The Danger of Knowing

God planted two trees in the Garden of Eden.
The Tree of Knowledge, by which men could know both good and evil, and in that way, be like God and
The Tree of Life, by whose fruit man could live forever.

Men would only be allowed to eat from one of them, and God told Adam which He recommended.
Adam and Eve, however, ignored God.
They chose the Tree of Knowledge.

It sounded good, the knowing, but it didn't work out very well.
The problem is this--only in innocence can we live forever with God.
And, once we have known evil, God must cast us out.
And so, He did.

Now, however, that we have taken from the first tree, we still long for the second. We were made, after all, for everlasting communion with God.
But flaming swords block our path, swords that only Jesus Christ, by His triumphal death, could part.
That is the punishment of Eden.

And it is still true.
The wrong knowledge leads me into sin and withholds life.
Do I need to learn, to know?
Yes, but as in so much else, I must be careful of what I learn.
I will have to live with it for the rest of my life.

...but God did say, "You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die."--Genesis 3:3

Blood on our Hands

You bred it.
You birthed it.
You fed it.
And now you are going to have to kill it.
God says so.

When a Hebrew penitent came to the temple under the old sacficicial system, the priest prayed over the lamb he'd brought, but he handed the knife to the penitent. An obedient Hebrew cut the throat of his own animal  himself.

At the moment of the animal's death, two things happened.
First, the Hebrew did the deed.  He was full of blood from it. He knew the stench of it. He expended the effort to raise it, to bring it, and to kill it in the name of God.
Second, he was deprived of it. One of the best of his flock, that animal could have fed his family, but now it would not.

Today, even after Jesus' final blood sacrifice, we do not escape that God requires the same from us.

What we bring to the temple looks quite different, but is often no less messy or painful.
And it still has the same two components.

We bring the sacrifice of doing what we do not want to do.
And we bring the sacrifice of not doing what we desire.
They are not the same thing.
One does not substitute for the other.

The sacrifice of doing.
And the sacrifice of doing without.

When any of you brings an offering to the Lord, bring as your offering an animal from the herd or the flock... He is to lay his hand on the head of the burnt offering, and it will be accepted on his behalf to make atonement for him. He is to slaughter the young bull before the Lord...Leviticus 1:2-5

The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences for acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!--Hebrews 9:13-14

The Howling Dark of Sin and Chris Tomlin's Pale Grace

Got grace?
Well, of course I do, silly.
I am set free by it, washed in the blood of the lamb. I am saved, Saved, SAVED!
And grace is amazing.
John Newton says so.
Chris Tomlin says so.

But John knew something Chris appears to want to forget.
Grace needs sin.
Always.
Always.
The crime. The betrayal.
The howl of deep hurt forcing itself to be heard from torn heart of the person, and of the God, I said I loved, said I would never forsake.
And then did.
And I have to listen to it.
Ragged. Raw. Unrelenting.
And I am responsible. Only me.
I did it on purpose, because I wanted to, because I thought myself more important.

That is why I need grace.

Amazing Grace is not a hymn. John Newton did not sing it.
He wrote and recited it with his congregation as a statement of wretchedness.
The grace he described covered the sin because it could not make it disappear.

The minute we forget the sin, we can forget the grace, too.
We do not need it any more.

If we want to sing about grace, we'd do well to remember the sin that made it necessary.

Look into the horror.
You will need to be bold, but it's worth it, because that is the only place you will find real grace.

Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find help in time of need.-Hebrews 4:16

When More is Less

Life is not random.
I'm just coming off two and a half weeks of flu and, whenever something hits that hard, I wonder why.
And that it should come now, at the beginning of a new year, at precisely the time when I'm setting goals and gearing up, well...I wonder doubly.
It is only now, as the illness begins to release its hold, that I start to get a glimpse.

For the first time in long memory, my whole life had to stop.
I was too sick to do anything, go anywhere, even talk to anyone.
I didn't clean, or shop, or cook, or go to the gym.
I didn't write.

I sat. I stared. If I felt halfway decent, I read a book.
And I thought.
Why?

Now, at nearly the end  of it, I think I know.
For the last years, I have told God I wanted more.
More of His intended life, more from my life in the body of Christ, more of Him.
And, to that end, I have picked up and put down goals and activities.
I have read and studied.
I have kept my eyes open and attentive.
I have prayed.

But I missed what was happening.
I didn't see the cage begin to turn, to pick up speed, to whir and rush.
I didn't see that I was in it.

Carried in a flood of sacrificial activity. Lost in the constant whoosh of wind.

Then it stopped. It had to. I had no choice.
I said no. And no again. And again.
Until nothing was left.
And I found it.
I found His hand.
Reaching from the emptied place.
Where He'd always waited.
And it was full of the more.

Thank you, God, for the flu.
For it is: Do ,and do, do and do, rule on rule, rule on rule, a little here, a little there...God will speak to His people, but they would not listen.  Isaiah 28:10-12

Be still and know that I am God.--Psalm 46:10

And I'm not the only one whose new year has brought this lesson.
See Sandra Heska King's How Clutter Makes Us Fat

In the Palm of Your Hand

You already have it, you know.
The world in the palm in your hand.
You have God and God has you. You are safe in His arms for all eternity. What more could you want?
Plenty, as it turns out.

There are two ways to live a Christian life:
The first is to experience salvation and live in the freedom of it.
The second is harder. It is the way of sacrifice:

 If I do not intentionally sacrifice, that is, eschew the things of this world I could otherwise enjoy without sinning, I will live a materially-based Christian life.
I will still go to heaven, and while I'm waiting, will enjoy the world, but I will miss something else.
If I intentionally sacrifice what comes naturally to my physical body, I am more likely to attain a full, spiritual relationship with my God.

Abraham had to offer God Ishmael before he was given Isaac.
I have to do the same.
If you would be my disciple, you must deny yourself...--Matthew 16:24

More is required of a disciple than of a believer, or even of a follower and, if I want to be one, I have to deny myself. Becoming a disciple requires discipline.
I cannot pray my way into this. It requires action. My action.
Jesus has already saved me. Now, He has shown me my part.

So, we have the world in the palm of our hand.
Now, it is for us to turn our hand over and dump it out.
In doing so, we are only making room for the better part.

Hit Me

So I'm playing blackjack and I'm dealt 15 points.
The smart money says that I take another card, that 15 points will probably not be enough to win.
But the next card might be another seven, or it might be a a jack.
And I would lose.
I scratch my head and hesitate.
I don't know what will happen next. I wait. I think. I ask "What if...?" until finally I squeak out, "Hit me."
And the dealer does.

Fact is, we don't know what will happen next. 
Not in cards, not  in life.

We are always looking at the hand we are dealt today, looking at the decisions we must make, and determine whether to hit or hold based on only part of the information we need.
I don't like that.
In fact, I like it much less in life than I do in an inconsequential game of cards.
Life brings much, much higher stakes.

But it's OK.
I don't have to know the next card. 
God knows it.
And because he does, we don't have to hedge our bets.

When Abraham went to settle in Gerar, he tried to hedge.
He told the king that his wife was really his sister so that they wouldn't get thrown out.
He already had 17 or 18 points in his hand, but he wanted to win, no matter what.
"Hit me," he said.
Only the next card was the king of hearts.
Abimilech took a fancy to Sarah, thinking her single.
Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

However, unlike Abe, Abimilech did not try to guess the next card.
He, in this situation, displayed more trust in God than Abe, and God rewarded him by watching his back.
Abimilech, looking at his hand, held, like he was supposed to do.
And God protected him from the sin he might have otherwise committed.

And God said to him, Yes, I know that you did this in the integrity of your heart, for I prevented you from sinning against me, therefore I suffered you not to touch her.--Genesis 20:6

We don't have to know the next card the dealer will slide off the pack.
We don't have to agonize over every decision.
There are rules, and we just have to follow them and trust God to take care of us in whatever He deals.
Hit or hold,  win or bust, the point is not the game itself--it is how we get to the end of it.

The Fool Who Follows Him...

Take a close look. I thought this was clever at first. The Last Supper, but rather than Christ and His disciples, well-known scientists-- Galileo Galilei, Marie Curie, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Stephen Hawking, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Thomas Edison, Aristotle, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins and Charles Darwin.

Harmless.  Even funny. But then I saw.

Not the heresy of it, although there is that component.  
It's the danger of it. Not because it's a joke, but because it isn't.

My former amusement dies to a choke, a strangle. I can't laugh at this because I live with it every day, as does every single smart person God made.
Suddenly, I get scared. Really scared.

This is the problem:
Smart people get used to being right.
They do. 
They get used to it because they often are, or sound like it. They know the right arguments, the pertinent facts, the scientific proofs. Most of them don't mean to lie or to deceive. Smart people are sincerely trying to help others understand. They are teachers, doctors, researchers, philosophers, scientists....and pastors. They are the best of us, aren't they? We go to them when we want to learn, want to improve, want to get well. 

But they have a problem. Us.
Because we believe smart people so completely, we have given them permission to believe themselves. 
We have given them license to ignore their own capacity for self-deception.
We ignore, and let thus let them ignore, their own humanity.

Oh sure, we all say no one is perfect, that we're all only human, and screw up, but then don't universally apply what we acknowledge to be universal frailty.
We permit some people to be more perfect than others.
We permit some people to be like God.

And that is what this picture is really about. 

Look again. 
Each of these men and women used their intelligence to figure out something important, and I am grateful for that. 
But some one of them also believed, and seemed to have convinced some of us, that their ability to figure stuff out makes them so special as to discount their own vast capacity for being wrong.
And this makes the smartest of us also the most dangerous. 
Listen to them, but don't trust them.

It is easy to deceive a really smart person when the deception involves their own perfection. 
They will believe in their own rightness almost every time.
After all, they're smart, aren't they?

The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways, but the folly of fools is deception.--Proverbs 14:8