To be willing to accept crucifixion with Christ; to leave all yourself, your plans and your longings, your abilities and your possessions, all of them at the cross so that you only trust and love and live for Christ, hurts a great deal…. It requires an absolute venture of faith; but beyond it, God says, “much fruit.” And the way to it is “into the ground and die”—it is the only way.
~L. F. E. Wilkinson
“And in that day, declares the Lord, you will call Met‘My Husband,’ and no longer will you call Me ‘My Baal.’ For I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be remembered by name no more. And I will make for them a covenant on that day with the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the creeping things of the ground. And I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land, and I will make you lie down in safety. And I will betroth you to Me forever. I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness. And you shall know the Lord…. “Come, let us return to the Lord; for He has torn us, that He may heal us; He has struck us down, and He will bind us up. After two days He will revive us; on the third day He will raise us up, that we may live before Him. Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord; His going out is sure as the dawn; He will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.” … Sow for yourselves righteousness; reap steadfast love; break up your fallow ground, for it is the time to seek the Lord, that He may come and rain righteousness upon you.
~ from the epic pain of, and redemption promised to, Hosea, in Chapters 2, 6, and 10
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.
~ paul, the Least of The Apostles, in Romans 5
Oh beloved, it is true. People in our lives will be untrue to us. They will, usually in the pain and shame and lies of their own lives, find they feel they cannot be who they really are. They fear they will be rejected if they expose the reality of their past. The teacher, psychologist and writer, Dr. Larry Crabb, said it well, “We believe that if people knew who we really are, they would turn around and walk out of our lives.”
And in being lied to, we can be tempted to
Shut down
Lock out
Fight back
Lash out
Beat down
Freak out
Go away
Give up
Avenge
Hate
Rage
Blast
And simply forget you even knew the other person.
Oh, it is not that we should not desire truth in our (and even their) innermost being. This is a noble desire. For a relationship to stand upon a bedrock of truth is to stand on something that is unshakable. Truth requires no defense other that to pursue it. It needs no tweaking or clarification or rollout. Truth just is, and it is very simple – even though sometimes it is hard.
No, what we have to come to, is the same understanding that the great prophets of the Old and New Testaments came to understand: we, each of us, is completely broken. Apart from Christ, there is inherent in us a wretched and total depravity. And this depravity is so toxic that it synergizes with the depravity of others.
So, when people hurt us. This is, of course, wrong.
But the deeper issue is that we don’t respond in Love to their fallenness. No, rather, we simply sit there and lick our wounds, and have to do everything in our power to figure out how to not lash out at the other person for not according us enough honor. We actually relish our victimization, because it feeds our willingness to pull out our self-righteousness and spring it on others.
Hosea was given a mission – in marrying a cheating, lying prostitute, that was just a high-contrast, simple picture of how we all have acted towards G_d and each other. And Paul says it explicitly: we were enemies of G_d, and He bought us with His blood that we might become His very bride – living in right relationship with Him.
Can we see it though? The wretchedness of others is not really about us seeing our own wretchedness – though it is a bit of this. No, our wretchedness is just the gateway to the solution. We see, in the failures of others, the only thing that can fix the problem: Him, and His unfailing Love. Because without Him, the catastrophic mess we live in now would be inescapable. Without Him, forgiveness would just be some sort of feigned ignorance of other’s mistakes. But with Him, forgiveness is the freedom of true restoration, because a real payment has been made to reconcile the issue to wholeness.
So beloved, are you hurting because someone close to you has let you down? There is no way through the solution. It can’t be fixed by any measure taken in this world. In fact, “you” can’t do anything to heal it. Your (and my) death to believing we can do anything to fix our failures or the failures of others is the only path. For in us getting completely out of the way, then (and only then) will roll in the flood of His Great Love, borne through the blood that wipes away all our sins.
Tonight is our night. Time to die, that we might live a completely other Life.
