Wanted to share these two videos about grace that were shared with me today. This is so good!!!!
This will be my last post for a while.
What I am about to share is true. It really happened. It is not the only encounter I’ve ever had with God, but it is the one that changed my life. I will not go into details or try to prove this experience. You can choose for yourself whether you believe my testimony.
Around the age of 10 or 11 I had a conversation with God. He revealed Himself to me and He spoke to me and answered many questions I had. I don’t remember all that took place or all that we talked about or the span of time this happened in. It could have been days or it could have been months. I don’t remember.
One of the parts of our conversation I do remember and I want to share here is when I asked Him why He didn’t love everyone. He told me, oh no David, I love everybody, but not everybody loves me. Then He allowed me to experience what I could take in of His love for the whole world. He really does love each and every one of us completely. He also told me that the fear of death comes from the fear of being alone and took away a tormenting fear I had of death reassuring me by revealing to me I am never alone and will never be alone.
When God allowed me to experience His love for the whole world I was overwhelmed with His love. I asked Him, how can anyone not love you? You are so wonderful? I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t understand why everyone in the whole world didn’t run to Him and embrace Him and live in this place of joy and love with Him. Then He told me that the reason people don’t love Him is because they don’t believe He is really there.
It is not that He hides from us. It is not that He doesn’t reach out to us. It is that we refuse to believe He is really there. Instead we believe what other people tell us. We fail to know God and to live in the knowledge of the truth of His presence because we put our faith in the minds and doubts of men.
God really does love you and He is very near you all the time.
We each can choose to believe this, the true reality or we can choose to believe what a world without faith that doesn’t know God would have each of us to believe.
That’s all I wanted to share.
I hope God uses this to encourage all of you who believe. We are all family.
Blessings,
- Dave
Posted in Experiences | Tagged Conversation with God | 1 Comment »
Today I had a little heart to heart talk with my oldest daughter about what I believe is the single biggest thing we struggle with as human beings. C.S. Lewis wrote at length about it (which I have been meaning to read), the pages of the Bible are soaked with it and it is at the back of every human beings mind in some form or fashion. I am referring to the uncomfortable reality of pain.
I remember at very young age being exposed just enough to the Bible (I believe it was 1st Peter), that I had a built in reaction that caused me to shy away from having anything to do with it. I think much of the reason most people avoid God is because we don’t want to face pain, because we are all too acutely aware of its presence. As we get older we do our best to learn to acclimate to it the best we can. People use different techniques to deal with it or process it. Some people have to learn to do this allot more than others.
Perhaps at its worst is witnessing pain in those you love dearly.
First, to find where pain began for us we can look back at what the Bible says happened. Pain began with a broken relationship founded on a lack of trust. Then there was a separation and a death that resulted in that separation. Adam and Eve through their actions separated themselves from the source of life and love and in doing so invited death and pain into their lives.
We see these same things repeated over and over down through time ringing ever present in our own time and in our own individual lives. We live in a reality of death and pain and as a defensive mechanism, when we are hurt we either externalize it by hurting back or we internalize it allowing the hurt to define and hurt us in some big or small way.
So then an inescapable reality is that hurt begets hurt.
The problem wouldn’t be so terribly significant if it didn’t have such a long shelf life. When we get hurt, the reality is that it effects us all our lives. Cutting words, scarred or dysfunctioning bodies, the death of a loved one. As you grow older life begins to take its toll on even the most resilient and most well prepared. Some simply cannot handle it and resort to immersing themselves as deep as they can go into drugs, fantasies or even suicide or homicide.
What do you do when the pain feels like it is more than you can bare?
This is what was going through my head today as I began speaking with my daughter. How do I tell her to process pain?
For me, the most important thing to realize is that no matter how bad the pain is, it needs to be understood that it comes from other pain. If someone says a cutting or hateful thing or does something terrible to you or someone you love, the only way you can ever get passed this is to be able to find an attitude of compassion toward that person or persons for the hurt they caused and the only way to do that is to realize that the hurt they cause is the result of a cycle of hurt that exists in this fallen (hurt filled) world. Some people are so twisted and lost that they embrace the darkness of indifference and pain and others fall victim to it to varying degrees out of despair or hopelessness or frustration. I believe there is a part of each of us (the part that does not want to feel pain anymore) that is there somewhere in the back of our mind that saying, shelve love, all it does is cause you pain. Then there is another part that wants to believe in love, but can’t find the strength.
So is there any good news in all of this?
Thank God there is!
The Bible tells us that God foreknew from the foundation of the world what would happen and in time, became a man and took the sins (hurt) of the world upon Himself to restore the relationship lost in the beginning. That God was in Jesus reconciling the world to Himself not counting our sins against us and inviting us into this place of reconciliation and grace. Not only that, but He gives us the gift of His indwelling Spirit; that is, perfect love itself making its home in our hearts.
Through the truth of God’s love for us, we can face our pain, our failures, our hurts and the hurts of others with grace and compassion. We don’t have to accept the definition of what the world says about us or what our pain says about us or our performance says about us. We have the gift of God’s indwelling presence to testify to us what God says about us and not only us but those around us.
Yes there will continue to be hurt in this world until God makes all things new, but we no longer have to be defined by the perceptions and limitations of a broken and lost world. We have a perfect love from our Savior sent from God who has graciously called us out of darkness into His marvelous Light.
So when someone says something that hurts you, let God’s compassion be the lens which you see them through.
When struggles and failures come, let the reality of God’s unwavering and unconditional love and forgiveness already given to you, be the reality in which you see yourself.
When uncertainty brings questions and misgivings, let them give way to relentless trust in your Heavenly Father who will freely give you all things because it is His good pleasure to do so.
“With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.
God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that.
The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us.
Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.
But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!
So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!
This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike “What’s next, Papa?” God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us—an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!
That’s why I don’t think there’s any comparison between the present hard times and the coming good times. The created world itself can hardly wait for what’s coming next. Everything in creation is being more or less held back. God reins it in until both creation and all the creatures are ready and can be released at the same moment into the glorious times ahead. Meanwhile, the joyful anticipation deepens.
All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs. But it’s not only around us; it’s within us. The Spirit of God is arousing us within. We’re also feeling the birth pangs. These sterile and barren bodies of ours are yearning for full deliverance. That is why waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.
Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. That’s why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.
God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in him. After God made that decision of what his children should be like, he followed it up by calling people by name. After he called them by name, he set them on a solid basis with himself. And then, after getting them established, he stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he had begun.
So, what do you think? With God on our side like this, how can we lose? If God didn’t hesitate to put everything on the line for us, embracing our condition and exposing himself to the worst by sending his own Son, is there anything else he wouldn’t gladly and freely do for us? And who would dare tangle with God by messing with one of God’s chosen? Who would dare even to point a finger? The One who died for us—who was raised to life for us!—is in the presence of God at this very moment sticking up for us. Do you think anyone is going to be able to drive a wedge between us and Christ’s love for us? There is no way! Not trouble, not hard times, not hatred, not hunger, not homelessness, not bullying threats, not backstabbing, not even the worst sins listed in Scripture:
They kill us in cold blood because they hate you.
We’re sitting ducks; they pick us off one by one.
None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.”
- Romans 8:1-39 (The Message)
Posted in Thoughts | Tagged compassion, hurt, pain | Leave a Comment »
I remember a while back, listening to Jesus in the Gospels on the Bible I have on CD. As I listened the things he said got heavier and heavier.
He starts out in the Gospels and we identify with Him and feel we can live it. Then He begins incrementally telling us what it means to be a true follower of Him.
By the end of the CD and that day it felt like the weight of the world was crushing down on me. I saw what Jesus said and maybe, maybe when I was a kid I might have been naïve enough to believe I could live up to it, but now having lived awhile it is so incredibly obvious. There is absolutely no way to do it.
Yet we see Jesus in the Gospels preaching ultimately the impossible for us and yet living it out. In the end all of his disciples forsook him. They couldn’t even stay awake with him in the garden in His darkest hour knowing what was to come.
Some who want to hang on to our ability to be the perfect disciples of Jesus point to John with Jesus’ mother at the cross. They say he didn’t forsake him. John though was merely acting in love and was not being a true disciple. Had he been a true disciple (disciplined follower) he would have insisted on being crucified along with Jesus. In their own ways they all scattered in the end. Even the one Jesus called as the lead disciple. Peter when put on the spot, when it was crunch time, he denied him. Three times even cursing saying he did not know the man.
Even for Jesus’ very own disciples, their best turned out in the end to not be good enough.
When we step back and look at it in a panoramic view, we see that it wasn’t about simply a failure and then the disciples getting up from the failure. It was a demonstration of man’s total failure and God in flesh and blood doing and living what we could not do and live for ourselves.
When we lose that humility. That knowing of who we really are. That knowing that we are not simply dependent on the help of God. We are completely at God’s mercy and completely and utterly helpless without His accomplishment for us on our behalf, then we go back and have to live it over again. We have to be decimated by our failures and crushed by the weight of our own short comings. Our own, “I tell you I do not know the man” moments.
Jesus didn’t come to rely on the will of men, He came to do the will of God. The will of God was to set right once and for all everything man had made wrong. He came to make a new covenant, but this time not with man, but with Himself. God purposed to reconcile the whole world to Himself through Jesus (doing what we could never do for ourselves), remembering our sins no more and offering to all mankind the free gift of reconciliation.
We stood in a court where God was the judge and satan was the accuser. We stood guilty and condemned and God stepped down, took off His courtly robe and took the consequences of all our failures for us. Then the judged looked at us and said “acquitted of all charges” and we never have to go into that court room again.
To ever go and plead our case again, saying “I am a good disciple, I live a good life, I carry my cross” is to disregard everything Jesus already did for us. It’s as if we disown ourselves from Him or say, its not enough Jesus. God needs more than what you did.
If there is to be repentance in the lives of Christians, let it be a repentance from dead works, of thinking we can add to what God has already done. If there is ever to be any fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, kindness, gentleness, self control) it won’t come from our doing, but our trusting in what God has already done. That is why it says we must enter in by faith. We must really believe that Jesus was and is enough. We can never find the gift of God’s life while we are still laboring to fix our own.
If we truly enter in by faith though, if we believe we are reconciled, if we trust God completely and unconditionally loves us and accepts us because of Jesus having already accomplished EVERYTHING necessary for our right standing with God, then we can have peace, we can find grace (unmerited favor) and begin loving each other and ourselves not because of who we are, but inspite of who we are just as God in Jesus has loved us. We can find a heart for true holiness because His love continually touches our hearts keeping us soft and tender hearted toward one another, forgiving one another just as God has forgiven us.
Posted in Meditations | Tagged dead works, repentance, works | 2 Comments »
This is a new song I wrote. About half way through you can hear a bird that flew up next to the window outside and began singing with me.
Posted in Music | Tagged justified | 1 Comment »
If you have ever been to church or Sunday school, then more than likely at some point you heard the story of Abraham and Sarah and the promise of a child.
The story goes like this. Abraham and Sarah are not able to have a baby. Sarah is long since past her years when she could have gotten pregnant. God shows up one day and tells Abraham He is going to give them a child and makes all sorts of promises to Abraham. Sarah laughs knowing she is too old to get pregnant.
Time goes by and Sarah starts thinking, since she is too old to have a baby, if she let Abraham sleep with her maid servant then he could get her pregnant and since it would be under the same household, then technically God’s promise would be fulfilled. In other words, Sarah doubts God’s promise and decides she is going to help God out.
Well after her maid servant has the child, a little later on, guess what happens. Yep, Sarah gets pregnant. Then they eventually have a big family squabble and the maid servant and her child are forced to leave.
So what’s the point of the story? While there are a number of lessons we could all learn from this, one of the primary lessons is Sarah doubted God’s promise and it caused all sorts of trouble. In fact we are still having this same family squabble going on today between Israelis and Arabs. Of course they each have their versions of the story, but that is beside the point.
The lesson we all can learn from this is a lesson in faith. Instead of this being some isolated ancient incident, we find that this story rings true in our own stories.
For Christians this story holds a very special meaning and we should be the first ones who catch on to it. Unfortunately that is not the case many times, because despite being a Christian we still have our human nature. You know that nature we inherited from our grandparents Adam and Eve. The one that wants to control the situation, that doesn’t want to have to rely on God where when we are presented with an opportunity where we don’t have to, we are usually bound to take it.
So how does this story relate to modern Christianity? Well, it relates all too well. Let me give a series of events we as Christians can relate to that I think helps explain:
1. We are born and we start out knowing nothing.
2. One day we go to church, we are told we are sinners and we need a Saviour and Jesus is the Saviour and if we accept what He did for us then we are set right with God. In other words, we believe (have faith in God and Jesus’ promise) that God saves us and has done everything necessary to set us right with Him and get us home to Him in eternity. From this “entering into God’s grace through faith” we begin to experience love, joy, peace, kindness, gentleness, self control, etc…
3. After a short while, we begin to notice some problems. We begin seeing the sin issue is not cured, we still have sin in our life, maybe not as much and even though we don’t want to sin we still do, so the problem is still there. Then we have our well meaning Christian friends who say, “oh believing is not enough, you have to live a certain way.”
We then honestly believe that well, they have a point and even have Bible Scriptures they have so handily interpreted for us that support their position. So wouldn’t you know it, we find ourselves in the same position as Sarah was in thousands of years ago. Do we believe God’s initial promise or do we take a safer route and hedge our bet and take at least some of our eggs out of that faith alone basket?
4. So then we assume God is going to need some help in this situation. After all, we see the sin problem and we want things to work out. It’s not like we don’t love God, on the contrary we love Him so much that we want to not assume that He is really as loving and as gracious as we first thought He was. We shouldn’t assume His Spirit will lead us all the time. Look at all the things wrong with this world and even in our own nature. We can’t expect God to do everything.
5. So we change our position (with the most noble of intentions mind you just like Sarah did). God needs help so we are going to help Him. Instead of believing in and telling others the good news we were first introduced to and our hearts embraced, we start adding some caveats. Now you need to clean up your act before accepting Jesus as your Saviour. Now you need to give up “x” or be “y” before God will give you any of the gifts of the Holy Spirit or to even stay saved. Oh and as far as God sanctifying you (making you more holy), well He doesn’t actually do that. You have to make yourself holy and God will help you. Oh and if you fail, that’s your fault because God already gave you the ability.
6. As we go down this road, more and more rules, regulations and fine code get added to the list. We smash our finger swinging a hammer and use a four letter word. We need to repent and get right with God. We are “a” denomination and you are “b” denomination. They need to repent and get right with God. We lose our temper, drink a beer, smoke a cigarette, voted Democratic, missed church, didn’t tithe, looked too long at that boy or girl in the bathing suit when we were swimming, etc… And suddenly we find ourselves disconnected from God and continually trying to repent, but things getting harder and harder to where we begin to despair. Also the devil increasingly gets credited for more and more influence in one’s life to the point where we begin believing there is a devil hiding around every corner and God seems like He is off in the distance watching to see if we pass the obstacle course.
7. Eventually we begin to hide our sins pretending in public we are not sinners or we start grading on a sin curve seeing ourselves as better than some and not as good as others. The one’s that seem like they are the most perfect end up being our leaders and when they end up falling off the pedestal we have them on, we are left in disbelief wondering how this could happen.
8. Many times we adopt just enough “grace and faith” belief to help us along our way and get us back to our religious effort. We look at how hard we tried and that consoles us when we do something wrong. So then those of us who think we perform the best and winning God’s approval end up having very little grace about us. It turns into, God has just enough grace for people who perform to this standard and we move that standard around when we have to so we are meeting it.
9. We damage our relationships with each other and fight over doctrinal differences, who’s right and who’s wrong, we become professional fault finders in others and in our selves, we start out with a desire to live for God out of love and gratitude and somewhere along the way we find ourselves down a dead end road.
This is not some made up story, but has been my own story over the years. The only thing that has saved me from this vicious cycle and the feelings of condemnation it produces is grace. The faith I first believed, without all the extra baggage added on. Simple trusting faith that God has made things right and will make things right and all I have to do is trust Him. And you know what, I find myself growing ever so slowly. Growing in grace and love. Able to love people who before I found unlovable. I still sin of course. Everyday. Some ways I notice and some I may never notice. I’m growing in love though and by the grace of God I trust I’ll be just fine and you will too.
Thanks for reading,
- Dave
Posted in Experiences | Tagged Abraham Sarah, faith | Leave a Comment »
A new song I wrote.
http://smolderingwick.bandcamp.com/track/unfailing-arms-of-grace
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged unfailing arms of grace | Leave a Comment »
- Me and my wife Tricia both love to watch storms as they blow in and I wanted to write a song about watching them. This song was the result. – Dave
Posted in Music | Tagged A Love That Lasts Forever | 1 Comment »
What is Truth?
“What is truth?” Pilate asked this question to Jesus about 2000 years ago. I think everyone who has ever done any searching in life has asked this question in some form or fashion. In fact the searching itself is the question. It is a question that turns out to be so fundamental to everything in life and here we find it on the lips of a Roman asking it to the one guy we believe, if anyone does, will have the answer. For those who read the Bible and have ever wrestled with this passage, if you are like me, time slows every time we hear the question waiting to see what Jesus’ response will be even if we already know what Jesus is going to say.
Now I don’t know how you experience the Bible when you read it, but I do know people experience it all sorts of ways, from the hard core atheist who thinks they are reading a myth, to the Hyper-Charismatic who thinks every word or even syllable could have some supernatural manifestation to it where it requires no context and can be applied endlessly to any number of different situations depending on the circumstance and feeling. I’m not judging either side here; I am just giving a contrast and explaining that people see things differently, some times dramatically so. It’s called subjectivity and everything we know in this world is caught up in it. I could theorize and speculate for the rest of my life, what Pilate was thinking and Jesus was trying to tell him and still might not ever come to the whole truth of the matter. Maybe Pilate said it mockingly, maybe he said it sincerely, maybe he said it in disgust implying the uselessness of truth, maybe he was trying to reasonably suggest to Jesus that he give up his own cause because his own people had turned on him even though he had done nothing to deserve it, maybe God compelled him to say it and it wasn’t Pilate’s original thought at all. I have my ideas and I will share them, but the question he asks is one that I think speaks for every person in the world in some way or another.
So what is truth? Do I find the answer by tracing the original Greek meaning of the word in a Biblical Concordance or Dictionary? Is the truth Jesus talking about revealed through knowing the historical and cultural context to where if I can somehow fully put myself there then I will know what he was talking about? How exactly am I suppose to define this truth? Is it something only God can reveal that I am helpless to discover on my own?
Every question any of us ever have about life, each other and ultimately God is wrapped up in this question Pilate asked Jesus and Jesus’ prior statement that provoked this question is somewhat haunting. If I am on Jesus’ side then I am on the side of truth and if I am not on Jesus’ side then I am not. So how do you know if you are on the side of truth if you are not sure what truth is? How do I even know that is truly what Jesus said? Can I trust the Bible? Can I trust that the early manuscripts were truly accurate? Can I trust the translation of those manuscripts into the English language? Can I trust my own ability to find the truth based on my own subjective understanding of these writings?
You see how these questions can snowball on a person and lead to thousands more and no answer seems to completely suffice. One doesn’t have to look far to see this question in various ways being something that Jesus’ followers struggled with all through Jesus’ life on earth, his death and long after his resurrection and continues to the present day.
One of the reasons I am not a fan of sweeping dogmatic teachings is that, while they do provide a sense of comfort to the person who believes them, they also claim a sort of inerrancy in interpretation that ends up demonizing opposing interpretations which I find both in the Bible and in life can blind people from seeing the truth in a situation. One of the things I see happening in the Bible is that there were a group of Jews that were dogmatic Jews and that dogma was the vehicle they used to reject Jesus, try him as a heretic and ultimately crucify him. Many times in history where you have a group of people who are certain they are right and everyone else is wrong, they all too often end up doing some pretty terrible things. When Christianity became legalized inRomeand eventually became the state religion, they eventually ended up becoming hyper dogmatic and killing off thousands upon thousands of groups of people who did not comply with church orthodoxy. Even hundreds of years later when Christians came toAmericato flee religious persecution, the dogmatism and things that go along with it did not cease. If you look throughout history you can see how dogmatic religious and political beliefs were the fuel behind many wars and conflicts. Is this the truth Jesus was speaking about? Being convinced you are right and calling it the Holy Spirit?
We as people and in light of what Jesus said, especially we Christians are not at all comfortable with the idea of not knowing for sure we are on the side of truth and reasonably so. Our perception of truth (and being on the right side of it) is after all what gives everything in our life meaning and without it everything becomes meaningless. So how do I find truth? Am I better informed than Pilate was? Sure I have more information to choose from, but that just makes the decision that much more complex. How do I decide what is true and what isn’t? Do I abandon everything I can’t see with my own eyes or can’t be proven in a scientific laboratory? I know there are many who have done just that. There are scores more of those though who have believed faithfully in God and put their faith in others to communicate the truth of God to them for better or worse. There are also those who believe in a cause such as saving the earth, gay rights, right to life, the right to bear arms, patriotism, protecting the spotted owl, etc. People look and find meaning in all sorts of things and when it is stripped down to its most basic common denominator it is that all of these people feel like their cause is just and is on the side of truth. Even as I write this I am inclined to believe that the fact that I am willing to see the subjectivity in the perception we have as human beings means that I am on the side of the truth. However, seeing as I am also subjective in my understanding, I must inevitably concede that I too am limited in my understanding and can only see things from a certain angle, my angle.
So if I am at the mercy of my own limited understanding and comprehension, how am I ever going to have any reassurance of finding the truth or being on the right side of it?
The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis is about the consequences of believing the wrong thing. Eve believed what the Serpent told her instead of what Adam said God told him was true and Adam chose to believe her instead of what God told him and it had dire consequences for both of them. The Old Testament is full of stories of how the nation ofIsraelcontinually believed the wrong things and it never failed to result in the consequences of judgment. Jesus’ harshest words were reserved for people who refused to believe and acknowledge that he represented the truth in his words and actions.
What about outside the scope of Biblical text? The Romans believed in the greatness of the Roman Empire, but theRoman Empireeventually fell. The Nation of Israel believed they were God’s chosen people, but their temple and consequentially their identity as God’s favored people was destroyed in 70 AD. The first 300 years of Christianity was hardly a victorious time period for Christians. Think about that for a minute, 300 years is a very long time. They were constantly under the threat of death, upstaged year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation by Paganism andRome. Like the Israelites in bondage inEgypthundreds of years before them, Christians were born, lived and died in a faith that had become synonymous with persecution and martyrdom with no hope of that ever changing. Because of this, unfortunately pride became a central motivating factor among many Christians where if they denied their Christian faith to avoid a cruel, torturous death, they brought shame to themselves and their families in the Christian community.
In more recent history, Hitler believed his own version of truth and we know what resulted from that. No doubt there must have been Germans and those under German occupation asking the same question that Pilate asked so many years before them, “What is truth?” What about the millions of Russians under Stalin’s rein whose family members suddenly disappeared never to be heard from again with no explanations and no hope of a better life without fear under a better government. Surely there were those who asked themselves, like the people before them, “What is truth?”
In my generation, living in the most prosperous and blessed nation in the world, things are not even in the same ballpark as they were for the countless people who have come before me whose lives were marked with tragedy and despair. This brings up another question that hits close to home. Why them and not me? Why am I the one born to privilege and liberty and they had to live lives of suffering and oppression under tyrannical rulers and horrible circumstances? Yet as far as we have come as a society built on liberty and a government by the people, the question still persists. With every devastating natural disaster, with every wrong we see in the world that takes place, the question reverberates down through history into our lives, ringing louder as we each get older. What is truth?
In my own subjective opinion, I think Pilate was probably thinking along these lines when he asked Jesus that question. I think he saw Jesus as someone advocating a values system, (a set of truths), but from Pilate’s perspective, the kind of truth this trouble making rabbi was espousing was outgunned and outmatched in every way imaginable. To me Pilate was questioning (perhaps even in a sarcastic manner) the value of Jesus’ religious truth altogether. After all, look at where it had gotten him. We see this philosophy even today where the world many times will tell us not to be too idealistic. We live in a world full of compromise and those who refuse to compromise and tow the line of the common cause, end up getting put out of the car or worse.
What I think we find in society and in each of our lives is that to whatever degree we accept hopelessness and despair or the status quo of the reality that the world presents us with is marked by what we value and is seen in the way we live our lives. For example, the third world dictator who values power and control above all else and kills his own people when it serves to further what he values, has little or no use for the kind of values (truth) Jesus died for.
In an interesting twist to the story, at one point Pilate in order to prove his point of his version of the truth being superior to Jesus’ version of the truth, popped off to Jesus, don’t you realize I have the power to have you crucified or set you free? Jesus responded, you have no power except that which is given you from above. To which Pilate began from that point on trying to free Jesus. It seems Pilate recognized Jesus’ comeback was an intelligent and ominous one and by that also suddenly realized the situation to be a great deal more serious than he was at first willing to concede. Up until that response from Jesus, Pilate probably thought this was nothing more than another person who had ticked off the Jewish religious crowd that he was responsible for deal with, and keeping in check.
For Pilate now it seems this man Jesus is far more than that and he is caught in the middle so he begins trying to free Jesus, after all, who wants the spiritual world targeting you for retribution. So Pilate in my opinion had some sense of supernatural fear after all and did not acquiesce to the mob of Jews’ demands to have Jesus crucified until Jesus told him that the greater sin rested on them. Pilate then washed his hands as a sort of personal judgment against the mob of Jews for forcing his hand in the matter and maybe to try and make his own conscience feel better.
To me this illustrates in a very human way that deep inside most of us, when we are forced to confront it, we know that the truth that the world presents us with ultimately must give way to a greater truth which is that this world as we know it and our lives in it are temporary and that what is eternal is what truly matters. You can have all the money, power, fame and influence in the world and yet you cannot escape the reality of death.
God might seem like an insignificant, trivial or even unknowable aspect to this life for many, but as Pilate abruptly discovered, it does not decrease His paramount importance. For some, truth is hopeless and when we die we cease to exist; for them there simply is no God, heaven or hell, only this present life. For others God is very real and there are a lot of scary versions of Him even within the Christian faith. So then, we are faced with Eve’s dilemma once again within each of our lives. What do we decide as an individual to believe to be true and what are the consequences of believing and acting upon that belief?
To put it simply…“What is truth?”
Posted in Thoughts | Tagged Pilate, truth, what is truth? | 1 Comment »
This letter starts out as a message of comfort. It is similar to how when a parent has corrected a child and then the child gets discouraged or despairing because of the painfulness of the correction that they begin to doubt the sincerity of the love of the parent.
Paul is reassuring them of not only his love, but God’s unwavering love for them. He is adamantly pointing out to them that their salvation and standing with God is permanent. He had promised to go see them, but something had came up and they interpreted that (because they were already feeling uncertain about the genuineness of Paul’s care for them) as Paul not really caring . Paul states that his real reason was to spare them and that he was actually acting out of love by not coming to see them as he had promised.
He goes so far to say that they are “sealed” by God’s Spirit. Seals were used in that time in official documents to keep the contents from being tampered with until the document arrived at its destination.
Overall he is reaffirming their own faith and saying it is God that saved them and will keep them.
The “all God’s promises are Yes and Amen” part is simply saying when God makes up his mind, when He promises something, He keeps His promise.
He made promises to Abraham, Noah, David, Solomon, etc… and despite whatever happened God kept His promise. He didn’t look at sins, failures, rebellion, etc. and say, “no I think I have changed my mind.” Once God promises something, then it is done and He keeps His promise regardless of what we do. In fact He will make sure we do what He wants us to do in order for the promise to be fulfilled.
We may have Hagar episodes that delay the promise, but the promise is immutable and God is faithful to keep it.
God saved the Christians in Corinth in spite of all that was going on in their lives and in the community and it was God who would keep them through it all, for better or worse. Why? Because God keeps His promises.
Most important point?
God has “promised” to give eternal life to all who believe in His Son Jesus and despite what anyone might try and say otherwise, God always keeps his promises.
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