Broken Pieces

It's probably for the same reason a nuclear apocalypse has the same mysterious and novel appeal as a zombie apocalypse.  At least this seems to be a prevailing cultural anecdote.  Nuclear fallout is both a terrifying and awesome display of global consequence.  And though you have no sight of the irradiative atomics that pummel your flesh, you know that when you step out that front door you're walking into a saturating nuclear bath.

The same can be said of the Holy Spirit's capacity to move through the worship of the saints.  If all it takes is 10 seconds of CBN to bring on the water works, you know that you've just found yourself in a radiant bath of eternal grace and unfailing love.  Though the Holy Spirit cannot be seen with regular eyes, He moves on both a global scale and a personal scale.  We don't have a ticking Geiger counter to detect the Holy Spirit's presence, but there are other ways.

These passages can be confusing or even a source of annoyance, disappointment and pain to many.  The uncany irony here, however, is that it is only after the experience of a bath in the radiant and saving grace and unfailing love of our saviour through the Holy Spirit that these passages become as clear as the sky is blue.

It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. - (Lamentations 3:22 [KJV])

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. - (Psalms 34:18 [KJV])

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. - (Mathew 11:28-30 [KJV])

If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. (Daniel 3:17 [KJV])

For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted. - (Hebrews 2:18 [KJV])

Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them. - (Hebrews 7:25 [KJV])

Your love, LORD, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies.  Your righteousness is like the highest mountains, your justice like the great deep. You, LORD, preserve both people and animals.  How priceless is your unfailing love, O God! People take refuge in the shadow of your wings. - (Psalms 36:5-7 [NIV])

What often struck me as alien about these verses is the precedent.  Why would a deity be bothered?  Let's not forget that the eye-witnesses attest to Christ's compassion (Mark 6:34).  I believe the linchpin is in the verse following Hebrews 7:25:

For such an high priest became us, who is holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners, and made higher than the heavens; - (Hebrews 7:26 [KJV])

The key words are "He became us."  But as I said before, this doesn't make sense until after taking a bath in the grace of God.  It's a complete waste of time trying to figure this out cerebrally.  Instead, give yourself permission to take off the radiation suit and step outside into the radiant bath of eternal grace and unfailing love.

Giving Up

It's time to give-it-up already. Cryptic wisdom that bites at my heels oh about every five to ten years or so. Give-up what? and isn't giving-up generally a hallmark of weakness? Giving-up control of your life, essentially what Christians call dying to self. And yes, this act of giving-up is most definitely a hallmark of weakness. Humans don't actually posses the strength to lead a life that works. I believe it is this basic misconception that is responsible for all the suffering we witness or even experience.

Human beings have a natural affinity for strength, excellence, and beauty. To cling to self-defeating and weakness would be contrary to our nature, and it is, however all we have to go on is self-perceived weakness and self-percieved strength, which is hopelessly myopic.  If we are intended to seek out strength, excellence, and beauty, then how can it possibly make sense to take one's own ego and will and sacrifice it on a crucifix? The answer is here in Zechariah 4:6 cross-referenced with Revelation 11:

Zechariah 4:1-6

¹ Then the angel who talked with me returned and wakened me, as a man is wakened from his sleep. ² He asked me, "What do you see?"
I answered, "I see a solid gold lampstand with a bowl at the top and seven lights on it, with seven channels to the lights. ³ Also there are two olive trees by it, one on the right of the bowl and the other on its left."
⁴ I asked the angel who talked with me, "What are these, my lord?"
⁵ He answered, "Do you not know what these are?"
"No, my lord," I replied.
⁶ So he said to me, "This is the word of the LORD to Zerubbabel: 'Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,' says the LORD Almighty.

Revelation 11:4-6

⁴These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. ⁵If anyone tries to harm them, fire comes from their mouths and devours their enemies. This is how anyone who wants to harm them must die. ⁶These men have power to shut up the sky so that it will not rain during the time they are prophesying; and they have power to turn the waters into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague as often as they want.

The key is in understanding that God insists that His children replace their own will and strength with His. There is no sign of conceding weakness in the passage above from Revelation 11. The reason for God's wrath here in Revelation 11 is similar to His wrath against Sodom and Gomorrah, and if you know your bible you'll notice that turning the waters into blood was precisely what Moses did in order to persuade the Pharaoh to free the enslaved Israelite people. So what's God trying to say? if I truly value excellence, beauty, peace, love, joy, then I must let His Spirit override my own will and ego otherwise I'm going to mess-up and be utterly clueless as to whom it hurts. Ignorance truly is bliss, a bittersweet conundrum.

Some believe that God wants one to live and to continually improve oneself to become a better human being.  What does the bible actually say?  I think Mark Gunger puts it most succinctly condensing the gospel into a phrase.

"But this is backwards! surely this is an incorrect interpretation because it's all upside down and backwards!" well, Matthew 5:1-12 suggests that the gospel is intentionally upside down and backwards.  Honestly, what do you think it would take to lead an incurably self-centred species to transcendent holiness?  Answer: it would almost certainly mandate some backtracking and forgetting everything you know.

The popular notion is to simply strive to become a better version of oneself. Putting faith in that idea makes it impossible to have communion with God because it is still self-focused and the scriptures command Christians to die to self.  I may be a capable, noble and commendable human being, but communion with God requires heading back down and taking a different road.

Ex Machina - Nathan the Anti-Hero

In a few moments I am going to tell you how a movie about a naked robot drove me to my knees in repentance.  To be precise, it was Nathan's character that did it.  Our idols can captivate us and enslave us even in the very moment we profess to have mastered that which has mastered us.

It's not my goal in this post to go into depth about the film.  I do recommend it with caution for adults: be prepared for a few scenes of frontal (robot) nudity.  However, it's quite clear the director was attempting to misdirect the viewer to augment the potency of the film's very dark finish (and I hold to be a very important reminder of the total depravity of man).  It's easy to slam Nathan's character as evil and wicked and perhaps he should have been wearing a pair of horns and holding a pitchfork.  There's just one inconvenient fact to point out here, Nathan's character didn't do any of the killing in this story.

God never intended for man to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Some would argue that He did intend that for us, just not now.  Well let's consider that a moment to God is as a million years to man.  As such, I think it's worth forgetting about.  Some things are off limits, and when God says no then no means no.  Yet as humans, God has hard-wired something into our spirits that drive us to "go ahead and do it anyway" despite the consequences.  This is an integral part of our free will and the cornerstone of God's master plan to restore human kind back to Himself.  We go ahead and break the rules and challenge what we think we have to do or what we must do.  I believe whole-heartedly that some part of that God wove into our souls from the dawn of time but perhaps for a very different purpose.

The tragic and ironic nature of an idol, is that it draws us in with promises of freedom, independence, power, and mastery, and then in its latest stages convinces us that we must concede to it effectively robbing us of all those things.  The idol takes on a shape of its own, much like a person, and some will go so far as to call it demonic oppression.  What I believe is indisputable, however, is that it seeks to fool us into believing that we must serve the idol and that there is no way around that.  Thank God that God hard-wired us to rebel against things that try to force our will.

I grew-up around a lot of alcoholism.  I know, intimately, the breadth and depth of the phrase "beer, the cause of, and answer to, all of life's problems!" and what I have learned is that alcoholics are alcoholics because something is eating at their souls and they are seeking refuge from it in a bottle.  Being a depressant, it feeds an endless cycle that becomes harder and harder to escape from.

I believe Nathan felt that he was an agent of evolution in his invention of thinking machines.  And because Nathan (again, my opinion) was a determinist, he felt that it was inevitable, beyond his control, and was hence trapped by his own genius.  He felt it was his burden to create those machines, that it was his role and destiny to create those machines, and wanting to rebel against all that he would drink himself into a stupor and suppress exercising his God-given free-will to escape it.  Nathan's idol was two-fold: determinism and alcoholism.  Like everything in the cosmos, all things go through cycles and oscillation, and I believe the same is true of idols.  We tend to flip-flop back and forth between two or more different idols.  In my case, code and coffee, hands down.

God calls us to set aside our idols and give Him our first-fruits.  He doesn't call us to fight our idols, or to work with our idols, or to outsource the fight to a third party, He calls us to abandon them outright, turn 180 degrees and walk the other direction (Ez 14:6).  Ex Machina struck a huge chord with me.  A brilliant man's idolatry of artificial intelligence and its connection to determinism eventually consumed him and claimed his very life.  If we personify an idol momentarily for the sake of argument, the idol's imperative is to fool you into thinking you will achieve life and fulfilment through it, while secretly intending to rob it from you and drive a dagger into your heart.  This was pontificated by the bone-chilling and cold calculating robot that killed her creator, killed her accomplice, but most importantly of all, the one individual who showed nothing but kindness and compassion to her, the one individual who sought to cultivate a human sense of free will in her, she locked-away left for dead.  For me the metaphor was thick with irony and Ava became for me the personification of idolatry and its consequences.

God calls us to cast down our idols for He knows the plans He has for us, and those plans are not to harm us but to give us a hope and a future.  We tell ourselves (and Him) that our idols are good and make us happy.  And the personification of that idol smiles with a cold and calculating satisfaction, for it has successfully played us for fools.  I found myself identifying with both Nathan and Caleb.  I have been burnt by reaching out to people who have stabbed me in the back and I have put my own programming inventions before God and His kingdom.  If we find ourselves saying that our idols really aren't a problem and some of them are even good to have, my question for you is this: is that you or the idol talking? 

Be a rebel, drop out of light speed behind the shields, set some charges, and raise a little heaven.

Letting Go

Several months after reading C.S. Lewis' Perelandra, I'm still deeply moved by his little anecdote about letting go and accepting the next wave that Maleldil sends us.

Or in other words, accept the adventure and will that God has in store for us rather than insisting on making our own path. As I grow, I am beginning to learn more and more that it's not that my dreams, goals and desires are wrong, it's that they are incorrect; I haven't got my facts straight, and I never fully will. This failure of perception and awareness is a tragic and immutable trait of humanity. Even if you consider that there is no God at all, this particular characteristic is still present and brings many troubles. If you look at it from this perspective, God's invitation to accept His will over ours is merely bonus.

I recently lost my keys up on the mountain at a huge ski resort. They fell out of my unzipped pocket somewhere. I had gone to extra trouble to wrap my smart phone in a zip-lock bag, wrapped in cloth, and stored in my backpack, but I was careless enough to leave my keys in the open pocket of my snow pants. I lost my car keys, my house key, and my office key. I had no spare keys at all. I was livid and felt violated that control was ripped away from me and I was left helpless and dependent upon others.

I spent the rest of the day and the following day with Dave, Peter, and Chris throwing snowballs at waterfalls, chatting-up the ladies, and getting to know each other on deeper levels. We pretty-much covered all the risky topics: sex, religion, and politics. I honestly don't know what God's plan was for all of this or even if He had a plan. I do know that some very old wounds of bonding and friendship resurfaced. This would seem to coincide with refiner's fire.

The thought of calling my friend back to come pick me up from the parking-lot made me very uncomfortable. I hate depending on others like that, I'd grown accustom to being independent for far too long. I had thought that achieving full independence from people, particularly my friends, I would finally be free from disappointment and pain. This isolation inhibits the natural flow of love and only fulfilled my greatest fear: "What if I am missing something?" (quite possibly everything actually)

But then it was over and God doesn't wait to send a new wave. This act of letting go is a state of mind. It has little to do with letting go of one's possessions to be more holy, letting go of a lover so that you can move on, letting go of a financial disaster and cutting your losses, letting go of your child as she leaves home for college. No these are merely fruits of this mysterious state of mind of letting go. This state of mind revolves around trust and self-denial. These are two more characteristics that constitute love, the greatest commandment.

God is getting at something here, particularly with me, and I can only hope that I have the courage to trust His lead and not waste any more of His time or my time in this matter.

As for my car, it's still stranded a hundred miles away from the nearest dealership where I must have new keys cut and programmed for it. It will cost me nearly one grand after everything is said and done, but for some reason I find myself oddly grateful.