"Reflections on the Book of Ecclesiastes"

(February 11, 2020)

Photos taken along the Columbia River
Near Mattawa/Desert Aire WA
February 2020

“Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity…. There is nothing for a man than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God; for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment? For the man who pleases him, God gives wisdom and knowledge and joy; but to the sinner he gives the work of gathering and heaping, only to give to one who pleases God. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.” (Ecclesiastes 1:2; 2:24-26)

Let us simply go. Go forth and live; in the sheer wonder that there is nothing for us, in this life under the sun, except for God to lovingly give his gifts to us; or for God to lovingly give to others through us.

Through the power of God, offering himself in Jesus on the cross, carrying the sins, and the evils, and all the striving emptiness of this world, dying and rising from the dead, we are claimed by God to be God’s beloved ones. As God’s beloveds, we are “given to”; or, as sinners, we are “given through”; through God’s power in Jesus. 

Otherwise, what is there in life for us to hold onto? What is there to call our own?

Holding on and calling anything our own are vanity, emptiness, and worthlessness in comparison with being either given to, or given through.

The whole duty of human life is to live what human life is created for, under the care of Almighty God.

All of human life (the life of the whole of humanity) is the essence of living in the fear of God. This means that our life is always full of the apprehension of a strange and blinding beauty; and of a completely undeserved, untamable, and uncompromising majesty.

The whole of human life (the essence of life for the whole of humanity) is found in our genuine experience of the ways of God, in fellowship with God: given to us so as to become the laws of our own hearts. The law for life is the intimacy of knowing God from the inside of his own heart. In Christ, the law of God’s life becomes the law of our lives.

“The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgement, with every secret thing, whether evil or good.” (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14)

It is the determined will and judgement of God, for his children and for his sinners, that God will allow nothing else for us but this. God will certainly preside (over our lives, and over everything in creation, for all time) to protect us from everything that does not bring this life to us. Everything else (in this world under the sun) will be refused, and taken from us. Anything else, and everything less than this, would be nothing but worthless: an empty vapor, dust, vanity, no life at all. God will give us nothing less than what is truly life.

Lord, Who Am I in You? – Equipped and Under Orders

Preached on Sunday, May 5, 2019

Scripture readings: Genesis 1:26-31; Matthew 28:16-20

There’s a friend of mine who has told me that he became a Christian when he held his first baby child in his arms. He knew, in his heart that he, as he was, was not the man to raise this child. He needed to become a new man. So, my friend gave his life to Christ, so that he could be a wise, loving, faithful father.

Walking near Crab Creek, north of Desert Aire-Mattawa, WA
Late April, 2019

The truth is that my friend was raised in a Christian home and seemed to belong to Christ already. But, his baby daughter became the witness commissioned by Jesus to go to the nation of Washtucna and make a disciple out of her new father, teaching him to observe all the Jesus had commanded her.

Paul writes: “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, behold the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17 RSV) My friend became a new man for a new world: the new world of fatherhood. By the way, my friend’s wife was always a saint. She must have seen his future when she said, “I do.”

My friend saw his old world passing away. In the bigger sense our whole world is passing away, ever since Jesus died and rose from the dead. (1 John 2:17) A new world has begun because of Jesus.

To us, this world still looks like a dying world. We will only see that new world of Jesus when he comes again. We live in a new creation and we, who are in Christ, are a new creation, even though we don’t look anything like new.

We are called by the Lord to live as his new images in this new creation. We know there must be different rules and a different calling than we had in the old creation, when we were trying to make ourselves in our own image, in those bad, old days in that bad, old world that was turned away from God.

God gave my friend a new calling, with his new heart, in the new world called fatherhood. This new calling was what we might call a covenant; a fancy Bible word for a holy promise bringing and holding God and human beings together.

The last few lines of the Gospel of Matthew are such a covenant, such a holy promise, that brings us and holds us together. Through this promise, we have a relationship of grace and empowerment with the Lord Jesus.

Jesus begins his new promise like this: “Behold, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me, go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” And Jesus completes his new promise like this: “And, lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

Jesus places himself at the beginning and at the completion of the promise to show that he is the one who holds it all together, for us, from the beginning to the end. The grace and the empowerment promised to us by Jesus is very clear, here.

What Christians commonly call “The Great Commission” is our calling and mission in the world that has been claimed by the authority of Jesus. Jesus came into our old, broken, rebel world from the throne that he shared with his Father in heaven. He dispensed with his heavenly authority for a while: while he was growing up, and working, and journeying toward the cross and the tomb. Jesus became truly human for us, in order to claim us from the inside out.

The classic way for an explorer to claim a new land for your own nation is never by gazing at its shoreline through binoculars and saying some magic, claiming spell. You have to set your own foot inside the new land and raise your nation’s banner.

Jesus set his feet inside the broken world of the human race, in flesh and blood, as though he was making himself a citizen of the place. Then Jesus raised the banner of the cross and claimed us for his kingdom.

Jesus built the only kind of human life in which we can follow in his footsteps. He built this new shape of human life for us when he was baptized for our repentance, and received the Holy Spirit, just as we all must baptized for repentance and receive the Holy Spirit.

Jesus opened the door into what we must all receive, in order that we may be washed clean in our hearts, and be moved, and enabled, and directed by the Holy Spirit in our own lives. So, Jesus moved in first, into the new world of repentance, and baptism, and receiving the Holy Spirit. Jesus claimed authority over our transition from our old life into our new life.

He did this before us, and he did it for us, so that we don’t take those alone. Our repentance, our baptism, and our life in the Holy Spirit are just as good as his, because he walks with us through it.

Jesus pushed his authority further when he made his way to the center of our hearts and took our sin and rebellion upon himself, on the cross, and made our lives stronger than sin and stronger than death in the resurrection.

Jesus reclaimed human dominion in this world when he reclaimed us in birth, in life, in death, and in resurrection; and defeated the powers of Hell and the Devil. In Jesus, there is no longer any place for us to go where he hasn’t been already. He is with us always, in so many ways, until all the ages and all the places of creation are brought together for the new heaven and earth.

Now that he has created and claimed the new earth and our new life, Jesus has sent us on a mission a bit like the mission of Adam and Eve in the old creation. They were commissioned to “dress and keep the earth”; or to “work it and take care of it”. (Genesis 2:15 KJV and NIV) This was the dominion of Adam and Eve. It was their rulership over the earth: to work on the earth and take care of it, to be servants and guardians of it.

The Great Commission of Jesus for us doesn’t take the First Commission away. Instead, Jesus adds the mission of partnering with him to care for and protect the new human world by bringing our living witness to Jesus wherever we go, into all the nations, or just into our own nation.

We are to go to all nations. If we don’t go to all the nations, then we go to all the people around us.

We take part in the Lord’s work of recreating everyone who will listen, and be moved, and follow. Everyone is beloved by the Lord, and the Lord’s greatest joy is for them to become new creations where the old has passed away.

This is where being in the image of God comes in. The image of God is not having a face, and hands, and feet, and internal organs. The image of God is not some spirit, soul, mind, and body thing. God’s image isn’t even a matter of being a person of self-awareness and purpose, although that comes a lot closer. God’s image is intimate relationship. God’s image is intimate, faithful love.

The idea of a mirror comes into this, in the Bible: “seeing in a mirror dimly, and then face to face (2 Cor. 3:18)” or looking into “the law as into a mirror (James 1:23.” Human sin interrupted the faith that comes from looking into the Lord. Human sin interrupted our ability to look at any time and see all that God is; and caring for all that God cares about. In Jesus, God has stopped and untangled this interruption.

Because of this, you can pay good attention (quality attention) to everything that matters most to God in your life and, yet, center your attention on God at the same time. You can play with your kids. You can pay your bills. You can work at your job, and your art, and your garden. You can work on your check book or online banking site. And you can look into the presence of God at the same time.

You can write a book or read a book. You can watch television and hear the news. And you can look into the presence of God at the same time.

That’s what being the image of God is about. Then, whatever you are thinking, whatever you are saying, whatever you are doing is what God would do if God were you. Then people will look at you and see God: see Jesus, see God in Jesus Christ, in you. They may not know it. But they may crucify you for it just as easily as they may praise you for it.

That will be one of the ways you can measure your competence, your abilities, your success. For better or for worse you will play and fit the role of Jesus. You will spread the new creation for the new world; the new heaven and earth that are coming.

Making disciples means bringing people into the image-changing and image-making that comes from this intimate relationship. You learn from Jesus by listening and watching. You learn from Jesus by following, which means going where he wants to go: not to the righteous but to sinners. You will be the good physician. You will be the good nurse to those around you.

To baptize them means to give them a good, Christ centered death and resurrection in Jesus. They will die to themselves and live in Christ.

Teaching them to observe all that Christ has commanded you means bringing them all back to your own calling. Wherever Christ has found them, that is the starting line of their part of the race in the image-of-God relay.

They will love taking care of and protecting the least of the people around them. They will love bringing others into the life that makes us the image of God by intimacy: looking and listening and following the presence and purpose of God. You teach others to observe all that the Lord has commanded you by sharing your life’s work and your life’s discoveries and your greatest loves with them.

Then the whole business spins around, and around, and around. It goes from generation to generation, family to family, country to country. It’s like a country folk dance, or a square dance, passing under the over-arching arms of the ones who are smiling at you through the lands and the ages of the kingdom of God.

There was a man whose name I can’t remember, and whom I have never met, but Christians in my home town used to talk about him. He came to my home town, from South Korea to America, because God called him to be a missionary to us.

The Americans had brought their faith to his country. Now the Lord called him to bring his faith to ours.

He was smart but, most of all he was humble and childlike. He was in a new world, for him, and other Christians helped him as they could. By helping him, they learned to grow in their own faith through him. Non-believing Americans understood the good news of Jesus better for having known him.

I don’t remember what became of him. It’s only one example of how The Great Commission works. It’s how the sacrifice and the resurrection of God in Christ creates the new creation around us, as we live face to face with the presence of Jesus.

Jesus holds us together, through the strength of his promises, for as long as the ages and worlds gather together in his kingdom. Jesus is with us always, as we go with him into this bold new resurrection world.

The Battle Primeval – Desires, Wishes, or Hope

Preached on Sunday, November 25, 2018

Scripture readings: Genesis 3:17-20; 1 Corinthians 15:12-22; Luke 24:1-12

Southern California and Santa Catalina Island, June, 2018

Once upon a time, there was a Bible Zoo. The owners collected animals from all over the world so that people could come and see all the animals mentioned in the Bible. As much as they could, the owners tried, in each exhibition, to show the animals in the scene, or in the action, mentioned in the Bible

So, a guy was taking his family through this Bible Zoo, and around these exhibits. They came to the one with the verse from Isaiah 11:6-7 “The lion shall lie down with the lamb”. That’s not actually in the Bible that way. (There are wolves and lambs, and lions and calves, but not lions and lambs. We shouldn’t fuss about this.) But, the zoo had them lying down together, anyway, on a small lawn with a lily pond, because everyone was expecting to see them like that.

This guy was amazed to look at them: the lion and lamb together and quiet. He turned to a nearby groundskeeper and asked him: “How do they do that?” And the groundskeeper replied, “Well, they have to replace that lamb every day.”

There are plenty of people who look at the promises of the Word of God that way. Even Christians find it hard to understand the very concept of hope. Even the common English language is confused at the concept of hope, to say the least.

A few weeks ago, I was thinking about what I had to get done that day. I said to myself, “I hope it doesn’t freeze tonight.” I hoped that because I hadn’t gotten around to insulating my outdoor faucets yet. In spite of my hopes, I left my other stuff undone, for a while, in order to get those faucets covered.

Of course, once that was done, I didn’t have to hope that it wouldn’t freeze that night. In fact, I didn’t need hope at all, anymore.

People like me say that kind of thing all the time. “I hope this doesn’t happen. But I sure hope that happens instead.” We’re not talking about hope at all. We’re talking about wishes: only wishes.

It’s as though we have no idea what hope means.

In the Bible our hopes are only wishes when we place our hopes in something else, or in someone less, than God; or else, our hopes are only wishes when we make our God too small, or when our hopes have forgotten who God truly is, and what our God can do.

Our three readings from the Scriptures are about hope, or about the lack of it, or about why our hopes are so weak and small.

The reading from the third chapter of Genesis (Genesis 3:17-20) tells us that we humans, who were given the opportunity to live abundantly and forever, chose death over life when they ate the fruit of a knowledge that was way too much for them to digest. They ate the knowledge that was too much for them, in order to make themselves like God.

They knew they shouldn’t do this. They knew that death was part of their choice. Waiting for the God who walked with them in the garden to choose a time to give them the fruit if he thought it was time for it, that could have been one of their greatest hopes, but they chose against hope and for their own destructive desires. We inherited from them a nature that prefers desires (and even wishes) to hope.

Only in Jesus does God offer us a life of hope again. When we choose him, we choose hope, but first we must relearn, from Jesus, the hope we’ve never known before.

Adam and Eve believed false hopes (or wishes) in the form of lies, because choosing the lies served them better than faith and hope. The result of this lost capacity for a reliable, God-centered faith and hope, is that we find ourselves in this broken world, and in these broken lives, where death seems stronger than life, and evil seems stronger than love, and stronger than God.

Because we have inherited the mental and spiritual deformities of sin, and of this world, we can only see the evidence of what has gone wrong, and we can only see that the odds are against hope. We don’t realize that God isn’t bound by what we see, or by how we count our chances. In God, in Christ, hope is not about the evidence. Hope is not about the odds.

Writing to the Christians in the Greek city of Corinth, Paul responded to the rumors that his friends, there, found it hard to hope in a resurrection of their bodies. They were convincing themselves that not even Jesus defeated death with his own physical body. They liked the idea of heaven much more than they liked the report of the resurrection.

They thought that perfection and glory were only possible for spiritual beings, because they believed that all matter (like their bodies) marched in lock step with decline and decay. If Jesus raised his own body from the dead, then he was doomed and so were they.

They didn’t want to save the world they lived in, and they didn’t want themselves to be saved in flesh, and blood, and bone. They wanted to escape from the world. They wanted to escape from their bodies. They wanted to be souls only; flying around freely in a far-away heaven.

Paul told them that exactly the opposite was true. Paul told them that the salvation and life that came from Christ was a lie if Christ was unable to conquer this world, and their bodies, and everything wrong with this universe. Christ was able to do anything he chose. Christ could conquer and heal and empower everything good. Christ could conquer everything created by God for good, no matter how much of a lost cause it may seem.

Timothy Keller says this about the conquest of Jesus, and what it means for our lives. “If Christianity is true, the good things we have cannot be lost.” Jesus enlarges our hopes to include every gift that lifts our hearts and gives us joy.

Christ could only save them if he was Lord of All. Jesus is Lord of the creation. He is Lord of the atoms, and Lord of the galaxies. He is the Lord of our souls, and the Lord of our bodies. He is the defeater of sin, and death, and the devil. He is able to replace the whole universe with eternal, and victorious, and overcoming life.

The Corinthians had made the mistake of settling for hopes that were much too small. They felt safer with smaller hopes, but small hopes don’t make a full life. They would only find life if they had a large and daring hope; only if they hoped for the unimaginable and the seemingly impossible and stake their faith and hope on a God who promised to take care of it.

In Luke’s telling of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, the angels told the women who had come to the tomb: “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you….” (Luke 24:5-6) Jesus had already told all of his followers, many times, what he had to do. Jesus had promised them, many times, that he was more than able to truly do it all.

Here, again, they had made their capacity to hope too small. They had made their hope small because they had made Jesus small, and they had also made the Father, who sent Jesus, small. They had made the Son and the Father smaller than the evils of this world.

The women at the tomb, and the other disciples, had made God smaller than sin, and smaller than death. They measured their God by the yardstick of their own loss and grief.

They had made their God too small. They had hearts too small for the hope that comes from God: the hope that God insists on giving us. And we often do the same.

The greatness of God, that we see at work in Jesus, is the Lord’s yardstick to measure our hopes and dreams. So here it is.

God’s goodness is stronger than evil and sin.

God’s forgiveness is stronger than guilt, or shame.

God’s peace-making is stronger than our division and alienation from him, and from others, and from the creation.

God’s peace-making is stronger than all our divisions, our conflicts, our covetousness, our envies and jealousies; stronger than the wounds we give and the wound that we receive.

God’s abundance is stronger than our needs.

***

If we have faith in this God; if we trust this stronger God, then our faith will grow. Then, Hope will sprout out from our faith. Our lives will be empowered, and changed, and set free by faith, and hope, and love, in the form of Jesus.

We will live up to God’s gifts more than we live down to our losses and griefs.

We will live up to God’s promises more than we live down to our fears, our worries, and the world’s low expectations.

We will live up to God’s eternity more than we live down to the limits of our time and strength.

We will live up to God’s crosses more than we live down to our compromises.

We will live up to God’s mysteries more than we live down to human common sense.

We will live up to God’s self-giving in Christ more than we live down to our own self-preservation.

We will live up to God’s humility and servanthood in Jesus more than we live down to our own dignity.

We will live up to the abilities of God’s grace more than we live down to our own sense of weakness and disqualification.

We will live up to the life that says “Our life is hid with Christ, in God” more than we live down to our weariness of life. Those who grow tired of life need to know that what they truly need. What they truly need to desire, and to hope for, is more life, and not less.

Living by great and daring hopes, as well as living by great and daring faith and love, will make us faithful witnesses to the good news of the gospel. We’ll join the fellowship of all God people in heaven and earth in the unimaginable purpose to which God has called us, in Jesus: “To make known among the Gentiles (or among the nations) the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Colossians 1:27)

The Battle Primeval - What's at Stake?

Preached on Sunday, September 16, 2018

Scripture readings: Genesis 3:1-15; Revelation 12:7-12; Matthew 4:1-11

In my studying I found out that there was an excuse that Adam gave to his children for the reason they weren’t living in the Garden of Eden anymore.

“Your mother ate us out of house and home!”

Along the Columbia River, Desert Aire/Mattawa, WA
August and September 2018

That’s true, but there was a deeper failure on Eve’s and Adam’s part, and a deeper issue than disobedience at stake.

The truth is that it was all a matter of love. The issue was their failure to choose love. Their failure was their sad choice of something that was not love.

Spiritual warfare is ultimately the struggle to make the right choice and carry it through to the end. The right choice is the choice of love: love for God and love for others.

Adam and Even trusted knowledge more than love. Trusting is the nitty gritty factor of faith. They didn’t love because they didn’t trust. They didn’t trust because they didn’t love: at least, they didn’t love nearly enough.

The Victory of Jesus over the Devil was the power of love in the heart of Jesus: his love for the Father and his love for us.

In the Book of Revelation, in chapter twelve, the picture chosen to depict the people of Jesus on earth fighting and resisting temptation, sin, and evil is the picture of an Angelic Army defeating a great Dragon and his army in heaven. The victory in that battle is also a matter of love.  Part of that love is the love of Jesus, the Lamb, lovingly shedding his blood for our sins, and the sin of the world, on the cross. Another part of that love is the loving testimony that the people of Jesus are able to give about the faithfulness Jesus at work in their lives. The caliber of their love that turned the tide of the battle was powered by their willingness to lay down their lives for Jesus, and for each other. They could lay themselves down this way in death, because they knew how to lay their lives down for Jesus and each other in life.

Adam and Eve did just the opposite. They defeated, or deflated, the power of love in the human race, in the human heart. Since God had designed them (and us) to love and to be loved, they couldn’t destroy God’s design for them, but they could mess with it, and distort it, and infect it. They could turn it from a gift into a gamble. Well, that’s what love often becomes in the world as it is.

They couldn’t harm God’s love. God’s love has remained what it has always been. Their only victory (if you could call it) that was to vandalize their own heart’s capacity for love.

The Devil in the snake told them that God had withheld from them the real meaning and power of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Satan Snake told them that God had not given them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The Ruthless Rattler implied that God was deliberately maintaining a false advantage over them by keeping the secret of the fruit to himself. The Snake suggested that God must not love them.

God must be a liar. The snake didn’t use that word, though, because Adam and Eve might not have known what it meant.

God had designed the woman and the man with the gifts that they needed for learning and maintaining the knowledge and the gifts that they needed in order to be beings of reason, and sense, and discernment, and good judgement.

They were God’s image. They already had this. They had learned to do their thinking from God himself. Most of all, they had known the loving care of the Lord all their lives.

They had the gift of fellowship and communion with the Lord. The Lord would come to the Garden of Eden, near the time of rest in the cool of the day. The Lord would walk with them, and talk with them, and tell them that they were his own. They hadn’t known the Slippery Serpent for very long, and the extent of the knowledge he claimed to have should have surprised them.

The man and the woman had never heard a lie before and maybe they didn’t even know the definition of the word. So, you might think that their lack of experience with lies had tricked them into believing the snake. But, then, if they couldn’t recognize a lie when they heard one, why were they able to believe that God had lied to them?

They were designed to understand things and have dominion over the earth. In a sense, at that time, Eden was their school, and maybe they hadn’t the time to graduate yet.

The snake was offering them the chance to graduate early, and to be grown up. And knowledge and wisdom are such wonderful and desirable things. Maybe God would even be pleased that they had learned so much so quickly and they might even bless him by saving God from trouble when he was at risk for making a mistake.

This could make them into an enormous help to God, if they only they took some initiative on their own. Even though that would mean doing the very opposite of what God had told them.

Everyone knows that if you allow a child to do absolutely anything he or she wants, except for one forbidden thing, the child will do that one forbidden thing.

But even if that is true on this side of Eden, we don’t see it being true then and there. When they ate the forbidden fruit and gained the forbidden knowledge, they were not smarter than they had been. They were much dumber than they had been.

They became afraid of looking at each other when had hadn’t been afraid before. The forbidden knowledge made them afraid of knowledge. They were afraid of what they now saw in each other.

They forgot that God knew everything, which is part of what knowing good and evil means, and so they thought they could hide from God in the trees, and they thought they could hide what they had done.

The forbidden knowledge made the first people unable to know each other, and to know themselves, and to know God. They forgot that they were each other’s beloveds. They forgot that they were gifts from God to each other. So, they blamed each other, and they denied their own responsibility for their own actions, which is another way of not even knowing yourself. Adam even blamed God for giving him the woman who had given him the forbidden fruit.

The truth is that sin makes us stupid. Anyone with a bit of sense knows this. When we make a mess of our lives, we make ourselves stupid. But never call another human being stupid, or you’ll make Jesus mad at you.

It’s worse than being stupid to make a choice that deprives you of the wisdom and understanding of love. It’s the worst choice in the world to make your love generator, and your love transmitters, and your love receptor break down.

The poet John Milton thought that the only knowledge of good and evil that came from the forbidden fruit was the knowledge of good lost and evil gained. I think Milton was much too generous in his opinion of them.

Now, in a world where the knowledge of good and evil is the rule, and where we pray to be delivered from evil, we must know both good and evil in order to pass muster for the battle between them. The use of the knowledge of good and evil must go like this, as the apostle Paul told us: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” (Romans 12:21)

If the man and woman had chosen to love God instead of doubting his integrity, they might have found a way, by using the power of goodness, to stomp on the snake Devil. If Eve and Adam had used the power of goodness that they had at their disposal, they wouldn’t have got bitten.

If they had used the power of the goodness that they had learned from their daily walks with God, they might have passed their graduation exams. They would have had a much wiser knowledge than the stupidity of sin that they got from the forbidden fruit.

Adam and Eve stupidly wrecked their own love, but they couldn’t wreck its source. They couldn’t change God’s love.

And, so, God loved them by kicking them out, but this wasn’t because he couldn’t live with them, or vice versa. In love, God simply didn’t dare to let them live forever without a cure for sin and evil. That would make them worse than mortal. Sin kills the beauty of God’s design for life just as it kills the purity of love. To live forever in the clutches of that poison is to become, more and more, like some creature that could be called the living-dead. A loving God would not leave them to that fate worse than death.

The future of our fallen race had to be disciplined by living faithfully and lovingly toward God and each other in our choices. Those choices required a tougher life that Eden could give them. They and we somehow need the discipline of hardship, and pain, and a life-long battle with the Devil and his minions.

God lovingly prepared Adam and Eve for the tough world to come by giving them tough leather clothing to go through it all. God lovingly prepared Adam and Eve for a tough life giving them a promise. God promised that generations of mothers giving birth would win the prize of victory over the snake, and over our own fallen nature. The pain of childbirth would finally receive the prize of a savior whom we would call Jesus.

Men work hard. So do women. But women are the ones whose work gives birth to life.

If you think that it is God’s order of things for the man of the house to rule his wife, guess again. Man’s lordship is a thing that happens, and it doesn’t have to happen. Men have a choice. A man must be very full of the forbidden fruit indeed, and made very stupid by that fruit, if he wants to be the punishment that his wife must bear for the rest of her life.

Remember that the forbidden fruit makes us stupid about love. Don’t be the lord of your house and lord of your wife unless you want to be stupid about love. You have a choice.

Paul says that men owe their wives love and women owe their husbands obedience. I think this is because men need to learn to express tenderness and love, and women need to learn to respectfully listen to people, like men, who aren’t quite as perceptive as they are. Both of these are humility things.

In one church I served, I lost one of our families because I refused to do a wedding when I found out that the woman was abusing her man. Someone else did their wedding and they were divorced in a month. The woman was lording it over her fiancee in a terrible way. She knew nothing about love, and she had nothing worthy of that name to give. Hopefully she’s better now. Lording it is never good.

I think that is why the glorious archangel Lucifer became the Devil in a snakeskin. The legends tell us that he decided that it was better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven. The kingdom of God is where Jesus is King. and he is a servant who died for the sins of his people. He died for us. We serve a King who has served us to death.

We need to train and develop our skills and strength if we are going to take our place in the part of life called spiritual warfare. We see how it started in the beginning, in Genesis, in the Garden of Eden.

There can be a lot of participants in the spiritual warfare: a lot of voices sharing the battle. Even at the start, there was the snakes voice, the woman’s voice, the man’s voice, and God’s voice.

Adam and Eve lost the battle. So did the Satan Snake. The war would go on; who knew how long? God knew, and God won, and God will win, and so will we. We will win if we die to our bad knowledge from the forbidden tree, and live by the faith that has love for its foundation.

We see what spiritual warfare looks like from the start. It’s not possession, per se. It’s a conversation and it’s a process of discernment, or the lack of it, in faith and love.

In the end, God is in command and God promises victory. God gets the victory by humbling himself to do what only God could do by becoming human, and using our human gifts, including the ability to die. God, in Christ, became a human servant to the human race, so that he could send and receive love on our frequency and on our level. Jesus, the eternal Word that is God who became flesh, became human and died for our rescue and our rebirth, and to be our captain in the fight.

Jesus fought the battle that Adam and Eve lost. Jesus won the battle of the temptation. The reason why the Lord Jesus did not fail is because he refused the easy way, the compromise. The forbidden fruit was presented to Adam and Eve as the easy way to be wise and independent.

Jesus took the hard way. Jesus was hungry but would not eat. Jesus had a great ambition to save us, but it was an ambition based on love. It was a love that couldn’t take the easy way of winning hearts by putting on a display: leaping from tall buildings and getting rescued by angels. Jesus’ ambition was based on love and so his work could not be built on gaining the world (such as it is) by the easy way of kneeling to evil. Because of love, Jesus’ work could only be built on gaining the world (such as it will be) the hard way. Instead of taking a bow Jesus took on himself the cross. The power of his cross, and his sacrificial death for us, and his resurrection defeated the old world and made it new.

The Devil’s temptation of Jesus had the attraction of easy self-fulfillment, which is clearly what our present world tries to sell us. Jesus tells us that self-fulfillment isn’t the way. The way is servanthood in love. That wins the victory.

When we fight the dragon, in our own spiritual warfare, the victory comes from letting Jesus return us to our original design. We are made for love and to be loved. Living marked by the blood of the lamb named Jesus returns us to God’s design for us to know that we are made to be loved. The testimony we give is one half of that love, and the other half of that love is what we give back to Jesus, and to Jesus through others. Our lives and our words bear the testimony and the evidence of this victory.

The blood of Jesus sets us free by making us like Jesus. Jesus didn’t shrink from, or let himself be held back by, the worst this world could do to him and neither do we. Living like Jesus (to love and be loved through faith) gives us the victory. That is the spiritual warfare.

The Primeval Battle - A Confrontation

Preached on Sunday, September 9, 2018 (a second edition of a sermon preached 6-9-13)

Scripture readings: Acts 13:4-12; Ephesians 6:10-20

Paul and Barnabas were honored to be invited into the presence of the Roman governor of Cyprus to tell him the message about Jesus. They found that he was, in so many ways, the perfect audience for the good news.

He was intelligent; which didn’t mean that he was merely very smart. Being merely smart can cause so much trouble. Intelligence meant that he could understand, and sort things out, and see what was really there, and come to the right conclusion. And this intelligent audience had a wizard, a sorcerer, right by his side.

Walking Near Crab Creek, North of Mattawa/Desert Aire
August 2018

We can’t be sure that Barnabas and Paul knew from the very start that the man standing beside the governor’s chair was a sorcerer. They seem to have argued with Elymas as though he was merely an influential man, like others they had met. There was some shifting in what they understood was going on in front of them. There was some shifting in what they realized they had to do about it.

There was a kind of inspiration involved on Paul’s part. We read that he was, “filled with the Holy Spirit, looked straight at Elymas (the wizard)” and spoke judgment upon him. (Acts 13:9)

While Barnabas and Paul were trying to share their faith and lead the governor to faith in Jesus, the sorcerer “opposed them and tried to turn the governor from the faith.” There was this growing conflict, until the Holy Spirit opened the eyes of Paul to who this man named Elymas was, and what he stood for. The conflict was an outbreak of what has been called “spiritual warfare.”

I know, from my own experience that such warfare is real and that it is going on all the time. There is the Kingdom of God and there is the Shadow Kingdom of this present darkness. There are armies of these kingdoms fighting some kind of war that we can’t see, but that war involves us and has an effect on us.

At the same time, I want to avoid obsession. C. S. Lewis said, "There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them." (C.S. Lewis, “The Screwtape Letters”)

I think our human race can fall into the same pair of opposite errors related to angels: either to disbelieve in them or to have an unhealthy interest in them. Angels almost never make their presence known unless they have a special mission that requires them to communicate with us.

Elymas the wizard probably would never have called his familiar spirits devils. They were just spirits, and maybe even gods to him. Or he thought they were angels at his service. As Paul says, “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.” (2 Corinthians 11:14)

Paul, in his thoughts on our struggle against “the spiritual forces of evil”, doesn’t tell us much about either devils or angels. The angels may well be working or fighting all around us but, for Paul, the main point is all about living inside of the spiritual realities that come to us through Jesus: truth, righteousness, the good news of peace, faith, the Spirit and word of God, and prayer. He calls this our armor, or our defense. He calls it our means of standing through it all; standing up in resistance and going forward. (Ephesians 6:11)

I have seen angels, myself, a few times. One summer night, when I was sixteen, I struggled with an invisible devil until I was able to say, “Go away, in Jesus’ name, and don’t come back.” And that came as quite a surprise to me because, at that time, I really didn’t believe in the devil or in demons. But I know what the Bible told me to do about it.

That is one way of being aware of a spiritual warfare but there is no need whatsoever for any kind of experience like that. In fact, if you tried looking for experiences like this it might get you in a lot of trouble. I know this from personal experience. I would solemnly warn you that there are much more important and necessary ways to be aware of such a warfare.

Paul said for us to be aware of it in the form of things like truth, and peace, and faith, and prayer. Our hold on the truth, and the peace that comes from the good news, and a faith and loyalty toward God in our heart, and all kinds of prayer make us part of the warfare.

Seeing these in others is also a way in which we take part. We see the armies of the kingdom of God when people live out the truth, and bring peace to others, and patiently cope by faith and prayer; trusting and communicating with God.

At such times, you see and feel the unseen. You see and feel the power of God living in others and living in you. You see it in the love and integrity of families. You see it in the baptism of babies, and children, and adults. You see it in weddings. You see it in holy funerals.

You see the glory of the armies of the kingdom of light. You see people living out what God is putting into them, but you also see it as a sign of the march of a whole kingdom (a whole new world) on the move; holding out and advancing against the darkness.

On the other side of the war, it is easy to see the sadness and the badness lurking in human nature; but sometimes you see something much worse. You see self-fulfilling fears. You see self-destructive behavior. You see the irresistible and irrational descent into misunderstanding and misinterpretation between people who should be working together; people who should be friends, or who should love each other.

You see something beyond human weakness. Sometimes you hear the cackling laughter of the spiritual forces of darkness. You may not hear it with your ears but you feel it in a shudder down your spine.

Paul was aware of something strange in his meeting with the governor. There was this other man. His name was Bar-Jesus (bar-Joshua, son of Joshua, a common name) Elymas (a Jewish and a Greek combination). In this way he was just like Saul who was also Paul (Saulus Paulus, a Jewish and Roman combination). One was a Jew who had turned into a sorcerer. The other was a Jew who had turned into a Christian. They had parted ways. They had been swept apart by the forces from the dark side of the spiritual warfare.

The Romans were so much about mastery and control, and this Roman governor was being mastered by the sorcerer every time Paul tried to share Jesus with him. The governor was “intelligent”, meaning that he had a gift for putting things and ideas together. He had the skill to see where and how things added up, and he was oddly not able to hold on to anything Paul said.

In the governor’s oddly disabled intelligence Paul saw something more than the work of a man who simply posed as a sorcerer. He saw that Elymas was more than a poser. He saw that the spiritual forces of evil were there, and at work.

The power and the wisdom of God, in the form of the Holy Spirit, filled Paul. So, Paul could speak for God and put his finger on exactly what was going on. Paul saw the hand of God was at work in this moment of time. God himself was there with Paul to face the spiritual forces.

The interesting thing is that, as far as we know, nothing worse happened to the sorcerer than what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus where Paul had met Jesus. Paul, too, had been blinded for a time by Jesus himself, and had to be led by the hand, just like Elymas. (Acts 9:8 and 13:11)

Paul’s blindness and having to be led by the hand were the mercy of Jesus. They were part of the story of Paul’s salvation. They could be part of the salvation of Elymas. We simply don’t know how the story of Elymas ended. When it all happened to Paul, it was a matter of salvation and hope. The salvation and hope that come through Jesus are the power that created the armor of God.

They come to us not as a feeling but as a fact. Jesus, and everything he has done for us, almost forces itself upon us in a way that leads us to repent and surrender. We see Jesus. We see the cross and the one hanging there. We see an empty tomb and death and all our fears and defeats defeated by Jesus and the resurrection. When we see it, how can we say “no” to what he shows us? How can we escape?

We see the truth of it; and it is that truth (that factuality) that serves like a belt that holds our lives together: the belt of truth. However much we may struggle, Jesus has made the fact of his love, the truth of his love, just as great a reality as any of our struggles.

There is the “breastplate of righteousness” where everything is set right. Jesus is the righteousness of God and our righteousness too. He is the justice of God who sets us right with himself and with ourselves.

In the cross of Christ, we die to ourselves. From the tomb of Jesus, we rise as new people who can stand against the devil, because Jesus has made us right before God, and Jesus stands with us.

We are still sinners, but Jesus stands up for us against all accusers. The word “devil” means accuser. The spiritual warfare seeks to accuse us and make us give up. The grace of God in Jesus enables us to stand up.

There is “the shoeing of your feet with the gospel of peace”. Paul almost never says anything in a simple way. The gospel means good news. The good news of Jesus gives us peace with God, but it also gives us peace in every way. In Hebrew, the word peace is shalom and it is all about relationships. It doesn’t mean an absence of conflict. Peace means all relationships are healthy and flourishing, especially our relationship with God, in Christ.

The spiritual warfare attacks us when we are not nurturing our most important relationships. Or the warfare tempts us to mess with our most important relationships. The gospel of peace prepares us to stop and pay attention to people. The peace of Christ teaches us how to nurture our relationships, and this protects us, and it protects them, from the spiritual forces of evil.

There is “the shield of faith” and faith is a kind of loyalty and trust in God, in Jesus. Loyalty listens to Jesus instead of listening to our doubts, or despair, or weariness, or weakness, or our strongest desires and temptations.

Loyalty and trust help us to listen to Jesus, who forgives our sins, and so we have another way to defend ourselves than by proving ourselves, or by justifying ourselves, or by pretending we are something other than what we are. True faith saves us from pride as well as from fear.

Then there is the “helmet of salvation”. When I was seventeen I drowned, but I was saved from the lake. I was rescued from the water by Charlie Lucas.

I was rescued, then I was resuscitated, then I was safe and alive. Salvation is our rescue by God, in Jesus, and we are safe. Knowing we are safe in Christ is how we stand up to the struggle of the war.

Then there is “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God”. In Isaiah chapter eleven we can see the power of the Lord working through the Holy Spirit, and through the Messiah. Isaiah wrote like this, “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him; the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of power, the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord; and he will delight in the fear of the Lord. He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears; but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth; with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.” (Isaiah 11:1-4)

This would tell us that the sword of the Spirit is the word that Jesus speaks in healing, mercy, and judgment. In this way, Jesus himself, in the Spirit, spoke from Paul’s heart and mouth to the sorcerer Elymas. Or we could say that Paul spoke in the Spirit, and Jesus spoke with him.

The Spirit put his sword in Paul’s hands, or the Spirit put his sword in Paul’s mouth. The Spirit gave him God’s word to speak God’s truth. It sounded like judgment, and yet it had the potential for mercy.

In spiritual warfare, we can see things as they are, and name them for what they are. At the same time, we can also leave the door of mercy open. We know that the sword of the Spirit has been given to us with an end in view; to make all things new.  

We have many powerful swords of the Spirit in the Bible. When we recall or speak these words of God, the voice of God speaks again from the words we have read from the Good Book, and works with power.

Then there is prayer. Prayer isn’t given a name as a part of the armor of God. Yet, maybe it is also part of the sword of the Spirit. In Romans chapter eight, Paul says, “We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” (Romans 8:26)

In the spiritual struggle we may be too tired, or confused, or frustrated to know how to pray, but God’s own words and thoughts (what we would pray if we were faithful, and loving, and wise) gets said. Through the Holy Spirit praying in us, the word of God gets said, in prayer; and that prayer changes things.

What God does for us in Christ is the real armor that we wear. God is our strength. The Lord’s Supper tells us this. Here is the gospel set upon a table. “Eat and be strong,” it says. “Be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power.” (Ephesians 6:10) “O taste and see that the Lord is good.” (Psalm 34:8)