Can Lost Reverence Be Found?

Her rival, however, would provoke her bitterly to irritate her, because the LORD had closed her womb.  It happened year after year, as often as she went up to the house of the LORD, she would provoke her; so she wept and would not eat.  Then Elkanah her husband said to her, "Hannah, why do you weep and why do you not eat and why is your heart sad? Am I not better to you than ten sons?"  Then Hannah rose after eating and drinking in Shiloh. Now Eli the priest was sitting on the seat by the doorpost of the temple of the LORD.  She, greatly distressed, prayed to the LORD and wept bitterly.  She made a vow and said, "O LORD of hosts, if You will indeed look on the affliction of Your maidservant and remember me, and not forget Your maidservant, but will give Your maidservant a son, then I will give him to the LORD all the days of his life, and a razor shall never come on his head."  (1 Samuel 1:6-11 NASB)

In my youth, I was taught reverence for the One my family worshiped.  It was taught in a thousand different ways, but I still remember it.  We spoke only in whispers in the sanctuary (and called it that).  We wore our best to church, better than we dressed anywhere else; not to impress others but to bring our best to our God.  We didn't miss church.  This tended to spread communicable diseases among the faithful church-goers, but we shared so much anyway, it didn't matter.

There were just things you did.  And there were just things you didn't do.  You did not question a leader, at least not as a child.  But we also did not direct our anger at God.  Ironically, it was understood that, as Master of all things, ultimately whatever bad thing happened to me was His fault.  Yet we were never to blame Him, at least out loud; or so it seemed.  The lesson being taught is actually one that is struggling to emerge again in modern congregations.  The lesson was that nothing bad that happens smudges the goodness and glory of my Master.

This lesson, lost in the rebellion against "organized religion", is one that needs to be renewed.  It's one among many, but it is one for which we pay dearly.  The loss of this lesson has permitted our society to dictate belief and practice to us in the place of Scripture.  This is evident in our disdain for authority.  When we teach that the Scriptural Deity can be yelled at and resented, and He's big enough to handle it, we degrade His holy goodness and glory.  We bring the One we cannot reach into our realm, and make Him one of us.

Jesus became one of us by His choice.  Our Maker reaches out to us.  He is unapproachable, unreachable, incomprehensible, and unknown by our own devices.  We can't reason Him into existence, we can't reliably demonstrate in controlled experiments one element of His character.  The best we can hope to achieve to to look at His handiwork and marvel at such magnificence and power.  Once there, we can then, with awe, approach the Scriptures; His record of His self-revelation to His human creatures.  And from there we can make ourselves available to His Spirit.  That is the best we can do.  Most of us don't even do that.

I believe that when I consider myself free to resent and be angry toward my Master, I deny the very first line of His Scripture, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."  If He created it all, what right do I have to resent Him for anything?  That I know of His existence means He has revealed Himself to me.  The blessings I receive from Him could stop right there, and I still have more than I deserve and more of His attention than I warrant.  That He does not stop there multiplies shocking grace until I reach the cross where all my assumptions, presumptions, pride, reasoning, and self-righteousness fail, revealed as the refuse heap they are.  And destroyed as a modern American male, I stand before an empty tomb, myself empty of all that I call my own, where I crumple to the ground in worship.

The truth lost with the lesson of reverence is that my Master has assaulted and utterly destroyed the limits of my imagination, understanding, and comprehension so that I sometimes can't, or won't, see Him as He has revealed Himself.  Like He hid Moses in a rock so he would not die as he saw only a part of His glory, so I am only able to see a part of my Master.  But the part I see is so much more than anything I endure.  How can I resent the One having done so much for me?  How can Jesus, the cross and the empty tomb not be enough?  How is that possible?  Scripture is already more of a gracious gift than I can ever be worthy.  How can the message it contains not reduce the rest of me to mere heap of gratitude, gratitude I can never really express well enough?

From Saturday to Sunday

I believe that the connection between the cross and the empty tomb is sometimes lost.  The power of my Master is not demonstrated on the cross as much as His determination to save His human creatures.  He showed the extent of His love and mercy there, but He showed His power through the empty tomb. 

On the other hand, the empty tomb is not really appreciated until the extent of my Master’s love is explored over and over as demonstrated on the cross.  So, I need both, and I need to appreciate them in order.  I need a focus and meditation on the Cross of Jesus so I can better appreciate the empty tomb.  Yesterday I was crushed by my meditation on the Cross of my Master.  Today I want to pause at the empty tomb.

The shock experienced by creation was then followed by such deep oppressive despair that it seemed there was no recovery.  Hope died with the Master on the cross.  Sure, all the sins of all of humanity were paid in that event, but now there was this gaping wound that is always left by death.  Death is relational, just like life is relational.  The Spirit could have come then and there would have been a revival of sorts, but there would have been this sense of a hollow victory.  Death would still have reigned supreme, even over the Creator.  And there was something about that which would not settle in the hearts of the disciples, and not in creation.

The debate over three days is odd to me.  Any part of a day includes that day.  We do that now.  We don’t measure it down to complete sets of 24 hours until we want to disprove something.  In normal usage, we just go with any part of a day.  So, Friday evening, and through Saturday, a doubly intense Sabbath, there was silence.  I imagine the silence to be dark silence, not bright silence.  I imagine an oppressive air where no one, not even Jesus’ enemies, felt light.  I suspect that there would have been such an air of hopelessness that it would have been as all life had stopped, as if in a moment of silent grief.  A day where silence permeates to the bones, and into the soul, chill and dark; that’s how I imagine that Sabbath day.

Part of this oppressive sense of hopelessness comes from the Creator Himself.  The unthinkable has happened; God has suffered the loss of The Son!  The Creator has lost the Uncreated One.  The Three are somehow Two.  The fundamental truth of the Source of the universe and all that holds it together has fractured and a piece is missing.  It is impossible.  It cannot happen.  It can’t!  How?  The crushing question is why, but now in the aftermath, even that answer seems lost in the echo of the darkness left behind.  Is this love?  Is this mercy?  The hole left in my heart from losing my father is nothing compared to the loss incurred by the Creator and His creation at the loss of the Son.  This Saturday is one of grief from the One and Only God right down to the infinitesimally small sub-atomic particle.  It is grief on a cosmic scale.  It crushes the world and the cosmos.

And then the unthinkable, unimaginable, shattering power of the Creator of the universe and all it contains totally annihilates the enemy that is death itself.  Light overwhelms the darkness, and shatters the grief spreading shards to the uttermost ends of creation.  Each shard carries the sound of the truth: HE IS RISEN!  Life sweeps out from that central point on the spinning blue globe and life stirs once again.  Creation takes a deep breath, not realizing it has been holding its breath, gasping for the life of the Son.  Joy so radiant in the darkness of grief that few dared hope it was true swept through the lives of 200 gathered together, and the ripples of that joy continued into Samaria, Judea, and all the ends of the earth.

Life, real life, returned from the grave of despair.  And this is the eternal life that they might know You the One True God and Whom You sent Jesus Christ.  I can know my Master now, I can speak with Him, listen to Him, seek His face, and worship Him.  But one day I will run with Him in the fields of Heaven!  I will worship before His throne!  I will see Him face to face, serve Him in His presence, and I will be who He truly made me to be.  He will give me a new name, and I will know His.  Then I will run and not be weary, walk and not faint.  I will fly, but only for the joy of my Master.  And all the joy of life will make up the air I breathe and the ground beneath my feet.  And I am not alone in this, but one of an unnumbered crowd all together in worship and joy; the voice of which will shake remaining debris of this life off like dust.  We will stand completely clean and whole before the Conqueror of death, Giver of eternal life.  And we will do so forever.

That is what the empty grave means to me.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, November 26

Even Death on a Cross

Chambers refers to the cross of Jesus as representing the agony of God.  That resonates with me.  In my heart, the cross represents a singular event that had never been seen before, and never will again.  The Gnostics had such a linear view of “holiness” that they could not have Jesus truly on the cross.  But the Scriptures leave no gray area about Jesus on the cross.  He was crucified and He died.  For Him to bear the sin of all humanity He had to do more than simply suffer physical agony.  That a normal human could do.  Even good people had suffered to death.  What He was doing required more than that.

The cross of Jesus is where I go for my final understanding of life and death.  In my meager grasp of the Trinitarian Nature of God, I understand Him to suffer something the likes of which I can’t really grasp.  I understand the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as one in some way, and yet distinct in some way.  I also understand from Scripture that death is defined more by being out of relationship with this Trinitarian God, than a biological event.  So in my view, Jesus suffered on the cross what is unthinkable, what all pay who have no relationship with their Creator.  That would mean that, for a time, the Son was separated from the Father and Holy Spirit. 

When I think of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane praying so intently that drops of blood form, I find it difficult to believe He is that worked up over the physical suffering He will endure.  He prays, relinquishing His will to the Father’s, and willingly goes to the soldiers coming to arrest Him.  He leads them to the trial, He refuses to prove Who He is to Pilate, and endures the physical and shaming trial of crucifixion.  He goes through all this willingly, intentionally.  He has chosen to endure the fracture of the eternal Trinity, and be broken from what He has known for all eternity:  The Father. 

The Creator of this universe full of infinite variety and imagination willingly suffered this break in Himself on behalf of rebellious examples of His masterful work.  He didn’t scrap us and start over.  He endured the unimaginable and impossible instead.  I don’t doubt this world shook and stormed at such an event.  It was in shock.  What had just happened?  What did the angels think?  How much of what was happening did Satan understand?  Did anyone, angelic or other creature, know these depths of the Character of God?  Could this have been imagined by anyone other than the One responsible for this entire universe?  Impossible?

What sort of love includes the willing self-fracture of the One powerful enough to create stars?  What level of mercy is required to willingly and intentionally endure a cataclysmic break in the very nature of the Inventor of inter-cellular structures and sub-atomic particles?  We can’t even see or measure all of what has been created, nor truly imagine limits to this Creator.  He is powerful in ways that defy reason and imagination.  Why would such a One willingly endure that for the squabbling rabble that is the human race? 

It is not enough for me that He died a physical death.  I would be in hell, eternally cut off from the Master of the universe, and I should be.  I have earned such a place a thousand times more than I can even remember.  My punishment would not be a suffering physical death.  That may be my end in any case.  Many people suffer such ends.  It was the eternal punishment apart from my Master that had to be met in the sufferings of my Master.  And that is met in Jesus on the cross; not in the physical suffering, but in the spiritual death He suffered for us.  I still can’t grasp it.  It’s too much, I’m crushed.

My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers, November 25

Wrath and Grace

The technical term is propitiation, but the sound of it suggests little of the devastating meaning it contains.  Jesus propitiated the wrath of God in His death on the cross.  The word brings with it both the terrifying wrath of the Creator and appeasement of that wrath.  I have heard people say that the God of the Old Testament is wrathful and the God of the New Testament loves.  Such a statement demeans what was accomplished by my Master on the cross.  The love of my Master is understood best when His wrath is laid alongside.

Just my sin incurred the wrath of my Master.  Sure I was born with it, but I also earned it.  It’s not reasonable to blame my Master for being penalized for the way I was made, I ensured the sin I was born in rightly applied by my own activity.  When I read that my Master died for the sin of the cosmos, I am immediately struck by an unimaginable enormity of what He took upon Himself in that act.  More than that though, it says literally that God put on Him the sin of the world, so that He was killed for that magnitude of sin.  And that is the essence of wrath; it is the high price paid to balance justice.

I remember feeling the shame for my addiction and it crushing me.  In a sense I needed to feel that, but in the sense of my guilt before my Master, not by succumbing to the crushing weight on myself.  He bore that crushing weight on Himself, and to take it back is ridiculous, and shows a lack of faith and understanding.  I was supposed to be aware of my guilt before the Creator of the cosmos, and therefore, His amazing love showed toward His human creatures through the sacrifice of my Master in our place.  In taking on more than that, I continued in my pattern of stacking more onto the wrath poured out on my Master.

Love and grace are best embraced in the face of wrath and justice.  I think sometimes I become so accustomed to the love and grace of my Master, I forget and take for granted the stark contrasting wrath and justice that makes them so glorious and powerful.  The closest I come to understanding what my Master has done on the cross is when I allow the conviction of my contribution His wrath to expand to include as much of humanity as I can imagine, and then extend that back into history and beyond.  There are realities of this life that I easily miss and so trivialize my relationship with my Master.  It’s a forest-trees thing.

The wrath of the Creator on His creation was laid on His Son, who obediently took it upon Himself.  A stunning truth which is then followed by another: the Resurrection.  It’s impossible to encompass the enormity of what Jesus did on the cross.  But when I extend that into the resurrection I find that the grace and love of my Master was not satisfied with removing the crushing weight of the wrath of God.  He also extended eternal life to that same rabble whose weight He bore.  I still can’t get there to wrap my mind around the enormity.  I can’t get my emotions to engage with it; it’s so huge I lose the sense of it permeating all life on earth (all life on earth is difficult at best to imagine all on its own).  I’m so overwhelmed I’m numb and easily fall into apathy.  I need to strain at the limits of my ability to imagine and describe this unimaginable indescribable reality in which I live.  That is my life’s work.

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, November 19