I am not sure what to write. I witnessed some things over the past few days that I can not fully discuss here. It has to do with how carnal a saved Bible-believer can get, including me. It has to do with church elections.
I am burdened, more wistful than sullen. What was right took place, but at great cost. A Pyrrhic victory. I have prayed that God would shut us all up, seat each of us down and have a one-on-one talk with every individual. It is good to shut one's mouth in the presence of God.
Ecclesiastes 5:2 Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few.
Where is the profitable servant? It ain't me I'll tell you that. Believers often forget to shut up and know that He is the Lord (Psalm 46:10)
Isaiah wept not only because he was a man of unclean lips, but because he lived also in the midst of a people of unclean lips (Isaiah 6:5). Fatally, as a mere lump of clay, he was in a sense vicariously guitly. It makes perfect sense. I always knew it. But now I know it a little more.
Even when I think I have acted well, wisely and with circumspection, having prayed and sometimes fasted; unfailingly, every single time I mess up some "little" thing which gnaws at my conscience.
Job 4:18 Behold, he put no trust in his servants; and his angels he charged with folly:
:19 How much less in them that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth?
Job 15:15 Behold, he putteth no trust in his saints; yea, the heavens are not clean in his sight.
Precisely. Then you face a flood of doctors of divinity and doctors of theology, and respected dedicated scholars, and pre-eminent textual authorities, experts of greek and hebrew, engineers and doctors and lawyers, and rubbish, utter rubbish. Vanity of vanities all is vanity.
Psalm 62:9 Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie: to be laid in the balance, they are altogether lighter than vanity.
Also the unsaved world, with its driveling theories and paradigms of thought and dialectic materialism and ZeitGeist and periodization and self-actualization, and the progress of the human mind, the development of civilizations blablablablabla
Oh yeah?! well you still are a piece of dirt in the most literal sense of the word, buddy.
You still live in huts. And when you move to Mars, you will still live in huts! (Obadiah 1:4)
And you still die. Try to get around that one. Go on, bable on about the progress of science; you will rot in the grave before you get any news of some immortality-imparting drug.
The only divine spark you will ever experience is the raging fire of hell nourrished by the eternal wrath of God against your sins.
Oh I'm sorry, after you are buried you will be a flower?
You blithering fool have you ever entertained that idea for more than 10 consecutive seconds? Don't you know that flowers also burn? (Matthew 3:20)
It is haunting that we naturally think so highly of the self. You'll have people teaching the depravity of man and acting as if it were a truth utterly divorced from the realm of human experience.
People you love and respect begin to forget the pit from whence they were digged (Isaiah 51:1).
Slowly, O ever so slowly, almost, almost imperceptibly, a saved Bible-believer begins to think a little more highly of himself. Like a cameleon judges his steps forward with a back and forth swaying of his body, so does the aging born-again man, eye and test the next step of the ladder of self-esteem. Fatefully emboldened, the pace of ascent increases. Eventually the foot is swift enough to apply pressure just enough on a step to reach the next one before the former breaks. A numbingly mad upward rush ensues. The higher he is the more terrified of acknowledging his elevation. The heart enters the discourse. There is nothing more insiduously sinister than the heart which consols itself (Jeremiah 17:9). Usually, it will romance its owner. It will whisper him his victimhood and infuse it into his soul. As sweetly as a cradle's lullaby it will bless and nourrish his anger.
The faculties of the mind then come in to rationalize the situation so subtly it is mesmerizing to glimpse in action. You can never catch more than a glimpse, but it is chilling.
I read over verses and discover how little I believed them, even understood them.
Job 15:14 What is man, that he should be clean? and he which is born of a woman, that he should be righteous?
I am terrified of being proud. This is no humility. I am terrified because I feel it like a beast in me. When I am cleaving to the Lord it whimpers like a wounded dog. But give it the oddest situation, the most off-beat compliment and it will erect itself and growl the muffled fury of the ocean.
It is soul-wrenching to have to hate your own thoughts, your own flesh.
Every painful waking second. I plead with it. please, please a cease-fire. a cease-fire I beg. The concept is alien, utterly alien to it. It cannot answer for it speaks not the language. Leaven cannot be contained or paused.
I feel it. Sin exudes out of my pores. It is an overflowing kettle I cannot contain. Even here and now as I write. You see, why am I writing? You could question the very motive of my writing this. Am I seeking gratification? Compliments? We are rarely ruthless in our honesty towards ourselves.
Or is Satan using doubt to paralyze me from doing anything? You see man is utterly incapable of discernment when it comes to God. He cannot even discern his own self through his own spirit, because the latter is dead.
What does God think? He tries my reins (Psalm 7:9, Jeremiah 11:20). What does he see and know? Surely my spirit is his candle (Proverbs 20:27), let alone the rightly seeing Holy Spirit within me.
1Co 13:12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
I shall know myself the way he knows me. I do not relish the prospect.
Then you begin to appreciate grace, grace that is greater than all our sin.
That's when you start holding on to grace like a dying man clings to life.
Then you start to realize what great a gulf God has bridged between himself and those who die, even without wisdom (Job 4:21)
You start to get Paul's pain as he pens
Romans 7:24 O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
That's when you understand that the last thing that man is trying to be is poetic! It rubs me against the grain when people start identifying methodologies of poetry in the Bible and tell you that in greek this is called "something-something -asis". Yeah, YOU tell that to Paul as his nerves were snapping because he had another law in his members (Romans 7:23) or to Jeremiah who couldn't weep enough over Jerusalem to wet the fire which burned in his bones.
(Lamentations 1:12-13)
After that you begin to grasp Paul's fiery indignation when he writes
2 Corinthians 10:5 Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ;
Yet I am pathetically weak. Sometimes I feel I just whine for help instead of getting up and quitting myself like a man (1 Corinthians 16:13).
You know I can have the opportunity to witness to someone, and I will think, allright I have the opportunity to save this person from being transformed into a worm and spending eternity in agonizing fire.
And I will do nothing. NOTHING. I will rationalize it away or console myself in others I've witnessed to.
That's when you wax hyper-calvinist.
Those things appear at the judgment seat of Christ. Knowing this I'll admit it dampens my joyful expectation of getting to heaven. Because when you first arrive, the worst moment of your existence is about to take place. Can you imagine showing up before the Seat after any given martyr for the testimony of Jesus Christ? After any saintly old lady that spent her life on her knees lifting up her church in prayer and supplication?
I'm too lazy to pray long enough (Matthew 26:41). Where will I hide? What hole will I dig? I'm saved. I know I am. But I will stand before the God from whose face heaven and earth run away, to be JUDGED, by the JUDGE of all the earth (Genesis 18:25). I cannot lose my salvation, but I'll tell you what I'll lose once and for all, any smattering of self-righteous pride. There's the upside.
"O to grace how great a debtor, daily I'm constrained to be"
