...At least I hope so!
Romans 5
5:1 Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ...
6 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us... 10 For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!
12 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned—15 But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace... overflow to the many! 16 Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification.
19... For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous 21...so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Romans 5: 1, 6-8, 10, 12, 15-16, 19, 21 NIV
This is extraordinary! Worthy of the One who changed everything for everyone.
One of the many scandals of the first Christian writers was in declaring Jesus the true Emperor of Rome, indeed in all the earth and the heavens beyond. Mark was first to break out of the bull pen like a rodeo rider on a bucking broncho. Writing of the very One condemned by Rome in the shame of the cross, he declares "the beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God" (Mark 1:1 NIV).
'Good News' or 'gospel' was a Roman phrase reserved for the Emperor. It did not mean, "Happy News" though it may result in prosperity and safety for any community that welcomed the Emperor's Word. Whatever the Emperor said, pleasant or painful was considered "good news" for it transformed the life of all who received it, for good or ill.
In times such as these we now live in some twenty one centuries later, my own faith has been tenuous, chaotic, as though in a still framed rodeo ride each twist and turn of my horse a near fall. Spiritually sensitive to the Spirit, fully open to the pain, sorrow and mistrust my own sin has created, I move ever near a rush of deep, tender sorrow pouring out. For the most part the memory of lust has faded and sanity returned to my inward self, though aware that repentance has not rum its course. It is the political and historical world around me that creates a deep faith-gap. Larry Norman's song, "I wish we'd all been ready" is the tragic icon of a child's and early adult faith rooted in apocalyptic judgments and chaos of a world whose political, moral, environmental sins are spilling out into a world at rage with itself, and notably God's chosen people. It would appear that love is loosing, to power.
Living inside such a world is a challenge. Perhaps Divine Power will have to arrest the evil in order that Love may heal. Perhaps in my optimism about Jesus compelling vision of Love's reign I have taken the horrific war of the world unseen too lightly; “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms"
(Ephesians 6:12 NIV). But what i simply cannot imagine is a Heavenly Father whose mysterious and magical holiness being rooted in any impulse not born of love.
How can The Father in any universe be less forgiving, less merciful than Jesus? This is the center around which the apocalyptic literature swirls. I cannot affect outcomes, only pray with Jesus for the salvation of Israel and her enemies. I am reminded by the Spirit that “Jesus answered" this very question on the night of his arrest, : “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work" (John 14:9-10).
A closer look at the context of Philip's question reveals a turmoil in the disciples not so very different from my own. Like us, they lived inside a time filled with apocalyptic questions swirling around the very nature of who God is and their own uncertain place in God's world. Had not Thomas just asked, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” (John 14:5 NIV). It was Jesus answer, “If you really know me, you will know my Father as well" that elicited Philip's response; "Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us" (John 14:7-8 NIV).
What is clear to me is that I live in a mysterious tension. If I insist that God be who I need God to be then I reveal a misplaced faith. It is faith in me—my own belief system—upon which I rely. Faith in faith is like a circular firing squad. Eventually I am the source of the target. It does not work.
Even so, if The Father is less than Jesus and Jesus really did die to remove The Father's wrath from me then I remain lost, this time running like a hamster inside God's cage, hoping to escape into yet another larger cage. For God's heart is the source of my dissonance, not my dissonance refusing its only resolution, a world without cages. If God's anger resides in the Father and God's mercy in the Son then God is divided over what to do with me. Love demands one thing and Justice another. Hence, the circular cage.
Did not Jesus life and teachings demonstrate that mercy lies at the epicenter of God's heart? Is it not the union of Love that makes The Trinity of God, Three Persons, as One in essential nature? All I can do is trust that God is at peace and we are the ones in whom the war rages. That is a place I can live or die with. If I awake in a kingdom where God is content to condemn the vast majority to a never ending hell so that I may live in the Divine's Presence I only hope that I have the courage of Moses who in Israel's sin and weakness sought to make atonement for his people asking that God would "please forgive their sin—but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written" (Exodus 32:32 NIV).
I can only trust that God will show me the favor he revealed to Moses in response, by reminding him that it is not Moses who can make atonement and returning Moses to his renewed mission, to turn what is written on the Tablets of Stone into The Word written on the human heart. After all, we are given a gift Moses was denied. We can gaze upon the very face of God and it is Jesus.
Blessings! Terry
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