Out of the Dark ...

Gloria Estefan had a very inspiring song she used to sing entitled “Coming Out of the Dark”.  I believe she wrote it after a fairly serious car accident / personal tragedy in her life.  From time to time I still hear the powerful chorus repeating in my head and I wonder to myself, are we Christians ready to finally come out of the dark?  Are we ready to depart from spiritual Babylon and leave her to her own condemnation?

In order to answer this question the first thing you need to do is separate criticism from counsel.  Maligning motives, negative language associated with inner thoughts and feelings, tearing something down, - these are all forms of criticism and tend to inspire a defensive response in the listener.  It should not be confused with statements of fact, or even opinion, that run counter to traditional thinking. 

Telling someone they are “doing it wrong” is not the same as telling someone “they are bad”.  You could be trying to tie a necktie for example, and be doing it wrong.  This can be fixed with a little advice.  Being “bad” is more of a subjective criticism and much harder to recover from.  And to carry the example a bit farther, often there is more than one way to tie a neck tie, or even recover from “being bad” so no-one who offers advices or counsel should believe they have an absolute lock on truth.

But in order to come out of the dark, I think it is important to realize how we got here, and where the dark is.  Most people associate darkness with evil, and simply believe the acts of the church members are like those of the world, therefore this is a call away from performing evil acts.  But I do not read in this text (in Revelation for those who are looking) as a call to perfection, but a call away from confusion that surrounds us.  I believe this is a call to clarity that will lead to perfection, but not the one without the other.

When you look at “the world” and “the church” the similarities are astounding.  In point of fact it is quite difficult to tell the difference between the two.  Christians that are bold enough to declare their faith seem to get caught in acts of betraying it left and right.  Christians who try to be quiet about their faith (the greater majority by far) find themselves engaged in all the “bad” behavior of their worldly counterparts, albeit seeking forgiveness for the trespasses.  Divorce rates in the church are just as high as in the world.  Drug addiction plagues both.  Alcoholism is found everywhere.  Sexual misconduct.  Judgmentalism.  In and out of the church, it looks no better.

This is the very definition of darkness.  But why is the church lingering here?  At its core, Christian churches have abandoned the idea of the “gift of Salvation”.  We have replaced the “gift of being saved from sin” with “sanctification is the work of a lifetime”.  We have replaced the simple joy of accepting the gift, with getting “ready to meet God”.  In short, we have substituted the work of surrender to God for victory over sin, with a partnership with God where we both work on our own problems.  But partnerships do NOT work.  And so Christians get up from their knees trying harder and harder, and failing more and more, until they just stop trying altogether.

We are in this darkness not because we fail in our actions, but because we fail in our thinking.  We would not be here if we finally learned what it means to surrender our will.  To give up to win, not to try harder.  To trust that God will not let us slide back into bad behavior, but longs to free us from it altogether and forever.  The relief and the peace that comes from this knowledge is the very siren call that will lead us all away from the darkness.  This is in fact the call away from confusion.  The call away from the focus on self.  It is time to relearn submission.

These days the name or term “fundamentalist” is applied to Christians with the same accuracy as the “Patriot Act” is applied to preserving our personal freedoms.  Christians have all but lost sight of their own fundamentals.  For instance, Christians the earliest variety and therefore most pure (closest to Christ) were the first group of people on earth to adopt communism.  They pooled all their wealth, sold everything they had, lived in one accord, and gave to each according their need.  Mind you, their form of communism, was built on the foundations of belief in Jesus Christ as their Savior, so it was far from Godless, but it worked, and they followed it for many years.

The first group of Christians were so disinterested in which government was in power, that they willing accepted their lot in life, even if that life was one of a slave.  They went about their duties performing them to the best of their ability, and honoring God all the day long.  They did not rebel.  They did not seek freedom of body.  They sought and found freedom of the soul.  Today’s Christians seem bent on not only being involved with Government, but literally controlling government so that they can enact an agenda that will prevent others from performing moral misdeeds, while losing complete sight of freedom of the soul.

The first group of Christians did not have extensive wardrobes.  They worked and labored for their food and lodging.  They taught those they worked with, ate with, worshipped with, and were in prison together with.  Believers were regularly put in prison for their radical beliefs, either by the established religions who did not want the competition, or by the governments who did not understand their radical beliefs.  In either case, believers did not rebel, they merely continued the work inside of the prisons they were sent.  In these conditions, can you imagine Christians trying to preserve a collection of jewelry to wear.  More than likely that would have either been sold for money to give to the poor, or been stripped away from them by their persecutors.  In either case, humility was far easier to achieve.

The first group of Christians taught with power and miracles and wonders followed their message and ministry.  Today we don’t even trust God enough to let Him conquer the sin within us, preferring to do the work ourselves.  With a record of abject failure in this regard, we have lost all belief that miracles could be worked through us.  And with our focus so bent inward, were we to have a miracle worked through us, the attention would go to us.  The glory, the credit, the honor, and the power – would be considered embodied in us, for this is our inherent nature we have yet to learn to sacrifice on God’s altar.  Until we surrender and become devoid of self, we remain ill suited for the working of miracle through us.

Yet the call remains, … “come away from her my people”.  Christ calls us from the confusion we have so surrounded ourselves with both inside and outside of our temple walls.  He calls us to the clarity that will embrace surrender.  The realization that you cannot, but God can.  The trust in God, that He will.  And the praise to God, when He does.  The abject death of self is on our horizon.  And once we experience it, we will no longer be “doing it wrong”.  We will stand apart from the masses.  We will be a light on the hill, though it will never be our light, but His light that shines within us.

I long to be a fundamentalist, who understands the fundamentals properly.  I wish to know what Salvation means.  I wish to know how to love.  I wish to know what freedom from sin is like.  I wish to know what it is like to serve with no expectations.  I wish to be immersed in the depths of Christ and completely dead to self.  I wish no more to embrace evil, but only to understand it properly so as to avoid it forever trusting in my God to save me from its bondage.  These are just a few of the fundamentals I wish to know.  For now I see only through a glass darkly, but the call remains to … “come out of the dark”.

What if God Were One of Us ...

The song asks, and then retorts, “just a slob like one of us” …  It is good for us to understand the lengths that Christ went to on our behalf, how much He was tempted like we are, suffered like we do, even died like one of us albeit He was tortured to death and eventually died of a literal broken heart.  In many ways Christ was more human than us.  But to attempt to put boundaries around Him, that would constrain Him to be no more than any one of us, is to take this attempt at understanding to a new dimension of dumb.  In point of fact, God was not just one of us, He is so much more.

Man’s natural inclination is to humanize things in order to equate to them.  Children give toys and inanimate objects character traits in a pretend world.  Adults extend this same phenomenon but under the guise of logic and reason, attempting to down-play anything they do not understand as non-existent.  Those that do not believe in Christ as a God who saves us, throw out His virgin birth, miracle based life’s work, and testimonials of all those who witnessed His physical presence after His death.  The most they are willing to acknowledge is His teachings on love and self-sacrifice, minus anything that would make Him divine.  They leave the man and throw out the God because they cannot equate to a God.

But this portrait of Christ, though inaccurate, may be less detrimental to His character and image than those who do claim to believe in His divinity and mission in saving us – yet they humanize Him to such an extent that He would tolerate and even participate in evil in its various forms.  Even some Christians are not convinced of His virgin birth, miraculous life’s work, or purported resurrection.  Christians who contemplate the possible “truth” of the Divinci Code, or the gospel of Judas or Mary, of the idea that perhaps Christ was either gay with John the Beloved, or fooling around with Mary Magdalene the prostitute (town slut).  These weak minded believers so pollute and humanize our God that they inadvertently accomplish stripping Him of any divinity more effectively than those who simply deny Him outright.

We cannot equate to a God.  Cheating and having sex is something we can equate to.  Living an entire life based on service to others, having the power of creation itself within you – but choosing to live without ever using it for your own self-interests is something we cannot equate to.  So for some, instead of admiring and aspiring to emulate Christ’s perfect example, we denigrate him with lowered expectations and weak faith.  The worst part, is that we lose His message of love, generally in favor of a guilt laden self-created message of judgment and condemnation to take its place.

It is funny how little we understand about God, about being God, or what God is like.  We think we “know” God because we read scriptures.  But scripture tells us that the chief rebel of the universe Lucifer, now Satan, never even aspired to be anything more than simply – “Like” the most high.  Satan craved the worship, power, and abilities of God, but even the 3^rd highest created being of all time so far, was smart enough to know, that the best he could ever hope to do, was to be “like” God.  He could not possibly BE God, let alone surpass God.  Satan’s highest ambitions reflect a better understanding about being God, than our purported “knowledge”.

Because we refer to God in a family based analogy does not ever limit Him in any way.  It elevates us.  Calling Christ our brother, and God our Father helps us to understand our relationship – it does NOT define the Nature of either of them.  We are encouraged to talk to God as we would talk to a close friend.  He does know everything about us.  He is the only one who can read our thoughts, decipher our motives, and judge our actions – past our words and what it may look like.  He is close to us, and desires a relationship based on friendship with us.  But He is ALWAYS God.  We are less than ants.  Because God chooses friendship with an ant does not make God any less, it makes the ant worth a bit more.

Once this process that God has started for our reconciliation with Him is complete, we will have all eternity to begin to understand what God is.  What it means to be God.  And even after eternity passes, our minds will only begin to understand it.  It is simple physics that the finite cannot define the infinite.  The created cannot define the boundaries of the Creator.  We have only our perspective.  Our limitations, both self imposed, influenced by evil, and inherent within us keep us from comprehending the infinite nature of our God.  Our lack of full knowledge is no excuse to attempt to bring God down to our natural or debased natures; rather, it should serve as inspiration to reach up to what we know about His.

We can lose a sense of awe or of reverence when we so familiarize ourselves with our ‘buddy’ God that we forget just Who our ‘buddy’ is.  Hollywood has been no help with this either.  The entire horror genre is based on a ‘scary’ evil which man either fights alone (the total absence of God from the concept) or fights in the name of a benign, unsympathetic and only marginally paying attention God.  Movies like the Exorcist, or End of Days, paint man as the hero fighting in the name of a God, but do nothing to show God engaged in the battle.  The way Hollywood describes it, when something evil this way comes, there is no God, or only a wimp God to look to for defense.  Thus the image of God becomes one of “what good is He in a fight?”

The truth is so entirely different, and real life so entirely more terrifying.  Beyond the immediate scope of human eyes is a world of the supernatural.  In it are two remaining forces diametrically opposed to each other.  They have been at war since rebellion broke out in the Universe.  The evil side rivals any imagery of monsters you have seen in a movie and has intentions far more graphic and horrific than any you can imagine.  They would gladly inflict all of this on you in a moment’s notice.  But here is where Hollywood preconceptions must be put to an end in order to reflect reality.  Angels and to some extent demons (former angels now corrupted by years of absence from God and intent to do evil) are scary beings when put next to humans.  Were we to fight them physically we would lose flat out.  But God is not us.  He is not constrained to some limits in His power, majesty, and love.  Against Him, NOTHING can stand – not all of the hate in existence, not death itself, no power seen or unseen has any shot at standing in opposition before Him for even a nanosecond.

This fact would severely change the plots of most Hollywood horror films.  How good would the movie be, if the human hero merely called out for help from our Creator God, and the opposing monster was obliterated completely and permanently in less than a nanosecond?  Note that man had no part in the destruction of evil as we are way less than effective in this.  But God’s destruction would be immediate, and permanent.  No chance for any sequel in the scripts written to reflect reality.  Where the tension enters the picture is mans seemingly limitless ability to flirt with evil without ever calling for God’s help to destroy it.  In this we are all collective experts.  Rather than flee from evil we approach it.  Rather than call down the eternal destruction of evil, we allow evil to do tricks for us, through us, and with us – until we reach a point we don’t want its destruction.  Yes this would be the first reality based horror movie of all time.  It might restore a bit of God’s honor to know just how powerful He is, and if nothing else, would depict man for his own true nature and the reason why evil is allowed to exist in this world of ours – chiefly because we let it.

Our God is more than our buddy, more than a loving Father figure, more than a brother who has always been there for us.  Our God is the source of infinite power, infinite love, and infinite grace.  His ability to destroy is unmatched, but He is not known for that, He is known for His ability to restore, to heal, and reconcile through forgiveness with a stiff necked, self centered, self absorbed group of ants.  The infinite has reached out in love to show the finite how much it is valued by its creator.  The whole story of the gospel is a love story from cover to cover.  It is not about judgment but of redemption.  It is not about eternal separation from God, but eternal proximity.  We are not destined to fail, but have already been selected for Salvation.  I praise my God of creation and restoration, and ask that He absolutely destroy the evil that lurks within me, and within the world around me…