The Word we study has to be the Word we pray. My personal experience of the relentless tenderness of God came not from exegetes, theologians, and spiritual writers, but from sitting still in the presence of the living Word and beseeching Him to help me understand with my head and heart His written Word. Sheer scholarship alone cannot reveal to us the gospel of grace. We must never allow the authority of books, institutions, or leaders to replace the authority of knowing Jesus Christ personally and directly. When the religious views of others interpose between us and the primary experience of Jesus as the Christ, we become unconvicted and unpersuasive travel agents handing out brochures to places we have never visited.
~ Brennan Manning
For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For His invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, Who is blessed forever! Amen.
~ paul, The Least of The Apostles, in Romans 1
Oh beloved, it is true. There is, for our souls, an ongoing battle. The war is won, for our King hath beaten Death in His own. He did swallow Death up in His Life as He burst forth from the grave. He has become the Firstborn of many brethren. However, even as wars are won, there remains the work of putting the damage right. Rebuilding a Kingdom does take time.
It is here, in the rebuilding of The Kingdom of Heaven that we live. It is here that the defeated foes – in the open shame to which they have been subjected – scream their taunts on the way to their Day of Judgment. And if we listen, we can still be pulled out of the stream of victory and follow them away into everlasting darkness. We have that choice available to us.
As the demons are being led away in chains, they scream out the lies that were born of the very first lie that started the whole downfall of a large portion of the hosts of heaven. The Liar, The Satan did say that he would ascend to the heights of heaven and usurp The True King of The Universe. He failed, and so now one of his tactics is to try and get people to believe that his Enemy never even existed.
The arguments that come out from the skeptics (and the demons that drive them) are harsh and bitter. They mock the idea that a Loving and real G_d could and would and want to be involved in the mess of humanity. They say that the mess we are in would have been something that G_d should have stopped or prevented – if He were even real.
They do this, missing the reality that True Love never forces its way into anyone’s life. Love has indeed given us the power to choose Life and death. And as unfortunate as it is, we have chosen death. Oh, have no doubt, the power is there for evil to be eradicated. But we, as humans, are quite chummy with our sin and failures. We would often rather die in our own excrement than allow ourselves to be washed clean by Love.
And so, the already defeated forces of darkness play out lie after lie and try to blame their evil on nothing, and to dismiss the fallenness of mankind as though it were nobody’s (including G_d’s) business. They work to glorify the putrid and to make that which is truly beautiful irrelevant, impotent or even nonexistent.
The end result of this in this world, though, is a not freedom. The result of this is pockets of overt rebellion against the coming Kingdom. And while the perversion and skepticism and atheism and anarchy seems like the dawn of a new age to some, it is nothing but an attempt of the Liar to promote his same old story: himself.
A friend of this fool of a writer has called this the “scorched earth policy” used by the forces of evil in spiritual battle. The only thing that evil can do is try to parody goodness, or to pull down, distort and destroy the things that have been created. And what is left in the wake of this activity is a dry and bitter dystopic sense of emptiness.
Can we see it though? The question is before us: What if the skeptics are right? What if we actually bought into their agenda? What if we really actually lived like G_d is not there? Would we gain anything? Would there be one nanogram of net progress in this world against the competing idea of the Kingdom of Heaven? Or, would the scorched earth of the demonic landscape just burst out into the physical dimensions?
Hopefully beloved, the answer is obvious. We can see that there already are copious volumes of evidence that – left to ourselves (and under the influence of demons) – atheism and skepticism gets us nowhere but into very bad shape. There is no beauty in a world that has lost its light.
However, this same problem of darkness gives light to the Answer. We can see that darkness is a choice. However, we have to actually and intentionally stop allowing ourselves to see the obvious elegance of the universe around us. We can (unless we choose not to) see the heavens declaring the glory of the They Who created us in Their image. There is no doubt.
We have to willingly block the flow of Life that we might die in our own sins. But, for Life and Light and Truth and Good to overtake us, all we have to is allow Him to do it. So, we are left with one of the most elegant and Loving things that Life Himself has given us: a choice.
Repent beloved, and believe the Good News. Death is beaten, and the skeptics have nothing to offer. Life is beating at your door. You have but to open and allow Him to enter in. Tonight is your night dear reader. Time to allow yourself to see the futility of doubt and full weight of His Love pressing in on your heart.
