In Perfect Strength

 "The Lord, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which are not as though they are". Romans 4:17.

In my last entry, I touched on how the cross shows us the nature of how God in Christ uses the weakness and folly of becoming empty and overwhelmed to bring about what is the most glorious liberty for creation. 

The same can so often be the case in our experience.

We're familiar with how God so often takes what appears of little or no importance, passing by what outwardly is claimed to impress, to bring about some of His most significant purposes. Time and again in the scriptures, it is those who have failed to aquire greatness or raise to something impressive that God marks as His and sets about to use in some astonishing fashion. This is because He wants us to understand something crucial in respect to the nature of eternity.

The dreadful thing about hell is that those confined there are entirely undefined by anything beyond their pride in themselves, so all they have left is a wilful arrogance which burns as they are continually exposed to the truth of the astonishing nature of God so explicitly expressed in Jesus. That is the anguish touched upon in the story of Lazarus - the rich man knew of God and of Abraham, of Moses and the scriptures, but he neglected and depreciated all of this because he believed himself best served by only indulging his own self interest.

The marvellous truth of the new creation is that it is home to a people just as unworthy as that rich man, but they have seen their misery, and God, so rich in mercy, has raised them to unlimited life purely because of that strength which is so certainly His alone.

Life now is, then, principally about one single thing - the justification of the ungodly (Romans 4).

The Romans killed thousands by the ignominy of crucifixion, and none of them are known to us - the purpose being to entirely erase the victim from record as they were deemed unworthy of such - but ONE such death has marked the entire nature of reality for twenty centuries, because in this particular case, this same Jesus could not be held by death as we are, for He dies, not because such had dominion over Him, but because by His sacrifice, sin and death would be emptied of their rule over each of us.

We dare not make Christianity about our being moral. If the 21st century has taught us anything, it is how quickly we are able to invent all manner of 'moral' movements and crusades from the misshapen core of humanity that lead us further away from God.

"Morality", notes Bunyan, was one of the poisons that seeks to prevent Christian from approaching the Cross by promising less troublesome ways to ease his burden, but taking such a route only leads back to the naked requirements of the Law, leaving us before a terrifying righteousness we can never obtain.

Morality is about to become the means whereby each of us is judged, externally at least, and deemed only "well" if we meet the criteria imposed by others, be it the latest social justice campaign, or, much more immediately, by the imposition of a growing number of rules and requirements to obtain those things which, less than a year ago, we could take for granted in many places as being ours. The punishments for refusing such conformity will be total - exclusion from much of everyday life and thereby exile from a large part of society, so it becomes more and more difficult to be a 'normal' person.

The lie behind such requirements is that such behaviour makes us whole - people that can be defined as 'healthy' and therefore acceptable to the world at large, but the Gospels deny that monstrosity. Time and again, Jesus shows compassion on those who are outcast by the morality of their day whilst bringing uncompromising condemnation upon those who presume to deem themselves as 'good' because they use the Law not as a means to see God, but as a weapon to elevate themselves whilst suppressing any who cannot meet their standards.

It is in these deeds and words, as He journeys towards the Cross, that we see the true nature of God amongst us - the true strength that calls us to look beyond the mis-placed foolishness of our own religious devices. 

My earnest prayer at this moment is that we will grasp and properly comprehend this vital distinction and doing so, amongst our fears, will look to God to define us by Christ alone.

The days ahead are going to be some of the darkest our generation have encountered. Let us look to God in His Son so that life, for us, is defined by the gift and healing that comes only by the life He gave up to set us truly free.