with His own death, and was then resurrected after having completed the task. ‘It is finished’ echoes through our minds once again in this.

If we accept Christ’s sacrifice as genuine, then what we have now is the remnant, the carry-over once-for-all atonement. That, too is what people find so difficult about the gospel. That Christ has his eye on things and his intercessory cloak on right now, watching, weighing, judging. That we are part of the redemptive plan of the world, and that we can be forgiven. See, we like to live in our failures, not have them forgiven. We don’t think we can ever be worthy of what has been done for us. You’re right. We can’t. We like to wallow in failure because it proves our own points. With new birth, it’s all put away. The afterbirth is discarded, and the new child looks up into Daddy’s eyes and smiles.

Happy Easter, and Blessings;

Christ-bearer

A World Apart – Justification

I promised last time that I would spend a post each on justification and salvation. This is the first of those two posts, and I’ll try and give it some qualification for the post-Christian mind.

Justification is essentially the gift of freedom, offered by Christ in His death and resurrection. It is not automatic in the life of every human being, and must be accepted in the heart – which is itself a tricky understanding – in order to have any effect. That freedom is not an immoral one, and it is an effective one. If you are in Christ, as the Bible declares in Galatians 5, you are free. Specifically, the verse declares “For freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1). The freedom we possess in Christ’s justification is not one that we can live under without acting in it. Worldly understandings of freedom are very different from the Christian understanding of the same word, and I would suggest that they are incredibly shortsighted. Freedom to non-Christians is often through wealth, power, celebrity, or rebellion, and seldom leads to any lasting changes in the lives of those who embrace it. You can certainly call me out on such a statement, but from what I have seen, freedom in the sense of the world is merely a different set of slaver’s chains. Interest rates on credit cards, for example, penalize the freedom of lent cash. Partying, sexual promiscuity – these enslave the mind and the body by destroying recollections, ending lives, imprisoning anger and dissatisfaction in a web of light, sound, emotion and oblivion. The natural inclination of the enslaved, however, is to escape, to be set free. And so the curse buries itself ever deeper in the mind of the hedonist.

Justification is not an end. but a means to an end. It is the access to salvation, and it is the way in which Christians can claim to be Christian.

Blessings;

Christ-bearer