No man ever got so much out of a surgical operation as Adam did.
Originally one, he has fallen, and, breaking up… he has filled the whole earth with the pieces.
~Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
Hear, you peoples, all of you; pay attention, O earth, and all that is in it, and let the Lord God be a witness against you, the Lord from His holy temple. For behold, the Lord is coming out of His place,
and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth. And the mountains will melt under Him, and the valleys will split open, like wax before the fire, like waters poured down a steep place. All this is for the transgression of Jacob and for the sins of the house of Israel. What is the transgression of Jacob? Is it not Samaria? And what is the high place of Judah? Is it not Jerusalem? Therefore I will make Samaria a heap in the open country, a place for planting vineyards, and I will pour down her stones into the valley and uncover her foundations. All her carved images shall be beaten to pieces, all her wages shall be burned with fire, and all her idols I will lay waste, for from the fee of a prostitute she gathered them, and to the fee of a prostitute they shall return. For this I will lament and wail; I will go stripped and naked; I will make lamentation like the jackals, and mourning like the ostriches. For her wound is incurable, and it has come to Judah; it has reached to the gate of my people, to Jerusalem.
~ Micah, in Chapter 6 of his prophecy
Oh beloved, it is true. We have, in Him, been healed. The saving He did in our lives has been the most real thing that has happened to us. We are true and whole and alive and free. What we were in the past is – past.
There is, though, a problem with a life like we now have. We can take the joy of our existence and lay it over the existence that is around us. We can look at some of the good going on in the world and we can begin to believe that things are OK for others as well.
And truly, for some (those who also know Him), things truly are well. Their lives too resound and resonate with His work and healing in their lives too. This is truly encouraging for us, but can also get us into a place where we can forget…
Most are gasping in the grips of a mortal wound. The cities of these inhabitants are crumbling in the spirit – and it simply does not matter how much economic opportunity their might be. It does not matter how much education or infrastructure or even freedom might be growing in a place. People are dying. They are trudging (and some hurtling) towards an eternity apart from Him.
We see the sparkling of a city, and the waving of a flag and think that all is well. It is not. And while prosperity and freedom and security and physical health are outgrowths of the Kingdom Life, they are not indicators that it is there.
In fact, the facades economic prosperity are just that. The deceitfulness of riches are so insidious that they can take our eyes of the reality of what is going on right in front of our eyes. Clean lines and bank accounts with a few extra dollars in them can inoculate us from even diagnosing the disease unfolding before us.
Said simply, the world is going to hell apart from Christ, and the quality of the buildings we see, or the green-emphasizing cars on the road, or the high-quality sporting events we attend – can do nothing to stop this.
Can we see it? We have been duped (each of us) when we look at what we can see as being OK, and from this evidence say that what we cannot see is OK as well. We are utter fools to walk into a town or family or business and assume the spiritual health of a group or individual by how they look on the outside.
What if we stopped doing this? What if we simply began to see people at the level of the essential questions of their lives? What it we began to see people (and businesses and cities and nations) as G_d sees them? How would our approach to all of these change? What if we were simply willing to see the incurable woundedness of those around us and allowed ourselves to hurt – and Love?
Yeah, this fool of a writer just said this.
Beloved, all is not well with the world. Tonight is your night. Time to see the wounds.
